Hi Tammy. Another post by the previous author. She has a site called Happy Eaters.

Willpower

Is weight all about willpower? Maintaining your weight, creating fat loss, controlling how much you eat, is that a willpower thing?

That was the great question in my e-mail last night. The asker was a recovering disordered eater working to let go of the obsession and restriction, but also struggling to control the rebound weight gain. Here's what I said:

Weight is all about willpower only if you're a yo-yo dieter on the brink of failure. Willpower is not a longterm solution. It's like holding your breath. You can only do it for so long and then you inhale absolutely everything. Once the novelty of eating yourself into oblivion wears off, you gather up some more willpower and suffer along until you inevitably fail again.

Willpower can get you through brief, tricky situations, like if you have a horrendous day and then end up alone in the house with trigger foods. You can tough it out for a few hours through pure willpower, but if you're relying on it every day in every situation, you're in trouble. If your appetite and emotions are being honestly addressed and dealt with, there shouldn't be any white-knuckling it. If you're out of touch with those things, then you're in the same boat as every fad dieter, forcing yourself to tough it out for as long as you can, seeing some success but rightly worried about how long you can last.

Eating more intuitively, being mindful of portions, listening to your body, paying attention to results, making adjustments, that's what works. I don't even worry that I might eat too much and gain weight. It's not a possibility. It wouldn't feel good, make me happy, or help me achieve my goals so I wouldn't do it. I might have a big meal or a big day, but then I have a light meal or a light day. I like to feel balanced and relaxed instead of always stressing and overly restricting, which tends to create the backlash of overeating.

The goal is to get to a place where you deal with emotions instead of trying to eat them or diet them away, to a place where you trust yourself, have confidence, experience lasting success, and enjoy the whole process. It's not the scary situation you're in now coming off of the eating disorder. This is temporary. Right now your body is urging you to eat, your hormones are wacky, your emotions are raw, and your mind is trying to keep a lid on the whole thing using primarily willpower. It won't always be that way. Things will settle down. The more you can picture how you want your eating to look, how you want your body to look, how you want to feel each day when everything is working, the faster you can make it a reality. As long as you're kicking yourself and spinning worst case scenarios, you tend to stay stuck in that situation with your fears creating your results.

At first you may have to "fake it 'til you make it," acting like a confident, naturally thin, happy eater until the feelings become second nature and authentic. Suppose all of your goals are already achieved. You're in your happy weight range, eating your preferred way, looking great, exercising regularly but not excessively. What does your day look like? What do you wear? What's for breakfast? Do you workout? How does the "ideal" you handle various food situations? Restaurant meal? Gourmet gift basket? Family outing? Birthday party? Movie food? Home alone? Bad day? Bored?

You need to be able to picture the new behaviors before you can do them consistently. Anything that has ever terrified you or ended badly, you need to rethink. If you don't give it any thought, you just repeat the same painful patterns that haven't worked. Imagine that you have happy eating super powers if that's what it takes. Changing the way you think is the key to changing the way you eat.

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So, questions for everybody:

What are your thoughts on "willpower dieting" and the yo-yoing it creates? Have you experienced it? Conquered it? Are you still struggling?

Have you made it from disordered/restrictive eating to normal eating? Was there a rebound weight gain?

Anybody using visualization, affirmations, vision boards, quote collections, or anything like that to reinforce positive change?

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Diets freak me straight out. Even thinking about them can affect my eating. So, I don't entertain the idea of doing them anymore. That way I can read or discuss them without feeling that I have to change everything, give up favorite foods, or follow new rules.

I gained 35-40 pounds from the depths of the eating disorder to the height of my rebound bingeing. Now, 20lbs of that, I probably needed to gain in order to be a healthy weight, but I just kept going. At the time it felt like a runaway train. The more I tried to muster my willpower and gain control of the situation, the more I cried and ate junk food. I thought my options were either binge eating out of control or going back to starvation. Health and fitness, middle ground if you will, were totally foreign territory but I eventually got there, and then turned my obsession to THAT. Suddenly, I wasn't trying to starve anymore, I was all about obsessive compulsive eating (OCE) as Brad Pilon calls it, trying to count my calories, balance my macros, time my refeeds, cycle my carbs. Gah! That went on for years.

Not to get all law of attraction woo-wooy, but when I heard the phrase, "thoughts become things" I became very aware of my thoughts for the first time. I realized that I wasn't going to punish, deny, and obsess myself happy. I quit looking to other people and programs to tell me how I should eat. I started thinking about how I wanted to feel and who I wanted to be. In an ideal world, how do I look? How do I eat? What is my day like? I didn't want to live in the gym anymore, suffer exhaustion, carry a cooler, eat every two hours, enter everything into software, fear restaurants, avoid social situations. So, I quit it.

