It's amazing to see how much weight everyone on here has lost. When I think how impossible it was to lose anything before, for me, it's like a miracle. I reached 32lbs this morning, 8 more is my goal but I do not think that will work. Still plenty of extra of me.

Btw, introvert here too... Funny how many are saying that here. It took a long time for me to understand that it was ok. It's a "gene" thing for me and we all probably understand the role genes have played in our lives.

___________
Mary

Good evening Summer Peeps. My mom's memorial was today. Absolutely beautiful service. Family I haven't seen in years. We had friends who drove over 4 hours to attend. I am so humbled and touched at the outpouring of love. All in all a wonderful emotional day.

And I cheated....big time. I was soooo good. Brought my IP food and was good until after the service and lunch. The church provided a huge spread. There was wine. I told my aunt I couldn't reminisce near the desserts but there we were. Next thing I know I popped a brownie in my mouth and it was downhill from there.

What bothers me most is not the cheat but the landslide that inevitably follows. I can't just have one brownie and stop. The rest of the day turns into a food fest. I am disgusted with myself. I need to learn moderation. My coach assures me that I will in maintenance and that I stuff myself because I feel like this is my chance to get all the junk in. In maintenance I will not be so restricted. I sure hope she's right cause at this moment I am pretty concerned about being able to indulge and maintain. Ugh.

I'm glad the memorial was beautiful. It's never easy, but somehow it makes it less emotionally brutal when it goes well and there's a lot of people present to share their special memories. :)

I think you need to excuse yourself today's food issues, CenTX. It's not like it was in any way a normal day. Your body was flooded with hormones and practising moderation under the circumstances would be like fighting a giant wave in a row boat. You tried. You almost succeeded. One day. Back to normal eating tomorrow. :)

--

I have just finished some deep belly laughing for the evening. After having to wait over 3.5 hours for my two kitten passengers to arrive (a series of mishaps and disasters to the previous driver and his co-pilot) while waiting in the McDonalds car park, my willpower muscle just wasn't up to the job of watching people walking out and so I was naughty. I have just entered all my food and discovered that the exercise I did this morning negated roughly half of the excess, but I'm still way over. Hubby joked that driving must surely burn some calories, as I had driven for nearly 8 hours. According to exercise.com's calculator, 7 hours of driving at 159lbs = 1011 calories. I just about wet myself laughing. Think I could get away with entering that for exercise? LOLOLOL

Mary congrats on your successes…. :)

Amanda you just keep on rocking:)…. I hope your kittens have safe travels also.


CentTX - First, my thoughts to you on this day. I hope you can be gentle with yourself. You will get back on program when you are ready in the next day or two, I’m sure.
If it helps, I had very similar fears to what you described. In the last 60 days before maintenance, I had about 5 distinct “crazy” days where I couldn’t stop eating extra packets - like 4 extra - I pretty much was binging on IP. I think it was just a process happening for me.
It is true, for me anyway, what your coach said. Once P3 started that crazed feeling hasn’t come back. My body is getting the nourishment it wants, and it’s not so weird. I definitely have days, esp. during stress (and today was a HUGE one for you) where I eat a good 300 to 500 calories extra that my body doesn’t need, but I can stop after that, and the 1 or 2 lbs up goes down in the next day or two. I’m not even sure it’s a bad thing. For example the last two days I had extra calories, but then my body is satisfied and today it wasn’t very hungry. So it balances out.
It’s actually kind of a challenge to teach myself how to eat “normally”. I think as long as we don’t give up, we can do it.
I’m sure you will need to cry at some point, if you haven’t already done a lot of it…. and remember even the tears take energy, and the hormones as Amanda mentioned, and you will need to give yourself space, rest, hot tea, baths, etc…. be gentle, kind, love yourself, love your mother.
I send you a virtual hug, from a virtual friend in the ethers you have never met. Best wishes to you and your family.

:hug::hug::hug: Sorry about the landslide! I am so happy that you were able to celebrate Mom's life with family around. You can pick yourself back up and get back on track just take time to get yourself back together. Its been a long hard few months for you and your doing fantastic.

Ugh so sorry about the McDonalds incident! At least you had some exercise already under your belt to burn it off...

Thanks for saying that. I have found myself "treating" myself to an extra IP packet here and there LOL...I know maintenance will be hard, but I am looking forward to learning how to eat my favorite things once in a while. I just have a tendancy to not be able to get back on track...

