What is wrong w me? Why cant I be one of those people that eat just to fill there body with nourishment. I eat cause i love food. Ive cut out soda which was my firat goal. Nowe I have over 100 lbs to lose. Im young, relativly healthy and single. I have nothing holding me back but myself. Anyone have advice? Id appreciate it
Nothing is wrong with you. We all eat for pleasure. We just have to learn to control how much we eat at a time. I'm definitely one of those people that can down 1000 calories in one sitting and think nothing of it xD...What helped me was starting to count my calories. It helped me back off my portion sizes and made it easier for me to lose weight. Just take it one day at a time. I think you need to come up with a eating and excerise plan that you'll be able to stick too. Maybe you can do some research on how many calories your body needs a day and how much you will have to eat to lose 1-2 pounds a week. I wish you the best of luck You can do it.
My advice is to not hate your body for doing this!
Look, humans have a natural sweet tooth, because back in the old days, sweetness in a fruit/leaf/plant indicated it probably was better to eat it than the alternative. We naturally have a palate for the stuff that made us survive in the old days -- fats, protein, and sweetness. The problem, of course, is that our bodies don't need to eat much as we do, they are just programmed to not stop because they don't know any better.
We do.
My one piece of weight loss advice that has been invaluable to me, aside from researching as much as possible on nutrition and weight loss, is learning to say NO and learning that I have to give myself boundaries when it comes to food and exercise.
Yes, I love cupcakes. OMG, how I love cupcakes. But I can't eat a cupcake every day. I just can't. And my body would tell me "You must eat that cupcake. It's so delicious. It's wonderful. It tastes amazing." And I had to learn to say back, "Sure, it's delicious. I've had it before. I know how good it is. I still remember how good it is, so I don't have to eat it again (yet). Maybe next time."
Yes, it means creating new rituals, it means changing how you interact with your friends and family and coworkers, it means having new healthy habits replacing the old ones. It means changing your life. That's why diets -- just deprivation of what you otherwise would eat -- don't work. That's why everyone says it's a "lifestyle" change!!! You have to change how you view food, how you nourish yourself, how you interact with others when it comes to food, how to remove the triggers that get you to eat crappy stuff.
It's hard. And it won't happen overnight.
So, my second best piece of advice is to take baby steps. Change one thing here, change one there. You took the soda out of your diet and you probably don't miss it anymore, right? Well, think of changing something else. Maybe you walk a little more every day. Or maybe you take an exercise class you always thought was fun. Then later, next month, you change something else. Maybe you don't eat dessert except on the weekends. Maybe you start trying to get 5 servings of vegetables in your diet if you don't eat that many now. Maybe you say you will eat at home 5 days a week... The possibilities are endless.
By making these small changes, you'll be making a longer term change in your lifestyle that will support you when you're out of motivation or feeling sick and tired of being on a "diet".
I took soda out of my life over two years ago. I recently had some ginger ale because I was sick. It was fine, it soothed my stomach some, but I will never go back to drinking soda like I used 2 years ago. Impossible. I don't crave it, I don't want it and I kind of prefer water over soda. That was impossible for me to believe two years ago that I could EVER say that.
Take those baby steps and even if it takes you a long time to reach your goal weight, you'll know it'll be a permanent change, rather than a fad diet.
food is good, balance is better. you're going to have a lot of activities you'll want to try and enjoy, and I've found a lot of it to be harder at a heavier weight. Traveling, sports, clothes, socializing. I'm not saying you have to be thin to have a happy and fulfilling life, but I do think many things would have been and would be easier for me at a healthier weight. The health aspect is no small thing either.
I don't say this as someone who has it all figured out, I'm working on getting it off. I think the more we embrace the lifestyle change and weight loss process, changing eating patterns, incorporating activity and exercise, the more positive and easier it is, less like a loss and deprivation, if you catch my drift.
I love food as much as anyone - really,i adore food and eating - and yet I have managed to lose more than 110 pounds. The key to this, for me, has been balance, as dragonwoman says. I have had to balance my love of eating with my desire to be trim and fit. That meant finding ways to work with my love of food,so that it became an asset rather than a hindrance. I invested more time in cooking,learning new ways to make wonderful, flavorful food that fit within my plan.
