Okay, this is kind of a funny question. I'm 3.8 pounds from my goal weight, and I'll at least be maintaining while I figure out if I want to keep going or stay where I am.

I found an old thread on 3FC where people said maintenance was just like dieting for them, just with more calories. I LOVE that! I don't do well without a plan, and not knowing what maintenance would entail was really bothering me.

My question is concerned with the foods you may have limited or just plain not eaten while losing. For me, I still allow myself to eat in restaurants occasionally (usually once a week and I stick to one serving, no matter how many servings are on my plate). I just don't eat crappy pub food. If we want to go out, we go somewhere like PF Changs where I can actually eat a balanced meal without ruining my calories for the day. I still eat chocolate because I made this change for life and know I would not want a life without chocolate.

But I cut out the really bad-for-me foods (downtown nachos from my favorite restaurant, chips, etc.). Well, on Friday, I decided to indulge in ordering lunch with my coworkers. I know that it can be done while calorie-counting, and with my exercise, I usually still lose up to 2 pounds (or more - 2.6 this week) while eating out occasionally. So I ordered a plain hamburger from Ruby Tuesday, no sides. Just the hamburger. 981 calories and 900-something grams of sodium!

About have an hour after finishing said burger, I felt really ill. My back started sweating. I felt dizzy and lightheaded and got a migraine. Does anyone else think it was the burger? One of my friends blamed it on all the sodium in the burger.

Same thing happened when I had a mini pizza from the grocery store a couple of weeks ago. I felt like crap for the rest of the day (even though it fit in my calories).

So, now I'm worried. Because even though I've restricted myself from enjoying the really bad-for-me foods while losing weight, I hoped to enjoy them every once in a while during maintenance (especially my beloved downtown nachos). Now I'm worried that I will be physically unable to do so. Maybe my body is so used to healthy eating now that it rejects the awful stuff? No doubt, I'd rather be fit and healthy than go back to eating the disgusting foods I used to eat every day, but I kind of wanted the best of both worlds - downtown nachos a handful of times a year and my new body. Is this totally unattainable?

You know, as humans we are tempted to turn correlation into causation, which isn't always the case. Maybe it WAS the burger, or maybe you were just thinking about the stats of the burger and your mind was playing tricks on you. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the burger at all and you just had a little weird spell. Or maybe it was a little too undercooked and you were a little sick from that.

There could be a lot of things that caused that. 900 mg of sodium is a lot for one meal, but it's not more than you usually eat in a day, more than likely. The mind has so much control over the body. A lot of it is probably that you've been denying yourself stuff with those stats for so long you just couldn't stop thinking about it, even subconsciously, maybe. I'd give the downtown nachos a try- but maybe only half an order the first time!

Oh...I sure enjoy the junk when I'm eating, but like you, I suffer later. You would think after 2+ years of maintaince I would learn my lesson with "unhealthy" food, but for some reason I still indulge about once or twice a month, and every time I feel physically ill for a day or 2 after.

For example, every single time I over indulge in refined carbs, (sugar and/or white flour stuff) I burn up, (and I'm almost always cold usually). I get terrible night sweats, heart palpitations, and severe anexiety attacks. I also get headaches and gerd/heart burn symptoms. It is SO totally not worth it, but for some idiotic reason, I continue to test the waters. The nice thing though...it goes away after a day or 2, when back 190 pounds ago, it was an all day, everyday way of life.

I'd suspect that it was the bun, not the meat. If you look up Ruby's classic burger in their nutrition info, you find that the classic burger has 65 grams of carbohydrates. That is a lot for one meal.

My tastes have changed. I almost never order burgers out anymore. I can do them better and more to my liking at home. I do eat out at restaurants fairly regularly, but I mostly stay within my plan.

Right now I'm losing rather than maintaining, but if I go to Ruby Tuesday, I usually get the salmon, or shrimp, or tilapia, or a small steak, with two vegetables sides (no potatoes or pasta). Delicious, filling, and allowed on my plan.

The point is, my tastes have changed, and things I used to think were wonderful just... aren't anymore.

Good luck!
Jay

It's these little splurges on foods we did not eat but decided to add back in maintenance that make us fall off the wagon all together. You cannot go back and eat the foods you gave up when you changed your lifestyle to lose weight. You eat the same as you did losing but a little more.

For the last 26 months I somehow, some way have found the strength to climb back on the wagon after a crap bender...but more and more I am coming (okay, HAVE come) to the conclusion that life just might be worth living without it. That wagon gets bigger and I get weaker every time I have to climb back on.

I have read it here at 3FC a hundred times, I hear it from people in real life all of the time...that a life without sugar/crap/junk is not worth living, and moderation is the key...blah, blah blah. I keep thinking that there MUST be something terribly wrong with me because I just can't seem to do it in moderation... I'm a freak, or weak, or did it all wrong because I CAN"T do the, (sugar/refine carb) moderation thing. I denied myself while losing, I can't sustain a diet free of garbage...But you know what? BS!!!. I'm not a loser because I can't do moderation. I'm a loser when I keep thinking I should be able to.

