Hello, I Rose and I am new. I am 33 and living in Scotland (but not Scottish) and it's not so much that I would like to lose weight (though would be a nice side-effect) but that I just want to have a normal attitude and desire for food.
I've had a rough medical history, starting out with bowel trouble as a small child which meant I was not allowed to eat at all for ages (tube feeding) and then various restrictive diets. This implanted in my childhood brain that some foods were dangerous - which was true then as they might have killed me, but is not true now but I can't shake the association.
I have a physical disability that means I can't exercise and can't work so my days are boring and painful, and I eat for the pure pleasure of eating stuff, it offsets the pain.
When I was 15 my disordered food relationship turned on its head when I went on a diet and became instead anorexic. I am terrified to start any diets because I worry I will end up like that instead, and I have to stay away from the semi-religious fervour of some weight loss support methods, magazines, etc. they flick the anorexia switch in me. I am not cured, I just put on the physical weight and now I am a fat anorexic!
Ongoing hormone treatments make me genuinely physically hungry all day, I am jealous of all those people who write that they simply snack on carrots instead of chips - carrots don't fill me!! All the things listed as "filling" don't fill me, 3lbs of apples doesn't fill me, 5ml of double cream fills me! If I could be pregnant again without having to have another baby weight loss would be easy as, I lost 2 stone when I was pregnant without making any effort at all.
So now I am looking for more of the emotional support that is lacking elsewhere, I don't need a diet sheet (all my GP can offer me) I need to find a way to live without the only thing that gives me a true feeling of pleasure.
I also "abuse sugar" because of my medical conditions, I can get an extra half hour of being able to get out of bed by having a bar of chocolate, so I do that.
It's a bizarre place to be because actually I don't have a large appetite, I have an extremely small appetite and no desire for food, poor sense of taste, dodgy digestion, but I do like sweets as they taste nice and give me no problems. Meals don't float my boat, and I easily go for ages without eating. I actually have no clue how people normally pick what they are going to eat - how do you do that? My anorexic brain will not allow me to eat food I don't 100% enjoy so if I want a ham sandwich there is absolutely no point having a cheese sandwich, I won't want it. So I can't plan ahead to buy things and often end up having no food at all. I just want to get back to a normal place, write a shopping list, buy some food, cook some food, eat it, feel no longer hungry, and replace the pleasure element with something else that will make me feel as good as chocolate does - haven't found anything yet!
It's "easy" for me to lose weight by going onto non-food substitutes like milkshakes, all soup diet, but to do it by eating normal food has always escaped me, nothing tastes worth eating, I have to pay for it and put effort into cooking it and then I don't want it, and usually can't finish it and end up still hungry and pretty depressed. No point being thin and depressed, and my husband ends up banning me from dieting because I am impossible to live with, but he is also driven mad that I won't eat normal meals. But he eats cheap instant meals and noodle pots and stuff, not very helpful and he won't be impressed with the food budget for us to sit down and eat real food. Oh, and I can't cook, not as in I have to learn but as in I am too disabled to do much more than 4 minutes of preparation before leaving stuff in the oven or steamer.
Sorry it's such a long introduction, just I wanted to try to be comprehensive and I guess unburden a bit since I am so confused and don't seem to find anyone who 'gets' me. Am I a hopeless case?
I think you are fooling yourself if you think there are really "normal" people out there. I sure don't know any. I know thin people who seem to live on chocolate and junk food, fat people who eat healthy, plenty of people with plenty of issues both mental and physical.
Everyone is different and everyone, even the people who don't think about what they eat at all, is just figuring it out as they go along.
I think most folks, given the guilt free, calorie free, knowledge of health free choice of a bag of carrots or a bag of chips would choose the chips. Carrot or cookie - no contest really. We have learned to like healthier food, to make healthier choices but that doesn't mean the other choices stopped being yummy. It's just we made up our minds to make the healthy choices - the long term health benefits are better than the short term gratification.
You have to decide what you really want and be honest about the obstacles you face. Eating doesn't relieve your pain - your boredom, sure, but not your pain. It's just while you are eating you're distracted from you pain. So find another distraction. Read a book, write a book, take up knitting, write letters to servicemen serving overseas, paint, sew, fish.
