Carol,
I understand about the intensity of emotion when everyone comes for a short time. It is emotionally draining, and it makes it even harder when they leave. We moved to TX from Los Angeles because we couldn't take the distance any more. Now my parents live 30 minutes away. We drive out every Sunday to go to church and spend time with them. My husband's parents live 4 hours away. The drive doesn't feel like anything at all.

Food was good for me today. I was a little stressed out but didn't go get any chocolate even though I went grocery shopping with that intention. I made it to the gym for some weight lifting. I ran 6 mi yesterday, so I didn't do cardio today. I cooked hamburgers today. My sister told me about mixing steak sauce and some cajun seasoning with the hamburger before cooking them. Yum, it made them pretty tasty. I have gotten into eating the Kashi blueberry waffles for breakfast. I really like warm food, and it is easy to pop a couple in the toaster and have a meal ready quickly. They have a good amount of fiber in them. I like to look for foods with higher fiber. I have tried the sugar free syrup, but I have to use the light instead. The sugar free doesn't taste good to me at all.

My 4 yr old had a salad with light ranch dressing for breakfast! Of course my husband stopped and got him doughnut holes on the way to the gym, so there went thoughts of a healthy breakfast! He wanted to play school, so I had to pack him a lunch in his lunchbox. Then I had to go to his room and be his teacher. He is so ready to go back! My first in-service day is next Friday.

Hi Kay,
One of my little boys liked salad really well, too. And my Dh is a donut lover, too, although I've noticed lately that he isn't eating as many as he used to. Maybe he's thinking about his health a little. My eating has not been good lately........too busy to reflect on it but now I will be reflecting!!!! The tomatoes are finally ready and we love them. Last night I ate an ice cream cone.......only one dip......and I burped it much of the night. Live and learn. Kay, It's so wonderful that you moved near your parents. Having 10 kids, it will be hard to get them all here but only 2 live really far away. At least they are not overseas.......yet. One boy is an engineer working for the Army Corps of engineers and he gets moved around some.

Carol,
Everytime I think about you having ten kids I wonder how you can do it. Two just wear me out!
I hit a milestone yesterday. I have lost 6 pounds this summer! Now, that might not seem a lot to many people, but it has been slow, I've eaten what I wanted, stopped when full, only eaten when hungry--- the whole IE thing so I don't feel paranoid about gaining it back. I actually feel confident each day about going forward. My sister, husband, and son have noticed that I've lost weight. My sister said it looks like I'm slimming down everywhere. Usually on quick diets I would just lose in my stomach right away. IE works, it just took me a year to get the hang of it. And of course, I am challenged quite often by boredom eating and eating because "it looks good" (like the cookie place at the mall), but the food is losing its power!

Congratulations Kay! I've lost about 12 this year and kept it off all while taking predinsone. But it is discouraging at times because I could stand to lose another 30. I recently read a book on fasting and I used to do alot of that. But I know it didn't lead to weight loss. It's funny how different foods affect different people. The cookies wouldn't bother me but they might have a few years ago. If you eat enough of something on a regular basis it gets old. We froze 100 qt of corn last night. What a mess! Our son and DIL helped and also the 2 kids still at home. One boy is just home for the summer. The last girl will be done this next year. I just don't think about it. ha!

Carol - 100 qts of corn!!!???? I can't imagine!

On a different topic, and I apologize if this had been addressed before; I have not seen it.
My preference is for quality rather than quantity in food. Where I see this tying into IE is in the concept of "eating until you are satisfied."
I do not eat a very large volume of food. I have heard people say that if they go without food for awhile (maybe several hours?) that they then are inclined to overeat. I don't find this is true for me. I think that the less I eat, the less I want to eat later. I used to, years and years ago hear the expression "your stomach shrinks" when you don't eat much. I have not heard that for awhile, but something definitely happens, and when I eat little and infrequently, I find it then takes very little to make me feel "satisfied." One caveat is that I do tend to overindulge with wine. (NOT recommended!!!!) But I raise this to question whether or not it may be self-sabotage to see how much volume one can eat with little calories, because the larger volume makes a person continue to require more volume before satisfaction.