However, it also meant learning to tell myself "no" a lot of the time. I can't take full advantage of every eating opportunity indiscriminately. I think very carefully about each one, and make a decision about whether it's really worth going off plan for. For example, the pastry spread that's out at my office every Wednesday is tempting, but it is there every week, so I can pass it up most of the time without feeling like I am missing out on a great opportunity.
Finally,there is patience. I have not been in a huge hurry to lose the weight - it's taken me more than 2 years to come this far and that is just fine with me. It means I don't have to be flawlessly on plan every single day - once in a while, I can enjoy a special meal or a nice martini or whatever it might be, go over my calories a bit, and it doesnt blowup my whole plan, because for me, success isn't measured in units of perfection.
For me, it really has ended up being about how committed I am to losing weight. There have been times that, frankly, the enjoyment I got out of eating has been greater than my commitment to losing weight. About 3 years or so ago I realized I was in that place. At one time I had weighed 119 (which is actually too low for me to maintain) and when I came to that realization I was at 207. I had been yoyoing back and forth. I would go to WW for a few weeks then quit, go back having gained X pounds, lose for a couple of weeks, go off track, gain, etc.
I wondered myself why I couldn't stick with it. It wasn't necessarily eating foods that were really awful (I had given up sugar-y drinks). But rather than eat 1/4 c of nuts (what I eat now) I would get a bowlful and just munch until full.
I finally realized that -- at that point -- being able to do that and being able to go to a restaurant and order whatever I wanted was more important to me than losing weight. Sure, I wanted to lose weight. I wanted to look good. I wanted to be healthy. But -- at that moment -- if I was honest with myself I didn't want that more than I wanted to be able to eat what I wanted.
It is hard to know what changed my mind. Maybe age (I'm in my 50s now) and feeling that I needed to either lose weight now or just give it up. Maybe just the realization that the extra weight really wasn't healthy and I wanted health more than I wanted the appetizer trio at Chili's. But somehow I got to a place where losing weight was more important than the enjoyment I get from eating what I want.
That isn't to say that I don't still have enjoyment from food. Yesterday, I had a McFlurry (first one in over 5 years actually). Occasionally I have ice cream or have an appetizer at Chili's (but I share it among several people). It is just that I realize that it is really sort of like a budget. If I buy this book then maybe I can't buy that song. I ate out yesterday and I ate more calories than I usually eat. I'm OK with that, but I also know that for the next few days I will be very careful on what I eat.
I can't have it all. I can't eat anything I want all the time. But I can eat most of what I want some of the time and can eat some of what I want all the time. But, anytime I am tempted to go offtrack (and I am tempted) I ask myself what is most important to me.
Is the reward of losing weight greater than the reward of eating the cupcake? Or if you're me, six cupcakes? Until the answer is 'yes' to this question, you won't succeed.
You might need help. I needed help. A combination of help from OA meetings, weight watchers, counseling, lots of research, and an exercise goal that has nothing to do with weight loss keeps me motivated and helped me get started.
I have to ask myself the question almost everytime I eat. I'm a compulsive overeater. I eat too much, I eat mindlessly, I almost never eat because I'm hungry, so everytime I'm confronted with a food choice I have to ask myself if eating this or losing weight is more important to me and does eating this support or hurt my efforts? Sometimes I have to break it right down to calories. If I eat an 800 calorie piece of cake am I going to run for 2 hours to balance that out? Is it worth it? Sometimes the cake is worth it, sometimes it's not. Most of the time I know that I can't stop at one piece so I better not start.
Lots of good advice. I think a good thing to keep in mind is that food can become like a drug. A study showed that obese people need to eat a lot more of food to get to a point when one is fulfilled. A good example, is what PrairieGirl writes about cupcakes. One cupcake is not enough. It is like all the information you read and hear about from drug addicts. A little worked and then I needed more and more and more. Also, you have the problem with sugar, eat it and you are really happy for a few minutes then the buzz wears off. You feel horrible and guilty about eating bad stuff.