Fresh fruits and veggies cost more than junk food but there are ways to make healthy choices on a budget. There are also ways to eat healthy without a lot of prep work or cooking. You have to decide what really matters to you and then make it happen. Will it be easy? No? But it hasn't been "easy" for any of us, we've all had personal challenges that made our journey tough. But you just do it.
By "normal person" I mean that most people I know get up and have breakfast, then later on that day they have lunch, then they have dinner. At various points in between they may or may not have a snack or two. The shop once a week, they know in advance (somehow!) what they are going to buy, they buy ingredients for it, they take them home and then they cook. They eat every day, not once every 2-6 days then other days have 5 meals and a packet of biscuits and they eat a wide variety of stuff. How do you decide I know, on Thursday I will have a lasagne? If by Thursday I don't want a lasagne I won't be eating it.
I wasn't meaning to imply that I thought it was easy for people to eat carrots instead of chips, I just thought maybe I shouldn't write "I would happily thump all the people" who write that in slimming magazine success stories, like all you have to do is not eat something nice, you eat something horrid instead, you just have to make "small changes" like that. They reflect back on them as easy substitutions, forgetting that early in their weight loss journey the option of chips or carrot sticks was a no-brainer. It's the implication that it's easy, and that the substitutions are somehow the same! If I can't have nice food I have NO food, and that's where I need to try to find how to meet in the middle. It's not so much a "healthy choices on a budget" thing, it's that I find it upsetting (actually worthy of tears) to have to spend money we don't really have on food I don't enjoy. I am being told on the one hand lose weight and on ther other hand "you don't want chicken but eat it anyway" - it doesn't make any sense in my mind, so I have nothing. A packet of biscuits is worth eating, a salad is not worth paying for, shopping for, bringing home, putting on a plate, consuming and washing the dishes afterwards because there is no reward for it, it's 100% drain, including the eating part. It won't make me "healthy", nothing will make me healthy until they discover the foods that can perform surgery and reprogram DNA, so the only reward is smaller jeans. Which I don't care about. I just want to have a relatively normal life so that I can open the cupboards and will find I have been shopping, there is food in there, and I will take it out and eat it!
How do you find the motivation TO eat the diet food, not so much the motivation to stop eating the other stuff? It's totally easy for me to stop eating chocolate, the problem comes that I just replace it with nothing at all. Do you just sit down and plow your way through it like it's medicine? And if so how do you not resent it for how much it costs you in time and effort for no reward? Or do you actually like other food?
Maybe you have some form of motivation - I want to be thin, I want to be slim for my wedding, I want to have a baby, I want to be healthy. I just want to be "normal". I want to be able to answer the question I often ask people of "how on earth do you decide what to eat" with the same as them - "I don't know, you just pick something". I just want to be one of the people who doesn't even have to think about how they think about food because they just get something and eat it.
Last edited by RoseRodent; 10-11-2010 at 02:55 PM.
The more I reflect on it the more I start to realise what the actual question is, bear with me while I get there!
You mentioned it being about learning to like healthier food - so what is involved in that process? If I ask someone how to I learn Chinese then they have an idea, a structure, if I follow the structure and stick with the programme I will learn to speak Chinese. But in sticking to a diet plan I have never learned to like the food, I've just done it and found it a punishment throughout. Unless I eat a really low calorie diet and then I can get off on the idea of eating so little.
You can do other things to try to equal that "hit" of eating nice food, but nothing can make you like them. Like if I asked you to come potholing. You hate it but you'll come to make me happy. You resent it every step of the way, but you do it to make me happy. Where along that line can you actually start to stop hating potholing, and how? How do you learn to simply live without the joys? There isn't anything else that equals it, like the coke addict will never find something that equals the high because coke creates something so artificial, a level of pleasure that the human body cannot get from not doing coke. So they have to address living without ever feeling that level of pleasure again, facing a life which is essentially extremely bland and forever more, when you know the other side. (Not that I have ever had coke!!!) My "hit" comes from either eating a whole packet of biscuits or from starving myself, other things aren't as good, and I can learn to do them but I haven't learned to enjoy any of them.
