I am glad what I wrote could help you. I feel like IE is a constant evolving journey for me and things are constantly changing. Over time, once I gave myself permission to eat snacks and knew the food would be there, I stopped even feeling like I needed to snack and now I seem to be going more toward the framework of 3 or 4 meals a day. Also, now I am eating something sweet after dinner more often but in smaller amounts and that feels fine too.
I noticed that yesterday I wasn't very hungry, and ate mostly yogurt or oatmeal as small meals a few times yesterday. I assume its because on Saturday I had a big breakfast and a big lunch at a restaurant and a big dinner with some desert and my body was just balancing itself. I remember that used to happen for me naturally years and years ago but once I entered the diet world that stopped. I would have plenty of days where I ate a lot of food and then I would TRY to not eat very much the next day and that would backfire horribly as I would be craving food and feeling deprived all day. Yesterday I was just genuinely not hungry very much or very often. It was kind of crazy to feel that way.
I still don't feel as hungry as I normally do today, and waited until 11 am to eat breakfast because I just wasn't hungry. It feels good to finally be able to hear / feel what my body is telling me without the diet noise of should and shouldn't. I think its impossible to truly hear what your body is telling you if your only goal is to change your body size.
I'm reading a kindle IE book by Geneen Roth called Women Food and God. I almost didn't read it because I had heard she had gotten kind weird when comes to her beliefs and when I read the introduction, I almost decided not to read it. However, I decided not to throw the baby out with the bath water as they say. I am really glad I decided to read it.
In one chapter, I learned a lot about myself and my marriage. I love my DH very much, but I don't show him like I did with my previous 2 who died. I learned from that chapter that it is because I am so afraid of losing another husband. When my second DH died, I swore that I would never marry again and I would never get so close to anyone like I did with him again because it hurt too much. I let him get just so close, but not so close that I couldn't live without him if he were to be the one who dies first. I realize how cruel that is because even with his quirks that all men seem to have, he is a very good man and he is very good to me. I am now trying to change that.
I've just read a chapter titled "It's Not About the Weight but It's Not Not about the Weight". I wish I could copy and share what she says, but not allowed so I will try to paraphrase.
She talks about how we eat to cover up or suppress some hurt, our fear, loneliness or something that we may have even forgotten that happened to us even as a child. We use foods just as an addict does with drugs. When we uncover the layers, as I have heard other people say, and get down to the root of our problem and learn to accept ourselves, then the we will no longer need our comfort foods to numb our feelings any more.
Then she says "It's also not about the weight". But she says that there is the reality of the physical consequences of the pounds that can't be denied. For example, a person cannot walk up a slight incline without pain or having a hard time breathing. The uncomfortable pressure on our joints, heart, for me dealing with diabetes. It is the extent of how the weight affects our basic function and how it makes us feel, move etc which is when we will have to make a decision to live or die. She admits that it comes to the place where it is about the weight because of how it effects how we live our life. We will have to finally ask ourself the question, "How do I want to live my life?"
I haven't really gotten to the part of how we deal with these situations, but I am actually thankful to hear an IE author to actually explain that "it is about the weight" even though it is also not about the weight because we are also eating to cover up (or maybe I should say trying to numb) a hurt, a fear etc that we may not even be aware that we have because we have buried it with food for so many years. It isn't the food that is making me fat, it is an underlying problem I didn't even know I had.
I hope I can get the answers that I need from this. I do remember eating when my previous DH would leave and I was home alone. I was bored and I felt alone. Was this when I first starting overeating? I do know that when I'm with a lot of people I don't feel I have to eat a lot because I'm busy visiting. When my Daddy wasn't home at night, Mama made fudge and we had a lot of fun when it was just Mama and us girls. Is this why I did the same thing with my children? I don't know. Might be. Diets became harder to continue and stay OP the more I dieted. Geneen Roth mentions how things teachers or parents said things to us as children to screw up our self esteem. As a child I had teachers who made me feel like I was nothing and I was told many times I would never be worth anything. If I didn't finish a difficult task, I was told I never finish anything. It wasn't true and I've proved those things wrong in a lot of areas in my life, but not with my weight. Did unsuccessful diets make me fulfill their predictions? I know being over weight makes me feel like they were all right. Gives me a lot to think about.