Personally, Jo, I'd just as soon get by with a little, too. But I used to do a lot of fasting and eating as little as possible and that is when my weight problem seemed to escalate. So I just don't know. I think you might be right, though, about the more you eat the more you want to eat. I guess moderation is the answer. I do feel lots better if I stop before I'm completely satisfied. The corn from last year is all used up so the kids managed to use it and we get to enjoy it, too.

This may be a rerun because I have posted things by Stephen Hawks before but I thought it was interesting.

Thanksgiving Gluttony Misaligned With 'Intuitive Eating' Approach Examined In New Study
Science Daily — Counting calories isn’t the best way to lose weight, according to a new Brigham Young University study that suggests that an approach toward food called “intuitive eating” is better at producing lower cholesterol levels, body mass index scores and cardiovascular disease risk.

“The basic premise of intuitive eating is, rather than manipulate what we eat in terms of prescribed diets -- how many calories a food has, how many grams of fat, specific food combinations or anything like that -- we should take internal cues, try to recognize what our body wants and then regulate how much we eat based on hunger and satiety,” said lead researcher Steven Hawks, a BYU professor of health science, who adopted an intuitive eating lifestyle several years ago and lost 50 pounds as a result.

In a small-scale study to be published in the Nov. 18 issue of the “American Journal of Health Education,” Hawks and his team of researchers -- Hala Madanat, Jaylyn Hawks and Ashley Harris -- identified a handful of college students who are naturally intuitive eaters and compared them with other students who aren’t. Participants were then tested to determine how healthy they were.

As measured by the Intuitive Eating Scale, developed by Hawks and others to measure the degree to which a per --on is an intuitive eater, researchers found that intuitive eating was significantly correlated with lower body mass index, lower triglyceride levels, higher levels of high density lipoproteins and decreased risk of cardiovascular disease. Approximately one-third of the variance in body mass index was accounted for by intuitive eating scores, while 17 to 19 percent of the variance in blood lipid profiles and cardiovascular risk was accounted for by intuitive eating.

“The findings provide support for intuitive eating as a positive approach to healthy weight management,” said Hawks, who plans to do a large-scale study of intuitive eating across several cultures.

“In less developed countries in Asia, people are primarily intuitive eaters,” said Hawks. “They haven’t been conditioned to artificially structure their relationship with food like we have in the United States. They’ve been conditioned to believe that the purpose of food is to enjoy, to nurture. You eat when you’re hungry, you stop when you’re not hungry any more. They have a much healthier relationship with food, far fewer eating disorders, and interestingly, far less obesity.”

Hawks says that “normal” dieting in the United States doesn’t result in long-term weight loss and contributes to food anxiety and unhealthy eating practices, and can even lead to eating disorders.

“What makes intuitive eating different from a diet is that all diets work against human biology, whereas intuitive eating teaches people to work with their own biology, to work with their bodies, to understand their bodies,” said Hawks. “Rather than a prescriptive diet, it’s really about increasing awareness and understanding of your body. It’s a nurturing approach to nutrition, health and fitness as opposed to a regulated, coercive, restrictive approach. That’s why diets fail, and that’s why intuitive eating has a better chance of being successful in the long term.”

To be an intuitive eater, a person has to adopt two attitudes and two behaviors.

The first attitude is body acceptance.

“It’s an extremely difficult attitude adjustment for many people to make, but they have to come to a conscious decision that personal worth is not a function of body size,” said Hawks. “Rather than having an adversarial relationship with my body, where I have to control it, and force it to submit to my will so that I can make it thin, I’m going to value my body because it allows me to accomplish some higher good with my life.”

The second attitude, that dieting is harmful, is related to the first.

“Dieting does not lead to the results that people think it will lead to, and so I try to help people foster an anti-dieting attitude,” said Hawks. “You have to say to yourself, ‘I will not base my food intake on diet plans, food-based rules, good and bad foods, all of that kind of thing.’ For people who are deep into dietary restraint and dietary rules, again, that’s a very difficult attitude adjustment to make, to give up all those rules.”

Behaviorally, the next step is learning how to not eat for emotional, environmental or social reasons.