Off to a college visit today with DS. then we always go out to lunch. Did OK at my brothers yesterday. I had brought a huge salad and I had 2 plates of that. I did however eat 2 ribs off the smoker. They were so good I could have dug my face into the whole platter, but I only had my brother do 2 without sauce.. I am sure that there was stuff in the rub is should not have had, but hey I stopped at 2! Came home and made a small salad with some shrimp to make up the protine amount. Cup of smooth move and bed followed LOL....Oh and I passed on all the chips and taco dip and BBQ and Buffalo wings my brother made as well as the platter of sandwiches and potato salad....SO I Say Yeah Me:D:D

Sounds incredibly tempting, Sue. I'm glad you had the foresight to limit what you allowed DB to leave unsauced for you! :)

Have a beautiful day with DS and make good choices. :)

I already know that my day is going to have one not-so-great meal (planned stop at a TA Truck stop that we love) but should be able to find decent options for the other meal.

Happy Sunday summer babes! :) :) :)

CTC - I am sure that was pent up emotion that caused the reaction. No real damage if you get back on the wagon today as your body can't store the excess consumed if you don't feed it carbs (insulin response) so good news is that today you can minimize the effects of yesterday and then keep moving forward as you have.

3BD - I am feeling same way. I think I am going to set my goal weight lower as long as I am assured I am not wreaking further havoc on my hormones like extended P1 phase seemed to do in the first cycle. But, that is dependent on how my body responds to my mini-reboot. I have 14 pounds to go to get back to where I was. Tomorrow's weigh-in for week 3 of reboot will be a good indicator - if I don't have another substantial loss, I may have to rethink that.

Sue and Amanda - you seem to be taking the deviations in stride so I think that is a healthy attitude. For me, I am currently obsessed with getting at least these 14 pounds off, especially with Vegas and my bday in 2 weeks, where I planned to wear my size 8 bathing suit. We'll see if I can pull it off. It seems to be working because my brother said to me yesterday at the Derby party, well I see you are losing weight again. So, my one month off did have as much of an impact on me as I thought. But, it is good to know my efforts are noticeable to others even if I feel like I am not losing inches.

On an unrelated note, did you ever really enjoy something so much that you wind up making multiple servings and then get sick of it before you have consumed it? Well, that is situation for me with my cauli rice pudding. I so enjoyed my first two that I made 5 more. I have 2 left that I am not really looking forward to but I don't want to throw them out. That is probably silly as there are so few calories on this program that we should savor all of them but I would prefer not to waste so my lunches the next 2 days feel like more of an obligation to get rid of what I have. It didn't help that I undercooked the cauliflower. Oh well...enjoy the rest of the weekend...one more day for me until next WI!

Thank you for your kind words and reassurance. And to everyone for the prayers and comforting words.

Amber - I am so glad to hear there is a light at the end of P1 that doesn't including binging. In reality, the days I have cheated while on IP are worse than before I started This diet and was 260+ lbs. I am still kicking myself this morning but more from the perspective that I was/am planning to start phasing off in a couple weeks and was trying to get off as much weight as possible beforehand. My birthday is this week and my coach was encouraging me to take a cheat day. Guess I just took it a couple days early. ;)

Hello all, I think one thing I will add to what I wrote is I haven’t yet on P4 added sugar, flour, any gluten/soy/corn products, or alcohol.
My observation over the years is my particular body doesn’t process these well, and they don’t have much nutritive value for me. My guess is also they would probably produce some kind of craving/blood sugar problem.
I am open to trying to add them in the future and see how it goes, but my whole health journey these last years has been so sensitive, I just want to take everything very slowly and not rock the boat unnecessarily.

CenTx, I also felt more out of control on those 5 “crazy" days in the last 30 to 60 days than I ever did before P1. I really do think it was just my body depleted from a year of P1, it was basically at goal but I was trying to lose more, and it was just seriously rebelling.

I think the overeating can be mental of course.
Now in P4, so if I make the mistake of waiting too long to eat (over 5 hours) after already having a low calorie day, I will feel ravenous, but if I make myself some healthy food with good fats, I am fine - I just have to remind myself to stop for 30 minutes before I add anything more because the hunger “ravenous” response has kicked in and I actually won’t be hungry soon if I just let my body digest it.
I try not to let that happen very often, but sometimes “life happens” and the best laid plans don’t always work out...

Amber I'm so
glad you wrote today about waiting 30 minutes. After lunch, especially, I just don't feel satisfied. I need to wait it out and see how I feel after 30 min. I like that. My big revelation doing IP is how all my stomach issues have disappeared. I think I may be one of those people who can not tolerate a lot of grains. Do we have to have grains to be healthy? Maybe just have oatmeal or rice? My stomach used to be upset eating anything it seemed. Not now.
___________
Mary

I was very similar to what you describe. I know it’s hard to people to believe sometimes, but I was eating very well for several years prior to IP and still overweight, due to multiple different things I have now discovered in the course of the IP protocol. I was lucky that my doctor actually believed me and suggested IP. I think that the insulin resistance and then metabolic syndrome can just really play havoc with the body, esp. after 20 years of continued dieting (as many women experience) and my body really learned to just hold onto weight and any carb that came its way, even carrots, it would just hold on to the weight. Like you it also seemed to me that I really wasn’t digesting anything well, my stomach always hurt and was very bloated and constipated.