Quite an interesting read. I'm glad I decided to read the book.
Sharing more from what I'm learning in Geneen Roth's book. I hope I can learn this enough to get away from dieting. I have to say I still struggle with it and I am not 100% IE yet, but I definitely want to be. I honestly believe if I could really get hold of what she is saying, I could be successful. From what she says in this chapter I am going to share, the weight will come off without dieting. I would love to get to that place because doing through IE I wouldn't just lose the weight, but I would be able to keep it off without a diet.
I really recommend this book, Women Food and God, as I am getting so much out of it. I didn't get much from the previous chapter and may have to read it again. However the chapter I jus read is titled Reteaching Loveliness. I paraphrase as I understand what she wrote in this chapter. One of our problems is that we have come to believe that we are damaged. Evidently she believed that when she reached her goal when dieting she was looking for peace and the way of getting there was by judging and shaming and hating herself as she believed in diets. She thought that diets were based upon unspoken fear that a madwoman, a lunatic or a food terrorist would eventually destroy all that she loved so she needed to be stopped. The diet not only promised that you will have a new body, but with the new body you will have a new life. We think we will love ourselves when our bodies of changed. This is why we hate our body so much that we lose our self-respect. From what I gather from this, this is how we end up with so many different attempts at diets that fail us.
From what I understand, the way we change our relationship with food is by understanding what she calls the "first step" which she says "until you understand who you take yourself to be, true change is not possible". Even if we ae lucky enough to get everything we want. We will continue to be who we believe we are at the core which will lead us to always be guided by the part of us we think is damaged which is what is shaping us. We much learn to understand it otherwise, we are continuing to fight it, force it and deprive it and not do anything to accept it. Even if we diet and get thin, she says we are still end up a deprived, ashamed and fearful person who will be thin for only a short time. By doing this we become a bruised human being no matter what we weigh. We have only demonized our self by pitting one part of our self against another... our will against our bottomless hunger and we end up feeling split, crazed and afraid that the part of us that we locked away will ruin our life when we're least prepared.
I think she goes on to say that we need to see that we are not damaged goods. We are here for a purpose and we need to learn to be the person we were born to be before all the craziness we learned that makes us feel like we are not worth anything just because we are over weight. We need to learn to trust ourselves and our bodies to tell us when we are or are not hungry. We have all eaten for the wrong reasons for so long that we don't trust ourselves to recognize true hunger and I know for me I'm afraid to trust myself to know the difference in "Am I really hungry or am I eating because I'm bored, angry, hurt, lonely or just thing I need to eat?" Some times I eat because I'm afraid I will get hungry, like being hungry is something to fear. Is it the fear that being hungry will be uncomfortable? I think because we are told not to eat before going to bed that I'm afraid I'll get hungry before I go to bed and I shouldn't eat then.
I think the key here in this chapter is that maybe by "honoring my hunger" I just might be respecting myself as I will be accepting the fact that I can trust myself to know what I want when I truly want it because I am truly hungry. Perhaps accepting myself as I am is the way to learning to respect me for who I am.
None of us are 100% damaged. We are all good at a lot of things in our life. One thing I am learning from this book is that I need to get my focus off the one thing I see as my "weight problem" and focus more on the good in my life as well and the good things about me.
i read Women Food and God a couple of years ago. Like you, I almost shied away from it but I am so glad I read it. It had a lot of wisdom. I actually need to re read it. I am glad you are getting so much out of it. I really have found Geneen Roth helpful, but sometimes I feel she is a little too esoteric for me to actually catch her meaning. I think for me, sometimes I just need to re read and really absorb her books.
Today I read a little while in waiting room for DD to have his pacemaker checked. She was talking about getting in touch with what your body and what you are feeling. I remember doing that years ago, but I have to say that I lost it somewhere along the way. Not sure when it happened. Perhaps dieting has caused it.