Can you ever really learn to like something or do you learn to live without what you like? And is anyone else in this starting position, where food is the thing that makes them the most happy (physically happy) and being without it is a future of dullness?
You mentioned it being about learning to like healthier food - so what is involved in that process? If I ask someone how to I learn Chinese then they have an idea, a structure, if I follow the structure and stick with the programme I will learn to speak Chinese. But in sticking to a diet plan I have never learned to like the food, I've just done it and found it a punishment throughout. Unless I eat a really low calorie diet and then I can get off on the idea of eating so little.
Maybe there are others that feel differently, but in my experience, you can't learn to like healthy food by a plan or a process. You can, however, learn to be a better and more varied cook.
Take chicken breast for example. Grilled chicken breast is going to have less calories then fried, so you decide to grill it. If you just grill the raw chicken as is, its going to be pretty bland, right? And that's assuming you didn't overcook it such that its all dried out. But if you had rubbed some of your favorite spices into the chicken before grilling it, that bland chicken would turn into something delicious.
Part of the 'learning process' of getting used to a healthy diet is learning how to make healthy meals that you actually enjoy eating. That takes time and experimentation in the kitchen. I know that there are things I've tried that I didn't end up liking and never made again, but I've also discovered lots of other recipes that I love and now eat all the time. Also, there are foods that I had never even eaten before that I discovered that I like and now I eat them on a regular basis.
There are some healthy foods that you are probably never going to like. I still despise green peas and never eat them. But if you play around with how you cook things, you might find that foods you used to force yourself to eat now are the highlight of your meal.
It's quite simple, really. You have to follow the rule of calories consumed is less than calories burned. Nobody is immune from that simple fact, not even me, not even you.
Some of us decide to eat lasagne on Thrusday and then on Monday we find the recipe for it. On Tuesday we get the groceries to make it. On Wednesday we get out the ground turkey from the deep freeze so it will be thawed in time to cook on Thursday. On Thursday, we cook it. Then we eat it. That's how we know we are having lasagne on Thursday. It's called planning. And beyond planning, we act upon what we planned. If we want to eat healthy food, then we plan fruits and veg and lean protein and whatever else is part of our own healthy diet plan. And we prepare it. And we eat it.
If we think we might eat lasagne on Thursday, but we go to the store and buy candy and crisps and biscuits...and Thursday comes and we get a milkshake, then guess what we will likely be hungry for on Thursday? And you know what we are gonna eat!
If you are looking for a magical fix, there is not one. I am assuming that you are an adult. If so, then you are responsible for your own choices and for doing the things that carry you forward to your goal. If you truly don't know how to eat proper food, then go see a nutritionist. And do what he/she tells you to do. Don't pretend to be dense when they tell you to eat carrot sticks instead of crisps. It is not rocket science.
If you don't like the food, too bad. Chances are there is some kind of healthy food that you can tolerate eating. There is lots of nutritious food out there and there are many options. Candy bars are not one of them, especially if you are eating dozens of them and not eating any veg. DUH! I've never yet heard of anyone who can have it both ways, but lots of us learn to enjoy healthy food and quit eating stuff that isn't good for us, or at least limit it.
And everyoe can do some kind of exercise beyond what they are already doing. Even swimming. Even walking. Even up or down the stairs one extra time a day. Where there's a will, there's a way.
Please forgive me if I sound harsh. It is not easy to have a healthy relationship with food, and some of us have circumstances which make it more difficult than others. If you want help to figure out what kind of food is nutritious because you aren't sure, or if you need to know how to cook things you aren't familiar with, if you aren't sure what kinds of activities you can do with your own set of physical limitations, then I know I and others here will welcome you with open arms and hearts. We will actually welcome you even if you don. If you are looking for folks to help justify poor eating and lack of exercise, then you don't really need any of us...
I am here to help you if there is any way I can encourage and help to teach you how to plan/shop/prepare food or how to get a little more active.
I dunno. I don't eat anything I don't enjoy. I'm lucky that I happen to enjoy nearly all foods (raw tomatoes being a big exception). I like some things more than others but Pretty much if it is edible I'll probably be pretty happy to eat it. So for me this whole weight loss journey has been about eating a whole lot less of certain things (crisps and candy being high on the list) and then putting some forethought into the rest of what I stuff in to my mouth.