Anyway, I'm all good now, but it's been quite an adventure! :-)

Morning Ladies. My fasting glucose has gone down from 145 to 118! Great news and moving in the right direction. Thank you Jesus! I hope you all have a great day.

:flow1::bravo::flow1: Great news about the blood sugar, CC.

Great news CC! I finally got mine back down to 120 yesterday. Didn't have a FBS this morning because I stayed up all night and then took a nap between 6 & 10 am. Had a snack around 3 am, so will have to see how things are tomorrow.

Carolr Great article. It is a keeper for future readings.

Still enjoying being on IE. Not counting anything any more or journaling either. Totally free to eat when hungry... no scheduling or min or max meals. I must say that I do experience what the article mentions in the fact that there are days I eat more than others. Hopefully it balances out.

Have a great day!

Carol - Thanks for that! Here are my answers to the questions:

What are your thoughts on "willpower dieting" and the yo-yoing it creates? Have you experienced it? Conquered it? Are you still struggling?

I've experienced it and I still struggle with it to a point. I'm trying to be an Intuitive Eater, but last week's gain freaked me out and I actually tracked my food the last couple of days at the end of the day just to make sure that I was eating a balanced diet. Still struggling... My ideal eating self doesn't worry about tracking my food. Instead, I will just listen to my hunger signals completely, but not have to actually worry about them, because eating when hungry and stopping when satisfied will just come naturally.


Have you made it from disordered/restrictive eating to normal eating? Was there a rebound weight gain?
I'm still working on this one, and I did gain weight last week (2.8 pounds) which freaked me out a bit.

Anybody using visualization, affirmations, vision boards, quote collections, or anything like that to reinforce positive change?
I do use both visualization and affirmations daily to help myself stay positive about all of this!

I use deep breathing and mantras to help me stay focused but also remind myself that “I am enough”. Have been using a great site called mindfulbody.com for guidance on these breathing exercises (mindfulbody.com/mind/breath).

One more day and the last of our ten kids will be married, Lord willing. Time flies.

Carol I have a question. Which Happy Eaters website is the one you mention above? THere are a few and I am not sure as to which one you are referring to. Thanks. We are back at the hotel from Market. TIRED! It's hard not to eat all the goodies the showrooms put out, but am trying. I overate today, so tomorrow will try and do better.

Carol--Thanks for all of the articles and the website. I will check it out.

Things are still going well here. Still doing IE. Now becomes my tough time. Camps start on Monday and I will be in camp mode for 9 weeks. I have a cooler for my car for when I'm out & about but I need to go grocery shopping and buy a few ice packs.

Wedding over.......went well.

Good morning, ladies...I've been catching up on the posts that have been made since my last visit. Carol, a very happy anniversary to you and your husband. What a blessing to be celebrating so many years together! :cp:

I've been having a hard time this month because I hit a new all-time weight high in the middle of the month, which threw me right back into diet mentality, which of course only made things worse, since I can never stick to a diet plan anyway.

Another thing that's pushed me back into diets has been that my daughter and son in law have lost a LOT of weight eating "primal"/low carb. I've been trying to low carb again, but just cannot do it. I do not like meat, and it feels like jail trying to rope myself into a plan that allows so few carbs.

Also, my sister went back on NutriSystem. She's already lost 40lbs on it, so that has an effect on my thinking too, though not as much as it used to.

So, once again, I'm returning to the way that always seems to help me the most, and the way that allows food and eating to fade into the background of ordinary life, instead of becoming an obsessive focus, and that is non-dieting.

I don't really want to call it pure by-the-book "intuitive eating", because I think it's very easy to turn that into another way of dieting sometimes too.

I've read "Health At Every Size", and think that might be closest to what I'm going to do, if we really need any kind of a plan at all.

Mainly, I just want to get back to eating like I used to when I was naturally thin, when eating wasn't a big deal, and weight and size weren't always what filled most of my waking thoughts.

It's a beautiful summer day here in Vermont, and my dh just took our grandsons fishing, so I have time to putter around a little before they get back.

Enjoy your day, everyone! :flow2:

My sentiments EXACTLY.

Carol, thanks for posting the link to the Happy Eaters forums. I've been reading several of the threads over there in the food section, and while there are some threads that will push you back into diet mentality when you read them, there are also some good intuitive eating ones too.

Here's an interesting one called "The Price Of Cake".
http://jentrinque.com/blog/2011/03/1...log-charlotte/

Lots of things can throw you into diet mode, like this wedding we had. You just want to look your best........all those pictures. But soon they will be forgotten and life goes on. I didn't diet... can't really do that anymore but it sure does cross my mind, especially because my DS and DIl just lost 40lb each and are really thin. There is way more to life than thinking about that all the time. They both exercise like mad but probably won't be forever.