Sorry for the rant, but Right at this very moment I want something sweet and crappy for me, and I KNOW if I eat it, I won't stop until I feel like complete crap.

I think it's possible, but I also believe that indulging in high-glyceminc-carb, high-salt, high-fat processed foods is such a slippery slope it may not be worth it.

In college and graduate school pychology classes, we learned that some alcoholic treatment in both the past and present has focused on returning the alcoholic to social drinking. The success rates are significantly lower than the abstinence method, but aren't zero. Some problem drinkers can return to moderate use of alcohol - but most cannot.

I suspect the same is true of highly processed foods. The more a person includes in their diet, the harder it is to control the addictive nature of the foods (and the more physical harm it does the body).

You can try, but don't beat yourself up if you can't, or think that life will be empty without them. There's tons of wonderfully delicious food that is less "addictive" and less physically toxic.




I don't thin the body suddenly "rejects awful stuff" I think it always DID reject the awful stuff, we're just often too chronically sick to notice it. I know in my case, I was sick all the time, so I didn't realize just how sick I was, until I started feeling better.

I think that many of the illnesses of our modern world (that are even running rampant through even thin and healthy-looking people) are caused, in part by the foods that have become so common.

There are a lot of very sick people walking around, unaware that they're sick, because they look ok, and they've been sick so long, they've forgotten (or never knew) what feeling well feels like.

It's not just obese folk getting type II diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. It's extraordinarily common even in thin folks, and it's appearing at younger and younger ages.

I don't think it's a coincidence that it's correlated with the amount of processed foods, especially high-glycemic, high-carb foods in our diet - and the salt/fat/sugar or starch combination that David Kessler talks about in his book The End of Overeating (in which he points out that all people, and lab animals too have difficulty turning down such foods and avoiding overeating them. And the food/flavor combination is not just addictive, it's health-damaging).


Through low-carb dieting, I learned that I have an allergy or sensitivity to wheat and perhaps gluten. Before low-carb dieting, I thought some of my health problems were just unavoidable (or were due to the obesity).

When I went super-low carb, aside from othr health improvements one dramatic improvement was with my skin (which I'd had severe problems with, since puberty) cleared up. Not only did I stop getting seborrheic dermatitis but also the cyst and boil-like pimples, and the redness, bumps and spiderveins of rosacea were gone too. Even the scaley dry patches and the super oily pathces were gone too. I had beautiful skin.

I suspected the low-carb diet, and I also suspected the weight loss, and I even suspected coincidence (because of my education in research methods).

So I started experimenting by adding different carbs to see which ones aggravated my skin issues. I eventually (after maybe 8 months to a year of experimenting) learned that wheat was the biggest trigger, followed by other grains or large amounts of sugar and followed very distantly by large amounts of any carb (except veggies - I've never had a reaction from even insane amounts of non-starchy veggies).

The more I read on the subject (books that argued that large amounts of digestible, non-fiber carbs such as grains and sugar have only been part of the human diet for less than 2% of our history on the planet). Honey and sweet fruits were available, but so rare as to constitute a very small part of the diet. And fruits (and vegetables for that matter) were much more fibrous and far less sweet than modern versions. For thousands of years, we've bred the fiber out of and sugar into our foods, to the point that 99% of our food stuffs bear little resemblence to their wild counterparts.

I know I'm starting to get all soap box and ranty about this, but I think we've been poisoning ourselves with yummy but nutritionally useless and often physically harmful foods. And we're raised on a diet so high in these foods, and these foods are so potentially addictive, that we wouldn't recognize moderation if it bit us on the butt. I think indulgence can become a slippery slope, because true moderation is very difficult with foods that are so super-addictive (after reading The End of Overeating, I can't help but see these foods as the edible version of crack or heroine or meth-amphetamine).

It's taken me 7 years to lose 94 lbs, because I have been so subbornly determined to eat my problem foods in moderation. I keep having to lower my definition of moderation to make progress, and I think I'm finally acknowledging that for many of these foods, there may be no moderation for me (or moderation may be twice a year).

Every food has to be judged by it's trigger potential, and it's consequences. If a food makes us physically ill, we have to ask ourselves is it really so delicious that I'm willing to make myself sick over it. Sometimes our answer will be yes.

I'm thankful that Ranier cherry season is only about a month long, because I can make myself very sick on Ranier cherries. It hasn't caused a weight issue, mostly because of the associated diarrhea (sorry for the graphic TMI), so I can binge to my heart's content every year and call it moderation, because I'm willing to put up with the unpleasant effects. However, if Ranier cherries became available (and affordable) all year-round, I probalby would have to give them up entirely because I cannot eat them in moderation, and becasue the physical side-effects aren't pleasant.

We have to judge all of our food this way. Are the negative consequences worth it? Especially for the foods for which the negative consequences seem to dissipate the more we eat them (but they don't really, we just get used to feeling crappier and forget what feeling good feels like - that's my theory anyway).

Ouch! I literally cringed when I read that and I think you're right. I lost weight on a low-fat diet, then transitioned to the South Beach Diet, which I continued to "clean up". The low-fat diet was very unhealthy (lots of pasta, risotto, jasmine rice and sugar with very limited fat). I didn't realise until I read the South Beach Diet book just how unhealthy it was, and that eating like that long-term can lead to diabetes. (My mother has Type 2 diabetes and has never been overweight.)

