If you learn how your body works, you’ll see solutions to some so-called problems.

The past two columns, for instance, explained that what many call the set-point theory is indeed reality, that your body does make adjustments in energy use and storage to maintain its established weight. It’s why you’ve probably read more than one article and met more than one person expressing the belief that body weight is solely a matter of fate.

Bologna. And I don’t mean Lebanon, ring, or even the vegetarian variety. I mean silly talk. Utter nonsense.

Just like you, your body has habits, but its habits are subject to change because they are subject to you. If you recognize your body’s tendencies, you can override many of them.

That’s because you, my friend, possess an oh-so important force that too many people choose not to use.

Willpower.

Use the following information to call forth — or continue using! — willpower to avoid most forms of liquid calories. Willpower is needed not only because most forms of liquid calories taste really good (a Frosty from Wendy’s or a cappuccino from Wawa immediately come to my mind), but also because the mechanisms that satisfy thirst and hunger are unrelated.

So when you consume a 16-ounce whole-milk vanilla latte from Starbucks, it may very well quench your thirst, but the 290 calories — 140 of which are sugar and 100 of which are fat — won’t help with your hunger. Thirst abates with an increase of water in your blood and cells.

Hunger abates when the nerves in the stomach wall sense it’s being stretched, suppressing the release of ghrelin, the hormone that induces hunger. Since consuming 16 ounces of fluid won’t stretch the stomach walls, those 290 calories don’t “count” as food.

Ergo, you are far more likely to consume an excess of calories any day you consume a couple hundred or so in liquid form.

Analysis of dietetic surveys from 51,603 women over an eight-year period conducted by Harvard University and the Children’s Hospital in Boston researchers and published by JAMA in 2004 showed just that. The women who increased their consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages from one to more than one per week during the study experienced an accompanying average increase of 358 calories daily — and a significant amount of weight gain.

In one four-year stretch, those women gained an average of 8.1 pounds.

Conversely, the women in the study who reduced their intake of sugar-sweetened beverages consumed 319 fewer calories on average.

Now that you’ve learned a bit more about hunger and thirst, you can construct a weight-loss diet that doesn’t create a sense of food deprivation or hunger. Eat what you normally eat in the same amounts, but cut out 250 to 300 liquid calories a day.

That shouldn’t be too hard to do since a What America Drinks report published in 2007 found that 22 percent of the average American’s daily calories come from liquids.

In fact, you can create a diet that feels like overeating if you not only cut out 250 to 300 liquid calories daily but also replace another 250 to 300 liquid cals with solid food.

Years ago, for example, my mother’s doctor gave her a warning: Lower your triglyceride level dramatically in six weeks, or you’ll need medication for the rest of your life. That news caused her to ask me to do something I offered to do at least a dozen times.

Create a healthy eating plan for her to follow.

Doing so was easy since she drank a significant amount of coffee (always with creamer), Coca-Cola (always sugar-sweetened), and homemade iced tea (10 tablespoons of sugar per pitcher was her recipe) daily. At my suggestion, she drank her coffee black, started drinking water instead of Coca-Cola, and cut the amount of sugar in the iced tea in half.

Those changes created a great enough caloric deficit that she needed to eat more solid food.

After about one week of the diet, she called me frantic. She felt so full after a meal, she said, that this diet couldn’t possibly be working.

I asked her to wait one more week and then do something she hated: weigh herself.

One week later, she was 3.5 pounds lighter, which motivated her to replace the remaining sugar in her iced tea with an artificial sweetener. She also began riding a stationary bike three times a week, 10 to 15 minutes at a time, albeit rather moderately.

After six weeks on the diet, her triglyceride level had dropped so much that medication was no longer a consideration. And to double her thrill, she weighed 8 pounds less — and probably carried 10 fewer pounds of body fat.

That’s because my former sedentary mother, unbeknownst to me, had started using the lightest dumbbells I had purchased for my dad two times a week, and, along with her stationary cycling, had actually added a bit of muscle.