Pinkhippie Sometimes, I can't read a lot at one time because I will see something that I really need, but I have to really think/meditate on it a bit. I read it on my kindle and I think when I get through the book that I just might go back and read again and write down some of the things I think I need to remember and possible things I need to do. I may not agree with all of her theory, but she for the most part I do. It is a good read and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get in touch with themselves and understand themselves better.
Carolr Right now I would just like to get back down to 150. At the same time I want to learn to do IE again. I am really having a difficult time stopping the "diet thinking" right now as well as learning the difference in true hunger and head hunger. To think that I had that figured out at one time and now I'm having to learn it all over again.
I am learning from Geneen's book that a lot of my problem is probably because I am a "control freak" which is why I get on this roller coaster of needing restrictions and then rebelling against the restrictions. What she calls "The Voice" that talks to us in our heads which is combination of all the authority figures which has formed our thoughts is my biggest problem. As I under stand this... a combo of those rules and restrictions and reprimands/corrects etc and criticisms spoken to us or about us and The Voice is formed to beat us up to where we never feel or think we are good enough or deserve what we are trying to accomplish. This is one reason that when we try to go against the norm of "dieting" and try to trust ourselves to "break" the diet rules we have such a difficult time with it. The Voice is always telling us we cannot trust ourselves to make the right choices.
However, according to Geneen, when we allow our body to tell us what "it" wants to eat, it will choose the healthier, better foods most of the time.
When I was growing up, I ate the same lunch everyday because #1 I liked it enough that it was my favorite and #2 It only cost me $.24 a day. When I went home, Mama cooked dinner and when television came along and people set down to eat watching tv while we ate, she fixed our plates almost like a tv dinner, but home cooked. I never had to decide what to eat. Left to myself through out the years, I learned to cook like DH liked to eat. WW taught me how to cook a pretty balanced meal back in the 60's and that is pretty much the way I always cooked. My family loved the sweets so I always added dessert which we didn't have with meals when I was a kid. We had sweets because Mama was a chocoholic, but that was made when Daddy was gone and since I wasn't a sweet eater back then, there were times I never ate even a bite of it. I think that is because it was never forbidden.
I think all this plays a big roll in the problem I have with getting back to eating Intuitively. I know when DH and I travel, I have absolutely no problem eating Intuitively. We head out and we eat brunch when we get hungry. Later in the day, we eat our main meal when we get hungry and we eat what we want. When we get to the motel, we will have a snack if we want it. I think maybe the difference is that there is the freedom of not having to plan meals. I'm not sure.
Pinkhippie or anyone reading Please feel free to jump in and share your experience. You may have other ideas I don't see. I would love to see a conversation here of other peoples thoughts.
@pattygirl, the "voice" that Geneen describes is something that I've given a lot of thought to. It is easy to get swayed into believing that this voice is the real inner you and that's why we usually follow it. But any voice that makes you doubt yourself is not really your own voice. When I first started tackling this voice I had begun reading Brain Over Binge. It made a lot of sense but I had no clue into how to implement that. Lately I've been reading The Little Book of Big Changes and it's making more sense how to begin to make these changes. It helps me to know that I can choose not to follow my inner voice, and the less I pay it attention the quicker it goes away.
I notice the same thing about traveling and eating Intuitively. I find it so much easier. For one thing, we usually have lots of stuff planned and we are so busy we don't eat until we are quite hungry and then because we are out at restaraunts the choice is practically unlimited so its easy for me to order exactly what I want, and only eat as much as I want. Meal planning is annoying because you have to do it in advance. And then of course there is the work of making it. I typically plan my meals out about a week in advance and I do it based on what sounds good but also what my husband can put in the oven while Im gone, what the kids will eat, etc... Its not usually about my biggest desire. That used to be a big stumbling block in IE for me but now that I usually only eat dinner when Im hungry, a lot of times if its not really what I am in the mood for, I will eat just a little and then eat a yogurt or something that I really do want until Im satisfied. It works for me for now.
