Any advice on this? I'm fine all morning - eat breakfast, have some coffee, maybe a 100 cal snack around 10. But as soon as I have lunch, I just want to keep grazing. It doesn't matter what it is - I could eat an entire bag of carrots or an entire bag of chips. How do you fight the urge to keep picking? My stomach isn't hungry (I just fed it), but my mouth/head/emotions want to eat. This has to just be habit! Does anyone have any strategies? I want to save the rest of my calories so I can have dinner with my boyfriend tonight. I'm going to brush my teeth and see if that quiets the beast....
I chew a piece of gum or suck on a couple of tic tacs. It really doesn't take long at all for the desire to stick more food in my mouth to pass, so these oral diversions do the trick. Mainly you just need something that works long enough for the message from your stomach that it is full to reach your brain. Then you will feel full and it will be easier not to pick.
Last edited by Petite Powerhouse; 11-05-2010 at 12:21 PM.
Do you like tea? That always helps me. If nothing else works I'd eat some sliced cucumbers, or broccoli, or some other raw veggies you have on hand (no dip) and it always goes away for me soon
Hot tea usually helps me. Some days I drink 2-3 cups to keep the munchies at bay.
Celery can be helpful because you get the fun crunch but not too much damage.
Long-term, I find that if I plan my day's food, right down to the snacks, and enter it in my counter ahead of time, I am more likely to stick to it. It just kind of settles any argument I might have in my head about what I can eat. There it is, in black and white, and if it's not written there, it's not happening.
Have a good dinner tonight -- I'm going out too and I'm excited!
I get the munchies after lunch too. 4-5 hours in a cubicle between lunch and the end of the day is torture sometimes.
I keep gum and hot tea in my cubicle and I also use that time to make sure I'm getting my water in for the day. Sometimes it's enough to entertain your mouth for long enough that your munchies fade away.
Also my dentist has told me to floss and rinse after every meal, so I'm doing my best to try to remember to do that after lunch. After mouthwash you don't want to eat anything for a while because it would just taste gross! Haha.
Thank you everyone! As much as I hate artificial sweetner, I'm drinking a diet root beer out of desperation. Lol! And I think I will try pre-programming my meals for the day. I bought this really cute pair of Levi's at Goodwill that are just a weeeee bit too tight - I'm going to take a picture of them and put it on my desk!
as you say it's really a mental thing. you need to find an 'end of meal indicator' as others have said. (Hence the smokers of the world tend to not overeat!)
At work i have my salad, and then an orange, and mentally i know the orange is the end of my meal. In an evening i have a cup of peppermint tea after my food. Same deal.
And the teeth brushing thing is the same kind of theory and that would work too.
So just try and find something like that, and it might help.
This was one of my major food problems before I began to lose the weight--I was a life-long food picker (my mother and grandmother also struggle with picking!).
I deliberately chose something else to do when the post-meal grazing feeling showed up. When it happened while cooking/preparing food, I told myself "I don't want to have to put into fitday something like 'two bites of this' or 'a pointless scrap of that'; I want to only put in foods that were my real meal or snack. Nothing else."
It's a very tricky matter of developing that self-discipline, but trust me--it DOES get easier. Within two months, I had lost all desire to pick. And now, three months after that, it's still gone.
When I was stuck a few weeks back and kept getting late-day hunger, I packed a lunch of various little "nibble" foods and just purposefully grazed on it all afternoon. I'd have a few slices of very bran-heavy flax seed bread, one or two apples chopped up into slices, baby carrots, and then my main lunch was some loose leaf spinach and cottage cheese. Also, drinking lots of water helps.
If you have something minty handy like gum or breath mints - or, ideally a toothbrush and toothpaste - it can take the edge off the urge to keep eating. I am currently having this problem with mikan/mandarin oranges - I'll have one for dessert after dinner, sometimes "just one more," and then I have to physically leave the room to keep from eating more.
fighting the urge to pick and graze