“Socially we eat all the time in our culture, we go out to eat ice cream if we break up with our boyfriend, we eat to celebrate, we eat when we’re lonely, we eat when we’re sad, we eat when we’re stressed out,” said Hawks. “Being able to recognize all the emotional, environmental and cultural relationships we have with food and finding better ways to manage our emotions is part of the process.”

The final step is learning how to interpret body signals, cravings and hunger, and responding in a healthy, positive, nurturing way.

Learning the body’s signals can be difficult at first, but Hawks suggests thinking about hunger and satiety on a 10-point scale, where “10” is eating until one is sick and “1” is starving. Intuitive eaters keep themselves at or around a “5.” If they feel they are getting hungry, they eat until they are back at a “5” or “6.” They stop eating when they are satisfied, even if that means leaving food on the plate.

One part of intuitive eating that may be counterintuitive to people conditioned to restrictive dieting is the concept that with intuitive eating there is a place for every food. In other words, there’s no food that’s ever taboo, there’s no food you can’t ever have.

“Part of adopting an anti-dieting attitude is the recognition that you have unconditional permission to eat any kind of food that you want,” said Hawks. “And that’s scary for people who say, ‘If I abandon my diet rules, then I’ll fill a pillowcase full of M&M’s, dive into it and never come up again. That’s what I crave, I know that’s what I crave, that’s all I will always crave.’ But that’s not the reality. The reality is that our bodies crave good nutrition.”

Dieting creates psychological and physiological urges to binge on taboo foods, and, although in the short term people may have binges when they first start eating intuitively, they eventually learn to trust themselves. One technique Hawks suggests is having an abundance of previously taboo foods on hand. Once the foods are no longer forbidden, a person quickly loses interest in them.

“If people are committed to recognizing what their bodies really want, the vast majority of people will say that they very quickly overcame cravings,” said Hawks, opening a drawer at his office desk filled with untouched junk food. “It certainly has worked for me.”


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Brigham Young University.

Hi everyone. This is a quick drive thru while my nephew is visiting with his laptop. Yes, my computer died, and I'm feeling really deprived. I've been doing pretty good with my eating, tho still having trouble with the stopping when full occasionally. Hope everyone is well, and I don't know when I'll be back.

Spiny,
I have changed to quality over quantity. I only eat what I really want. I have also found that I am eating less. I eat a normal portion and then walk away from the table or drink extra water. I feel like it takes my body longer to tell me I am full, so even though I might not feel full at the moment, if I wait 10 minutes I will feel satisfied and no longer hungry. I feel like my stomach has shrunk. Also, just a few bites of what I am craving now satisifies the need and I don't have to overindulge.

Another interesting article.




3 Steps for Breaking Out of Diet Prison

Gillian Hood-Gabrielson , Healthier Outcomes
Published 06/24/2007 - 10:55 p.m. GMT


Step 1: Get educated on the truth about diets

One way to get out of diet prison is to understand the damage diets really do. Here are a few examples that may be enough for you to break your shackles, and run as far away from diets as you can:

For every diet there will be a “diet deprivation backlash”. The more you deprive yourself, the more powerful the binge, ensuring more weight gain. Dieting teaches your body how to become more efficient at storing fat.When when you diet, the enzymes that stimulate fat storage increase, and the enzymes that stimulate fat release, decrease. Chronic dieters find fat starting to store more in the abdominal area, regardless of where they may have stored fat before. This increase in abdominal fat increases your risk for heart disease. With every diet, metabolism slows and the rate of weight loss slows down. Dieting also increases binging and cravings, increasing fat storage.

Step 2: Undo the diet mentality

If you are a chronic dieter, you probably are a victim of the diet mentality. So it can be hard, even scary to consider giving up dieting.

The longer you hold on to the diet mentality, the longer your term in diet prison. The diet mentality is the way a chronic dieter deals with eating, exercising, and handling emotions. Behaviors include counting calories, exercising as punishment for cheating on your diet, and seeing food in terms of “good” and “bad”. Holding on to the diet mentality leads to more deprivation, which leads to overeating, which then leads to more guilt, shame and anger, keeping the vicious cycle going.