I realized I have some serious IE kryptonite, and that is when someone comments on my weight loss.
On Sunday I saw someone who I hadn't seen in a few months and they commented on my weight loss, saying I had lost a LOT of weight. Its so funny how when someone tells me this, I immediately feel the urge to eat. I also never know what to say. My dh says they are trying to give me a compliment and that I should just respond like it is a compliment, so I say Thank you but it still bothers me. This time, I think I did better because I have established a lot of better eating habits and I have been eating to hunger for quite a while now, so even though my head felt like eating, my body really didn't want to. And even though at 10:30 that night my head wanted pizza, my body said really? Pizza? I am so not hungry for pizza! In fact, I am not hungry at all! And so I didn't end up eating it or anything and I was able to enjoy a good breakfast the next morning.
It's a slow slow process but I do feel like I am regaining my ability to hear what my body is telling me.
Last edited by Pinkhippie; 03-07-2017 at 01:19 PM.
@Pinkhippie just so that we're clear, "you've lost weight" is not a compliment. You do not have to receive it as a compliment. It is an emphatic exclamation of a fact. It's like saying "you're wearing a blue shirt!" or "it's 75 degrees outside!" so you treat it accordingly. You can say "Yea I know" or "Yes I did" but you certainly don't have to THANK someone for noticing your body unless they give you an actual compliment like "you look so great".
The art of giving someone a compliment is really lost. I think it's because people are so insecure that they're afraid that complimenting someone else will cast a shadow on their own merits. People have a hard time being sincere about it and in many cases don't even bother. And then there are always the inappropriate ways to call attention to someone's weightloss. A couple of months ago my husband was having some health problems, specifically his gallbladder. After painfully passing a stone he went to the doctor and was told he would have to remove his gallbladder. The surgery was scheduled to happen about 6 weeks after the initial doctor's visit. While waiting for the surgery to happen he was placed on an extreme diet - NO FAT and I really mean no fat! No oil, no butter, no avocado, no nuts, no eggs, no olive oil, nothing. I can't tell you how difficult it is to eat this way and especially how difficult it is to cook this way. He lost about 20lbs off his already thin frame. After the surgery people came to visit him and were telling him congratulations on all the weightloss and that he looked great. I was really sickened by these "compliments." My husband was sick, miserable, hungry, weak and gaunt, and was in the middle of a painful recovery from surgery. It just goes to show you that weight loss is the most important thing people respond to even if it's done under the most distressing circumstances. Fortunately my husband thought it was a little weird too and was really surprised catching a glimpse of his sunken cheeks in the mirror one day.
And by the way, now he is almost fully recovered and back to eating the foods he loves. But restriction does have its side effects as we all know. I watched him eat a pound of cheese in one sitting the other day, making up for lost time since his restrictive diet. Crazy.
@Pinkhippie just so that we're clear, "you've lost weight" is not a compliment. You do not have to receive it as a compliment. It is an emphatic exclamation of a fact. It's like saying "you're wearing a blue shirt!" or "it's 75 degrees outside!" so you treat it accordingly. You can say "Yea I know" or "Yes I did" but you certainly don't have to THANK someone for noticing your body unless they give you an actual compliment like "you look so great".
The art of giving someone a compliment is really lost. I think it's because people are so insecure that they're afraid that complimenting someone else will cast a shadow on their own merits. People have a hard time being sincere about it and in many cases don't even bother. And then there are always the inappropriate ways to call attention to someone's weightloss. A couple of months ago my husband was having some health problems, specifically his gallbladder. After painfully passing a stone he went to the doctor and was told he would have to remove his gallbladder. The surgery was scheduled to happen about 6 weeks after the initial doctor's visit. While waiting for the surgery to happen he was placed on an extreme diet - NO FAT and I really mean no fat! No oil, no butter, no avocado, no nuts, no eggs, no olive oil, nothing. I can't tell you how difficult it is to eat this way and especially how difficult it is to cook this way. He lost about 20lbs off his already thin frame. After the surgery people came to visit him and were telling him congratulations on all the weightloss and that he looked great. I was really sickened by these "compliments." My husband was sick, miserable, hungry, weak and gaunt, and was in the middle of a painful recovery from surgery. It just goes to show you that weight loss is the most important thing people respond to even if it's done under the most distressing circumstances. Fortunately my husband thought it was a little weird too and was really surprised catching a glimpse of his sunken cheeks in the mirror one day.