Now in P4, it is very different. I think the P1 protocol really did do what it was meant to do - I do feel that my pancreas is working better now (perhaps not as well as some people, but at least now I can maintain at 1700 calories or so - before even 1000 calories would cause problems and gain). I very rarely feel heavy blood sugar swings or cravings. And my stomach doesn’t hurt the way it used to, unless I eat too much. Also if I eat more than one or two packets of IP for some reason it will hurt - I think it doesn’t want too much of the additives, but it could just be psychosomatic.

So far quinoa and oatmeal seem fine for me, I eat a small amount of rice and that seems fine. I can do small potatoes and sweet potatoes as the carb but if I do more then two days in a row the potatoes seems to cause a bit of weight gain, so I am a little careful with them, and use them more like a treat, like if I am out to dinner and want to have a baked potato, or if I have a heavy workout day. I can eat 1/3 cup of non-sugar/gluten cereal in the morning and that seems fine also.
I eat a lot of healthy fats, and that is what seems to satiate me, and if I’m hungry I will lean toward fats rather than carbs. This seems to work well for my particular body.

Also I am learning (big revelation to me:) ) that sometimes when I am still hungry I actually am still hungry!:)…. so it’s a learning curve. It is taking me time to learn to trust my body and its responses and that they aren’t always emotional hunger cues or going to cause me to gain weight.

I think on P1 it’s tricky - I often was still hungry after meals - I think the hunger, esp. closer to goal, is just a natural response the body has, and we almost have to tolerate until we are ready to transition. Most days it wasn’t too bad.

I got that way with the muffins...I made them every other day for a while and then I just could not choke them down anymore LOL....Now they are a once in a while treat and it is fine. I actully felt that way about a lot of the packets after a while..could not even do the soups, I have learned I can do anything once in a while if I have to LOL...Sorry your stuck with so much pudding :?:

Very insightful! I seem to no longer have IBS since on program. Of course I have avoided my follow up colonoscopy, but would be interesting to see if there is a difference. Right now (and maybe some can relate) I am scared to death of adding anything non IP back into my diet. I know that I am going to have to soon and I am scared to death that I will put all the weight right back on in a week LOL..I know that is unreasonable but.....

So my home scale is so so close to letting me into the wonderful world of the 190's. I am so hoping it is Tuesday! It would be great news for me and keep my spirits up. DH and I have a meeting with the oncologist Tuesday after my WI as his biopsy results were inconclusive. We need prayers and I need to go into that Dr. meeting in a good mood.....

Sue - You are in my prayers. Good luck tomorrow!

So, I am majorly bummed. I had no loss the past week. No idea how that could be the case. Plus, I know I didn't lose inches either. I put a pair of shorts on yesterday that were a little tight.

I averaged 980 calories and 22 net carbs per day. I golfed 5 times in the week with 3 x walking so based upon calories burned from that activity alone, I burned about 6100 calories.

I think my hormones may have caught up to me :( I'll see what this week brings but what a downer to start the week.
The weather fits my mood - it is raining here.

Briael – I WISH car riding burned calories. I would be a toothpick by now all the miles I have racked up the last few months! So good of you to get those kitties to their new forever home. Next time, meet outside of a gym. ;)

Sue – Fingers crossed you hit Onderland in a big way this week! You have worked so hard. And I love your capri NSV. There are plenty more where those ones came from!! New clothes has been one of the highlights of my WL journey. Hope your DS liked the school you guys checked out. So far, nothing has resonated with my kiddo...

Ro – This is a marathon, not a sprint. You know you did all the right things this week. Maybe you’re retaining water from all that exercising? I so know the feeling of no loss. You gotta just keep on keeping on. You’ve got this!

Shockingly, I was down 0.6lbs this morning at WI (my aria was up 1.6 since Friday) . Maybe because it was only a half day indiscretion and not all day? IDK, but I guess I’ll take it. Measurements were also down this morning. None of it makes sense really. Back on the wagon since yesterday and hoping to actually go check out my new gym membership this week. Possibly find a trainer. My coach still wants to start phasing off on 5/18. I was just hoping to lose as much weight as possible (really hoped to get to 150 by phase off). I also asked about continuing to see her once I am in maintenance. She said she has people in maintenance who still come weekly to people who come once a month or less. She said I can come however often is comfortable for me. That is a relief. I feel like as long as I am accountable to her (and you guys) that I can figure out “living” with this plan long term.