What do you do? I think if you plan ahead and use procrastination. Like I will eat that frisbee size cookie later. I will eat all these baby carrots instead. Later, later and more later. It works. Try and add it to your arsenal of weight loss tools.
good luck,
Melmelvin
And let me second the suggestion that you come up with an eating plan. I chose calorie counting because it's free and it lets me eat the foods I like, just in much smaller quantities than before. It gives me an objective measure that I can use to help decide whether to eat that cookie. Today, for example, I decided to eat that cookie and several of its friends but I stayed within my calorie budget and I'll eat healthier tomorrow, so I'm not mad at myself.
for me the secret has ended up being a very low carb plan. I am not going to say that it will automatically be the same for everyone, but when I am on plan, I have turned into one of those people who eats more for fuel than for fun. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the foods I eat very much. But I don't get carb/sweet cravings and while I do get hungry, I eat enough to be satisfied and then move on.
However, I know this isn't a permanent thing and my plan (the Dukan Diet) isn't meant to be that way, and ultimately, I will start to add everything back in, in moderation. But for the weight loss part of this, it's been an amazing experience to be able to eat the way I want to eat with this plan, without it being a major struggle. I wish you (and everyone) the same good luck in finding a plan that feels like such a natural fit for your, whatever that plan is.
What is wrong w me? Why cant I be one of those people that eat just to fill there body with nourishment. I eat cause i love food. Ive cut out soda which was my firat goal. Nowe I have over 100 lbs to lose. Im young, relativly healthy and single. I have nothing holding me back but myself. Anyone have advice? Id appreciate it
We're taught to blame ourselves for being lazy, crazy, or stupid... We point to "naturally thin" people and say "why can't I be like that... there must be something "wrong" with me. They must be smarter or better than I am in some way, but weight loss is a lot more complicated than that.
Here's a really good article that describes the growing epidemic obesity has become (are we becoming lazier, crazier, or stupider as a society, or is something else going on...?)
Personally, I also strongly recommend the book "The End of Overeating," it (perhaps more than any of the other hundreds of books I've ever read on weight loss) has been a life saver for me (and part of the secret of my "success" this time after nealry 30 years of weight loss failure).
The answers in a nutshell are that
Nothing's wrong with you. And you can't be like "those people" because you're not one of those people. And most of us aren't (2/3 of Americans are overweight, and if we don't change something soon, in three years 75% of Americans will be).
For me, I've found that I'm not food-addicted, I'm high-glycemic carb addicted (especially the salt/sweet/fatty combination that David Kessler talks about in The End of Overeating).
The book changed my life (and the book Refuse to Regain is awesome also - one of the very few books ever written exclusively on the topic of maintaining weight loss. And you don't have to be at your goal weight to start practicing maintenance).
For me, that's the biggest change "this time" is that I decided from the very beginning to focus on maintaining weight loss. Instead of making weight loss my main goal - my main goal is to maintain my weight loss and if I can to lose "maybe just one more pound."
This way, there's never the "I've blown it, I might as well binge" mentality. In the past I always thought that a teeny loss, or a zero loss was almost as bad as a gain, so when I wasn't losing fast enough to suit myself I always felt like "I might as well be gaining, at least I'd get to eat what I want."
But now my goal is always first and foremost not to gain. So even when loss doesn't feel possible, I never have that feeling that I might as well be gaining, because I've learned to be very protective of the weight I've lost.
It's taken me an outrageously long time to lose the 98 lbs that I have, but I've not done any serious backsliding basically just because I realized that every pound matters, and that even when I can't lose, it doesn't mean I should choose gaining.
You can do this. And you can learn to have more control over food, but it may take choosing different foods. I've learned that I can't control myself with some foods, and keeping those foods out of my house and out of my mouth works a lot better than trying to learn to eat those foods in moderation.
It doesn't matter why I'm not "one of those people" who can eat those foods in moderation, I can't. For me, intensely flavored, calorie-dense carbohydrates are like the edible version of crack, meth, heroine... There is no "moderation" And yeah it kind of sucks, but there's plenty of awesome, wonderful tasting food that I can control myself with.
As much as I love scrambled eggs, beef roast, roast turkey...I'm not going to eat them until I can't move. Protein and even fat (unless paired with high-carb foods) aren't foods that I binge on. All my binge foods are high-glycemic carbs (even when they're not high-sugar ones).
Back again. Short rant. advice plsss
You can do it.