I don't eat anything I'm not hungry for, which means some days I am under my 1500 goal. I don't plan for lasagna four days out because I don't know what I will want tomorrow let alone the end of the week. But I keep my fridge and cupboard stocked with a supply of things I do like and can easily turn in to "dinner". And "dinner" for me may be a turkey sandwich or a can of soup. I think most people plan dinner by what they feel like today and what they have before them as options.
Other than fresh fruit and veggies everything else can be stored in a cupboard or a freezer - if you don't feel like eating this week it'll still be good next week. Don't buy something because you think you should or it's on some plan your doctor handed out. If you don't like it you'll never (willingly) eat it.
But here's the part I don't get Rose - you say you don't care about being thinner and that you won't ever be healthy (although you can still make healthy choices - a 300 pound body is harder on your joints and organs than a 200 pound one) - so really, why not just eat what you enjoy.
Why not just eat what I enjoy? Because I don't enjoy anything at all on an ongoing basis. This is the problem area, I don't have "food I like" and "food I don't like" I only have food which is 100% perfect on a given day at a given time or food which is not worth eating. Right now at this particular moment in time I like apples. At 4pm I probably won't. If I try to eat apples this afternoon they will make me sick because the anorexic part of my brain kicks in and say "you don't like this, why are you eating it? It's calories and you don't even want them" and I can't force it in even if I am really hungry. That's the missing link, how do you start wanting what is in front of you even if it's not what you want? Or have you always been able to eat something even if it's not what you want?
And this is the planning thing, it's not that I don't know what to buy in order to plan, I am not a complete thicko from planet Mars, but I do have a psychologically messed up relationship with food, I don't know how people decide what they are going to PLAN, not the bit where you have a plan and go on to decide what you are going to BUY. Do you go through a recipe book? Do you pick something you think you'd like? Do you get a diet plan and just cook everything in order, day 1 is chicken salad, let's have chicken salad? Do you buy what is on special? Some people go to the shops with a list, how do you decide what to put on it? I don't mean "if I want to cook lasagne how do I pick the ingredients" I mean how on earth do I know I am going to eat lasagne? I seriously and genuinely do not know how normal people choose what they are going to eat. I know how to go out and buy "healthy" food and I know how to cook it, and I also know how to take 2 spoonfuls then throw it in the bin and go to bed hungry, as that is the universal next step, I won't want it.
Literally how do you choose what you shop for and cook? That bit, not the next bit about how to plan for the ingredients, but how do you pick something? You probably don't know because you have not had to think about it, you just do, I want that! If you think really, really hard about where you food ideas come from, where do they come from? Since I put my weight back on I was discharged from the anorexia clinic as cured, but that's 20 years that I have gone days without eating then eaten loads then eaten nothing then eaten loads. I eat when I am hungry but also when I am hungry for a specific item. If I am starving and the options in front of me are unappealing I will still have nothing. I've lost weight before, I find it really easy to lose weight but that's not essentially what I want to do I want to just have a normal life that doesn't drive me round the twist, that doesn't involve 3 hours trying to work out what I might like to eat and cooking 3 meals and putting all of them back in the fridge for some other time when I will theoretically eat them (I don't) and being in tears because I am hungry. It's entirely possible to lose weight eating chocolate, you just have to choose 1,000 or whatever calories of chocolate, I've done that in the past and yes you do lose weight, but that's not what I want, I just want to understand how people who are not screwed up select and plan meals, where does the information come from and what do you do if it comes time to eat it and you don't want it? If the answer is "eat it anyway" then how do you do get past the appetite barrier that closes up your throat and makes you want to barf, or does that physically not happen to you? Is it that you guys have found a way to make that mental adjustment or is it that you have never been required to do that because you have never felt that way about a plate of food?