And by the way, now he is almost fully recovered and back to eating the foods he loves. But restriction does have its side effects as we all know. I watched him eat a pound of cheese in one sitting the other day, making up for lost time since his restrictive diet. Crazy.
Oh I know its not a compliment. I can see what my dh is saying though, which is that these people *think* they are giving me a compliment. I know the "you look so great" is implied. These are always older people I am dealing with like my MIL, my ex MIL, my parents etc... I used to try to not respond like its a compliment but that always ended up awkward. One time I said "thanks for noticing". And that went pretty well.
Its funny what you say about complimenting. I sometimes feel like I have a compulsive compliment problem. If I see something I like on or about someone, I always tell them, regardless of who they are or how they have been treating me. I can't help myself and I know it always makes me feel good when someone randomly compliments me so I try to do the same. However, I never compliment someone on weight loss. But that puts me in an awkward situation too because sometimes I feel like the person wants to be noticed and appreciated for their weight loss. I think complimenting can be a tricky terrain to navigate.
Wow! That sounds awful for your poor husband. That is pretty messed up that he received compliments for that. You are right, our society is obsessed with extreme thinness, no matter how it is attained.
It's interesting about him eating a pound of cheese as well. That is why I really believe in IE and not any kind of restrictive diet in the long run.
I like complimenting people but I try to avoid too many compliments based on a person's appearance. There are so many other types of compliments I can dish out that don't center around appearance. Of course we all like compliments but I think I'd like it if someone told me I was a good listener, or that I handled a situation appropriately, or that I did a good job at work. I'm especially careful about complimenting children. We tend to zero in on little girls' cuteness and fawn over their clothes, their hair, and their glittery shoes and by doing so we are making them believe that the most important attribute they have is their appearance.
Trigger warning, don't keep reading if you are triggered by diet talk.
Diet mentality - I think I might be in it right now. But I'm having health issues that need to be addressed. I have no intention of depriving myself or employing will power. I am overcome with self love and self care right now. I will be verifying this with my doctor but I believe I may have a hormone imbalance and adrenal fatigue. Symptoms include extreme fatigue, poor sleep, weight gain in the midsection, difficulty losing weight, extreme cravings, fogginess, panic attacks, tender breasts, PMS symptoms all the time, moodiness, depression, night sweats, and periods that are coming closer and closer together. Stress is the biggest cause of this and I have plenty of it, with anxiety attacks and heart palpitations happening a couple of times a week. I want to try to avoid synthetic hormone therapy but I need to really address some nutritional matters. Sugar has crept back into my life and I know that this is a major thing I have to avoid. I also have to cut down on refined carbs, I don't have to cut it all out but I do have to be a little more careful with my portions and preparations. I feel unwell, this is not about weightloss although I am really uncomfortable with the unexpected weight gain in my mid section. Like most pear shaped women I've never carried weight in my abdomen so this is not a good sign. Wish me luck because I don't plan on ditching IE while I tackle this. This hit the fan for me a couple of weeks ago. My son and I both had a week off from school and I wanted to spend the whole vacation taking him out to do fun things like going to the park, museums, hiking, shopping, and seeing cool things around the city. Every day I was hoping for energy and I couldn't do it. I spent the whole week on the couch watching netflix while my little boy was going stir crazy. But I honest to goodness could not get myself up and moving. I had headaches, extreme fatigue, and I was so depressed I could not find it in me to get up and go. I cried everyday. What kind of mom can I be like this?
Last edited by Palestrina; 03-08-2017 at 12:30 PM.
I think because we are told not to eat before going to bed that I'm afraid I'll get hungry before I go to bed and I shouldn't eat then.
