[rutgersgirl]

hi everyone,

i'm new here. i've been lurking for a few days and all of your stories and pictures totally inspired me to finally try losing weight. i'm finally posting because, like everyone else says, i want to start holding myself accountable.

i have wanted to change my diet multiple times before and told myself i would, but until yesterday i never actually was willing to put in the hard work.

yesterday i did great. ate a good number of calories, healthy food, and worked out. today i ate well all day, but tonight, i was up late studying for the GRE exam which i am taking tomorrow... i'm stressed and i got hungry so i went over to the kitchen where i saw my leftover dinner (broccoli cheese soup) on the stove... i heated it up and just started eating it out of the pot, standing over the stove with a spoon. as i was doing that i kept thinking, "wtf am i doing? why am i doing this? i don't want to do this" but it was like i just couldn't stop. i eventually forced myself to, but now i feel like ****. i'm ashamed, not because i ate some soup, but because i ate it in a disgusting way when i didn't really need to be eating it. i should have just gone to bed.

i would love any advice for how to make sure this doesn't happen again.

[CaliforniaDreamer]

What I do when I end up being hungry late at night is eat fruit or some kind of healthy snack. I also don't think of my healthy eating as a diet i just eat healthy and when I mess up I just make sure I do better my next meal. I also try not to stay up too late because I really want to eat a lot when I stay up too late.

Sorry I can't give better advice, that's the best I got. Good luck.

[indiblue]

First of all, good luck on the GREs! I took them earlier this year. Go to bed, get good rest, and don't stress. That will help you do much better than last minute cramming and worrying

You aren't alone. You're working on changing your lifestyle and lifetime behaviors. It's not going to happen overnight. Even with the broccoli soup, it sounds like you had a MUCH more healthy day than you would have a few weeks or months ago, right? As a lot of people here say, you are working for progress, not perfection. (Or another way of putting it, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. It sounds like you had a good day- don't diminish that because it wasn't "perfect"- there's no such thing.)

Be aware of why you ate and what conditions triggered it. Try to avoid it next time- like you pointed out, go to bed at a reasonable hour, work towards managing stress levels so you don't put yourself in a similar position in the future. Just learn from what happened this evening and use it to move forward.

And remember, caloric deficits (which are created by eating less than your body buns each day) are not measured in 24-hour cycles like we tend to think. We usually look at each day at the end of it as a "failure" or "success." That's definitely not how our body processes it. It's about long-term deficits over weeks and months. Just work towards staying on plan tomorrow. It does get easier

And go to bed! You'll do great tomorrow!

[cacklen]

I borrowed this from 52 Weight Loss Missions. That is an amazing program of bite-sixed missions geared toward changing the way you think and feel about food, exercise, and weight. I recommend it to all my friends, it is helping me a lot.

Mission 15: Kick the Perfectionism Habit

If you want a program that requires you to be perfect all the time, then I’m sorry to tell you – this ain’t it.

In fact, this mission is all about tattooing into your brain the idea of progress, not perfection.

And because we’re giving perfectionism the old heave ho, we’ll also develop a strategy for dealing with inevitable lapses when they happen. And they will happen. (Hence the word inevitable.)

It’s what you do most of the time that shapes your results. That’s why persistence and determination are w-a-a-ay more important than perfection, which is impossible anyway. But you knew that.

Many, perhaps most, weight-loss attempts get derailed because people expect too much of themselves, fail at this absurd level of perfection, then think they don’t have what to takes to lose weight. So they abandon the goal.

You do have what it takes: the great news is it takes less, not more than you’ve tried before.

If perfectionism has been your downfall in the past, welcome to a better way. You can be imperfect – yay!

You just need two things:
1.You need to know where to put your focus
2.You need a crucial skill that will help you weather every lapse with equanimity and determination.

Let’s turn to both of these now.

We are what we repeatedly do. ~Aristotle

Focus On What You Do Most Of The Time

Now before you think I’m giving you a license to slack off, skip the gym and eat a catering pack of chocolate – stop! Let me be crystal clear.

You need to have high standards for yourself – something we’ve already talked about and something we’ll continue to address in future missions. You have to do the hard stuff, sacrifice time, break a sweat, manage your portions and earn your weight-loss success.

But you can be human. You can have days when you stuff up, slack off or just can’t get it together. These need to be the exceptions though – remember: it’s what you do most of the time that determines the results you get.

