Quote:
Originally Posted by dms6k
I did really well. I stayed within calories and I even went to bed hungry a lot just so I would not go over limit. After a death in the family I just didn't really care and of course there was food everywhere.....then the holidays set in and so on. I just cant seem to get myself back on tract. Almost as though I cant control it. I don't know.....just wanted to see what other people did in these situations to get back on tract.
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There is no track. You didn't fall off any wagon. The diet failed you, you did not fail yourself.
I find these posts heartbreaking, truly. Everyday someone comes here and posts "I lost XX lbs, I was really good! Now I gained back XXlbs, now I'm really bad!" and it's nonsense in my opinion. Losing weight does not mean you were good and gaining back the weight does not mean you are bad! It's those stupid diets that made you gain the weight back.
You went to bed hungry how many times? You think your body isn't going to punish you for depriving yourself of what it's asking for? Did you think you were being virtuous? Well your body perceives that as cruelty. Gaining the weight back after a little bit of deprivation is your body's way of telling you that your diet ain't jive!
With all the definitive research on the abysmal failure of all diets out there it's a wonder why anyone embarks on this type of torture. Not only do diets fail consistently but they are PROVEN to cause additional weight gain. This wreaks havoc on your metabolism, your heart, and is the root cause of disordered eating.
Your pattern fits the bill with the tragic failure of dieting:
1. You resolve to be "good"
2. You prescribe to some diet and stay within the confines of it even if it means you have to be hungry at times. You override your body's own needs and ignore the signals of hunger. Basically you don't trust your body, you trust the diet more.
3. You're doing well, weight is falling off, you're a little hungry, your cravings are a bit intense but you ignore them. You're proud of your resolve.
4. And then it happens. An event that causes you to release yourself from the strictness of the diet. You got into a fight with someone. Someone rear ended your car. You found out your SO has cheated on you. You lost your job. There was a death in the family. Some sort of event has interfered with your ability to focus on your prescribed diet.
5. You resort to eating, which has provided so much emotional relief in the past. You reach for the exact "bad" foods you deprived yourself of for so long. The floodgates are open, you can't control yourself anymore around this food. You may as well eat everything in sight because "tomorrow this food will be off limits again" so you better eat it while you can. There's no stopping now. This may go on for days, weeks, months.
6. Now you're reeling from this apparent failure and blaming yourself for it when it was the diet that set up this pattern in the first place. Deprivation is not something to mess around with, look around you - the more people diet the more they are obsessed with food, the more weight they gain. It's painfully obvious once you step back and observe the effects of diets in others and in yourself.