Maybe if you have never had a psychological disorder it's impossible to get it, I don't know. If you've never sat next to a meal crying because someone is going to make you eat it maybe you can't relate to any of this???? It's not about the physical doing of anything, it's about the psychological effects of it. I can eat a chicken salad but I WILL cry about it, and I don't want that as I am no further forward, I am just eating "healthy" food and crying about it instead of eating biscuits and crying about it! I guess it relates to being sat down and presented with food you didn't pick and having a nurse sit over you while you eat all of it, no matter how ill it makes you feel, no matter how disgusted it makes you feel, no matter if it takes you 3 hours to eat it, no matter if it's food you wouldn't have eaten anyway, no matter if you'd rather have what the girl in the next bed is having, and knowing the next meal is going to turn up as soon as you have finished it anyway.
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And everyoe can do some kind of exercise beyond what they are already doing. Even swimming. Even walking. Even up or down the stairs one extra time a day. Where there's a will, there's a way.
I'll go with you that 99.9% of people can do additional exercise, but there are people out there who are asked not to. Heart transplant patients (pre-op), lung transplant patients (pre-op), people with severe emphysema, conditions most people have never heard of, where it is not the choice of activity which matters but the sheer act of physical exertion that is banned. You either need to take my word that I can't exercise and therefore have to do the whole thing without (you get used to the depressing 2lb a month rate of weight loss) or you can belive it's nonsense and you are right and the hundreds of doctors I see are all wrong and I am having extreme medical treatment and radical surgery for nothing. I'll take a few extra trips per day up and down on my stairlift and some more walks in my electric wheelchair if you like, but I'm not sure it's going to get me any exercise. In this case where there's a will there's a hospital bed in ICU waiting and a stern lecture from a doctor to cut it out. I have the biggest will in the world to exercise, probably because I am not allowed to. I bet you could convince the most slothful of folks to get out and about if you banned them from getting out of bed for months, they'd be desperate to get out and about. I've had to give up all my beloved sports, and that kills me. Like it's not difficult enough to be banned from doing these things without people saying such things.
It may be that "normal" people cannot answer this question, maybe for you it's like the question "how do you remember to breathe" because you just do, you don't have to put in effort or think about what you have to do, you just sit back and it happens so you don't know how you do it, but if anyone has any idea how they pick food, the very first stage in picking it as in picking a week's diet out of thin air, and how they eat it when the time comes that would be sooooooooooo helpful.
Hi Rose, it does indeed sound like you have some big obstacles to overcome, but it is something that you can overcome. I can't say that you are going to find that help here, because like you mentioned - if we don't have the disorder or proper training on how to treat the disorder, it's hard to give good advice- but I can say that you'll get plenty of encouraging words, support, and/or a strong shoulder to lean on.
As for picking out foods - have you looked in to eDiets or a similar online plan? They'll give you menus and shopping lists. You can plan out a weeks worth of meals, and also print out a shopping list to take to the store. Maybe something like that would help?
Good morning, Rose. I read your latest post, and then googled exercise in a wheelchair and here are 3 links. There are more. I'm sure you will have to pick and choose which ones you are interested in doing or able to do based upon your own particular set of circumstances. If you need additional ideas, such as chemo patient exercises or exercising with bone spurs, I'm guessing someone somewhere has ideas and that someone somewhere has put them on the internet to share. Once again, where there's a will, there's a way. It may not be conventional, but there is ALWAYS something you can do.
As far as food planning, I can tell you the process I use, but I'm honestly not sure it will help you. I've never been anorexic and I've never purged. I'm not sure I'm normal, either ;-)
I usually sit down on the weekend, but it doesn't matter which day. If i need ideas, I look through the grcoery store sale ad to see what's on sale that i could build a meal around. I don't even consider food I hate. I don't consider any of the high calorie/low nutrition foods either because they don't get me to my end goal. So I am left with food that I would consider using which is also on sale. Then I look for recipes I already have in cookbooks or printed papers, or google a particular food item, say "pumpkin recipes" and see what turns up. Last week, I found a recipe online for pumpkin chili which I am making tomorrow night. By tomorrow, I will have made this recipe so magical in my mind that I will be delighted to eat it. I may not be so thrilled once I taste it, but I will def. be happy to give it a try. If I like it, I will print it on paper and it goes into my collection of recipes to make again...the next time I want to use pumpkin. If not, we cross it off the list. It says how many servings it makes, so I make it serve that many times. When it is dinner time, I portion it out and then either put the extra containers into the freezer or fridge. Some days there are so many little plastic containers of food in my fridge, it looks like a small child lives here!