If you talk yourself out of exercise so often that you aren’t exercising most of the time, if you happily gorge yourself so many days that you aren’t eating properly most of the time, well then, cause and effect will catch up with you and you will stay weighty.

You need to expect a lot of yourself, but don’t expect perfection.

Fine, I think you get the idea.

So then, what about the times you do fall off the weight-loss wagon? How do you stop the bagel binge turning into a major meltdown? When you’ve lost your exercise mojo, how do you get back on the elliptical?

The answer is: You develop skills for recovering from lapses.

Develop Lapse-Recovery Skills

There’s a crucial skill that will help you weather every lapse with equanimity and determination. Have this in your personal toolkit and you’ll make perseverance your lifelong ally – nothing will be able to stop you from achieving your goals. Are you ready for it?

The skill is this: Refute all-or-nothing thinking.

The tendency when we have a lapse is to think along these lines:
■Oh well, I’ve stuffed up my diet actions today by eating that donut. Might as well eat a dozen more. And that cake. And I’d better finish that tub of ice cream in the freezer while I’m at it.
■I didn’t go for my walk yesterday, so I may as well write off the rest of this week. In fact why bother. Exercise is hard.

It’s all-or-nothing thinking because you tell yourself if you can’t be perfect, then you might as well be terrible. Not only is this ludicrous logic, it’s also self-defeating.

To refute all-or-nothing thinking you have to train yourself to see a lapse for what it is: a setback of perhaps a few hundred calories – a few hundred calories more than you’d like to have eaten, or less than you’d like to have exercised. In the scheme of things, it’s not much at all. It’s a blip on your long-term weight-loss trend.

But when you go all-or-nothing on yourself, you can turn a minor blip into a major blowout, magnifying a few-hundred-calorie setback into a significant backtrack.

Instead, keep your setbacks in their place – just keep calm and carry on!

Here are some more ways to deal with inevitable lapses:
■Use your writing [see Mission 10: Keep A Log, Blog Or Journal] to explore the lapse and look for patterns or useful information.
■If your setback is in diet actions, check that you’re eating enough good food. If you’re hungry then sticking to your chosen diet actionscan become a superhuman expectation. Don’t put yourself in this position.
■Also remember to splurge strategically [see Mission 12. Splurge Strategically] so you can incorporate the treats you really love.
■If you’re struggling with comfort eating, you’ll find help coming in Mission 43: Address Emotional Eating – Part 1 and Mission 44: Address Emotional Eating – Part 2.
■If your setback is with exercise, take special note when we get to Mission 17: Pre-empt Exercise Excuses.
■Lastly, if you find your resolve is suffering, give yourself a refresher of Mission 1: Unlock Your True Motivation.

And then get back to it, pronto.

As we move ahead in this program, I’ll keep giving you missions – some of them challenging. Do your best. You do not have to do any one of them perfectly to succeed. Not one.

The difference between success and failure isn’t perfection – it’s perseverance.

[ClaireBear92]

If you are someone who finds it hard moving to smaller portioned food, you should try the Dukan Diet. Pick up the book and try it! It cant do you any harm. It's a really great way to lose weight quickly, efficently, and healthy. and it sets you up to maintain your whole life. Most diets that involve calorie counting will get you there if you're truly motivated, but when stress or other circumstances get you to eating...then you will easily gain back. This diet is all about preventing that from happening and it has an 89% success rate of people who tried it, keeping the weight off forever.


There was a great story of a girl who was only 22 and weighed over 300 pounds, on this diet, she lost 126 pounds in 1 year and now feels and looks amazing and is maintaining like no other, hasnt gained one pound since!


Worth looking into if you're interested =]

[Paja]

I'm back in weight loss mode after a few years of maintaining (and about 15 pounds of gaining), and the thing I keep telling myself over and over again is that if I'm trying, I'm not screwing up. Sure, I make bad decisions sometimes, but one bad decision isn't going to derail me, so I shouldn't waste time feeling guilty about them. Simple as that.

As to your particular problem, one thing I focus on is making sure I always put my food on a plate or in a bowl before I eat it. It's easy to make myself do because all I have to remind myself is that I can still eat the food, I just have to put it on a plate first. This helps with portion control (and self control in general), which are good skills to have in your arsenal.