To undo the diet mentality, you first must end the labeling of “good” and “bad” foods. Next, realize that failing at a diet is not about lacking willpower, diets are set up that they fail people. Feeling like a failure will produce feelings of guilt and shame, and the deprivation backlash that follows, continues the cycle of dieting, bingeing, gaining weight and lengthens your term in diet prison.

Here is the easiest way to eat that will promote weight loss. Eat when you are hungry, and stop when you are full. It really is as simple as that. If you do this consistently, you will return to what your natural body weight is supposed to be. But we have been so busy following diet plans that we no longer feel our hunger and fullness cues. Relearning and responding to these cues is a process that takes time and is an important part of ending the destructive dieting cycle. However, once you learn it you can return to normal eating and lose and keep off the weight you have been struggling with for so long.

Step 3: Learn to eat intuitively

The final step in breaking free from diet prison is to learn to eat intuitively. The ironic thing is all of us knew how to do this from birth.

What infants know instinctively how to do and what we used to know was how to listen to our bodies’ natural hunger and fullness cues. Typically around age 3 our parents start to influence when we eat and we learn to no longer trust our own hunger signals. We hear messages like, “You can’t be hungry, it’s not dinner time”, or, “Eat everything on your plate and you can have dessert”.

You may know people who are at their natural body weight and have been all their lives. Instead of being envious of these people, you can take some time to learn from them just by observation. These people eat whatever they want, guilt free. They also eat when they are hungry, and stop when they are full, often leaving food on their plate, or saving it for later. What is their secret? They have maintained those instinctive behaviors they had as infants, despite outside influences.

Intuitive eating not only addresses the physical disconnection with the body, it also helps overcome emotional overeating, and other disordered eating patterns without dieting, restriction or deprivation.

The process is complex and different for everyone, but here are a few hints to get started:

Make the decision to give up dieting, forever. Give yourself permission to eat any and all foods that you like, guilt free. Tune into your physical hunger and fullness and while eating, check in often to see if you are getting full. When you are satisfied, stop eating. To keep your blood sugar stable, every time you eat, have at least a small amount of protein with carbohydrates. If you find yourself wanting to eat and you are not physically hungry, stop and ask yourself what emotion you are feeling. Determine what you actually need at that moment, instead of food. It could be a nap, a walk, to talk to someone, etc. I can tell you from personal experience, and that of my clients, that the journey back to intuitive eating can be challenging at times, but it is well worth it to leave behind the diets, guilt, frustration and shame – not to mention the weight!

I had an urge last night to go on the 3 day diet. It seemed simple enough and had foods I liked. But it didn't have tomatoes. We know now have the most delicious fresh tomatoes and will only have them for about a month more depending on the first freeze. I eat one every day. Just about my favorite food. So much for the 3 day diet. ha!

Carol -
Now what kind of diet prohibits tomatoes of all things. That's just silly.
I'm going on the pickles and radishes-cut-into-little-flowers-avoidance diet today.
HAHAHAHAHAH:dizzy:

Well, This was a special 3 day diet and only certain foods were allowed. You can google those words if you want to see it. But tomatoes wasn't one of the foods. It was pretty limited. Have you ever heard of the James Zeta diet? You are supposed to lose 18lb in 4 days but the funny thing is whenever you read about it on forums, noone will tell what it is. They say it isn't fair to Zeta. You know how it goes.....you have this event coming up and you just have to lose to look good for the pictures. How many times have I done that in my life!!! Doesn't work in the end.

I just looked up the 3-day diet. It is the classic example of a diet that I couldn't do, because it is so stereotypical American - coffee, grapefruit, toast for breakfast - I would just stop right there and spit it all out.
jo

I don't know if anyone saw the Gays Mills, Wi. flood on the news but my husband's vet clinic is still surrounded by water and he has to have a police escort to get to the clinic. They have to walk through flood water to get there. Once they took a boat. His office is built up so it didn't get in the door but got about 3 in. away from it. This is the worst flood they have had. They are not doing much business right now. It's is still raining some so that doesn't help. He goes in for an hr each day to get help people with their animals. We've been without power off and on, also. We actually live on a farm about 12 mi. from there and we are on hill so no problem at the house, thank the Lord. I had a bad eating day yesterday. Couldn't seem to get full. Today is better so far.