Those things having been said, there is an inherent assumption that you will find something to eat that is palatable to you. And that if you thought it was okay once, you could tolerate it again well enough to make the choice to eat the recipe item instead of crisps or candy bars. Sometimes, you have to choose between healthy food you have planned and whatever sounds nice at the moment simply becuase it is the responsible thing to do to keep your body healthy. I love Chinese food and alsmot went to the buffet on Sunday...but I stopped and thought about it and CHOSE to have a healthy Subway instead. Maybe you have to do it many, many times, making that choice and making it a conscious decision until it becomes a habit and it gets easier. I'm not sure what else to say. It sounds like the medical system has really let you down, but I would encourage you to find a therapist who can help guide you the direction you want/need to go. And to have that person work with you and a nutritionist if necessary.
I don't eat food I hate...nobody should have to when there are a ton of alternatives. Someone with an eating disorder may find it hard to find a choice they like, but I'm willing to bet YOU can do it if you keep trying and don't give up getting help until you find someone who does more than give you a list.
It's useful information to understand that other people are not having this problem! It's kind of hard to know what is happening with other people, I figured that everyone who is trying to change their diet, whether to gain or lose weight, ended up trying to choke down a salad before they puked. It seems not. I feel that if you dont' tackle the underlying issues you get nowhere. If you are a boredom eater you need to fill the time, a comfort eater you need alternative comfort, if you are a screwed-up eater you need to get rid of the screwed up! I generally only get to what I supposed I'd call the "methadone stage" - grapes and cups of coffee and chewing gum are used to substitute for food, and that loses weight. But if you don't get to the bit where you stop having that obsession with what goes in your mouth so that you have to keep on and on filling your face with chewing gum and cups of coffee to fill the desire for things that are not cups of coffee then you have only moved part the way to where you need to go. I want to get to that other side where I don't obsess about what I am eating, whether it's eating too much or eating too little, not to be having gum instead of food but to be not thinking about having food at all! I find that too many 'diet plans' only take you to stage one - substitute grapes for biscuits. Well yes, for normal amounts of snacks, but if you just change over to eating 6 pounds of grapes then you aren't moving forward!
I think I do have to nail myself to a specific diet plan initially that tells me what I have to eat and when I have to eat it, but the bigger obstacle is going to be actually eating it rather than cooking it then leaving in the fridge till it goes green then chucking it out. The flipside is a fear to get onto a rigid plan in case the rest of my life turns into an obsession with only being able to eat what eDiets tells me I have to eat, never actually knowing how to be spontaneous, to pick from a menu initially and then from the wider menu of everything in the world. That was a big feature of the anorexia, the listed "safe foods" that had to be specific brands. I recall with horror making my mum drive for hours to a place that sold the only thing I'd eat, and being so hungry while she was gone that I ate something else and wouldn't actually have it when she got back.
It's hard not to just replace one food obsession with a different one, which is basically what happened after the anorexia, I was dabbling in bulimia but couldn't make myself throw up, and eventually just got into the binge side only.
Unfortunately funding for eating disorders is so dreadfully stretched that even people who are at imminent risk cannot get places, so if you are over 7 stone and want eating disorder help it's not going to happen.
Just want to eat normally!
Dhani 
If the answer is "eat it anyway" then how do you do get past the appetite barrier that closes up your throat and makes you want to barf, or does that physically not happen to you? Is it that you guys have found a way to make that mental adjustment or is it that you have never been required to do that because you have never felt that way about a plate of food? 
In this case where there's a will there's a hospital bed in ICU waiting and a stern lecture from a doctor to cut it out. I have the biggest will in the world to exercise, probably because I am not allowed to. I bet you could convince the most slothful of folks to get out and about if you banned them from getting out of bed for months, they'd be desperate to get out and about. I've had to give up all my beloved sports, and that kills me. Like it's not difficult enough to be banned from doing these things without people saying such things. 