One thing I read on a South Beach board stopped me cold. If you feel an overwhelming need to go and lie down after dinner, it may be because your pancreas is working overtime to pump out insulin after a high GI meal. Mr RedPanda and I used to routinely have a nap (or more accurately, fall into a "carb coma") after a pasta or risotto dinner.



Mr RedPanda recently said that, back when we were both obese and often ate at restaurants, he felt bloated and sick much of the time and didn't really enjoy being a bon vivant. I don't remember feeling like that, but I probably did. But I feel so much better now, and have so much more energy, I never want to abuse my body with poor food choices again.

That too.

Exactly! I can so relate!

One of the reasons I started grazing, rather than eating meals, is that I wanted to shrink my stomach. It worked (almost too well).

Now, I have to be extraordinarily careful not to overeat, or I'll feel deathly ill afterward - and I can't believe I did this to myself on an almost daily basis.

I used to love buffets, and I would always feel ill afterward, but I was used to it, so it didn't seem all that bad. Now that eating to the point of discomfort is exceedingly rare, it feels exponentially worse - even though I don't think it is. I think I'm just not used to feeling that yucky.

I do remember in the past, many times eating to the point that I wished I could throw up. I'd feel so violently ill that I would wish that if I couldn't throw up, that I would at least die and get it over with. And when I say many times, I mean at least once a week (and more during TOM).

"Why oh why, did I eat so much. How could I forget that this would happen," I would think.

I haven't eaten like that in many years, and I've found that it's hard to remember exactly what what that felt like. The pain, the cold and hot sweats, the inability to stay awake, but also the inability to actually fall asleep. I know it was misery, but it was so frequent that the misery wasn't bad enough to discourage me from repeating it.

Every once in a while, I'll eat a little too much and get a glimpse of the old pain. It's never as severe (I haven't had to "lie down" after eating in a very long time), but even now it's uncomfortable enough that I'm amazed that I wasn't deterred by much worse.

I've learned even at a buffet to be extremely careful (the old me would have never believed that I could leave a buffet without filling at least two plates to overflowing - now I pretend that I'm my picky younger sister - I try to never let the different foods on my plate touch).

I can't believe that I ever found eating to the point of that kind of pain fun. And yet I still have a lot to learn, because eating Ranier cherries to the point of diarrhea isn't exactly the smartest decision either, and I suspect that one day that too will seem unbelievable (or so I hope).

Over the years, regardless of whether I was actively trying to lose or maintain, I've changed my tastes. I still like fattening foods, but my diet overall is filled with much healthier foods---salads, fruits, etc. Even when I was fat (okay--I'm still sort of fat), I ate good stuff---I just ate too much of it, and I ate fattening treats that I bought from Whole Foods (organic cherry pie, for example). However, over the years, I've changed my tastes so that it's a rare occasion that I eat a candy bar or just pig out on chips. I'm not saying it hasn't happened over the years, but it's happened MUCH less in the last ten years or so. I think my taste buds have become more refined.

I've also found that over the years, I'm getting better at moderation. I'm okay having a small piece of cake for dessert w/out going overboard----for MOST things. I still have some red light foods that I cannot keep in the house, and I'm still discovering what some of those are (e.g., I just put cashews in this category last week).

All of this is just to say that maybe what you can tolerate right now will not be the same as what you can tolerate long term as you move into maintenance. Maybe one day, you'll go to Ruby Tuesday, order that same burger, but be satisfied to eat just half of it.

Actually, I would place bets that you're the norm for people [including me] who have struggled with maintaining a healthy weight. There has to be a reason that so many people regain, and I'll bet one reason is that it is hard for someone like me (who has struggled most of my adult life with my weight) to eat favorite foods in moderation. I've gotten much better at it over the years, but I think I'll always be somewhat obsessive and hyper-aware of food. I'd say you're ahead of the game in that you've maintained for so long. I tip my hat to you (if I wore a hat ).

Exactly!

This conversation reminds me of an article I read only yesterday. (It's by Anna Stoessinger and was reprinted from the New York Times, in case anyone wants to look it up.)

The author describes her life as a full-on gourmande. Her life revolved around food, and she and her hubby planned their holidays around where to eat. Having done more than my share of fine dining in France and Italy, I could relate to the first part of the article. Then she writes about how she was diagnosed with stomach cancer when she was only 36, and had to have her large intestine and oesophagus removed.

In the three weeks leading up to the operation, she and her hubby planned an extended Last Supper during which they both ate their way along a route chosen to take in some of their favourite eateries, both fine dining and not-so-fine dining. When I read the detailed descriptions of what, and how much, she ate, I started to feel queasy. I just couldn't stomach that - sorry!

As I related to my hubby over dinner last night, if I were in that situation, I'd be freaking out and too upset to eat much. Instead of planning a food-fest, I'd be researching and planning what I could eat after the operation. He nodded, because he knows that's exactly how I'd react. Of course, I'd have a Last Supper during which I would no doubt drink too much and order the cheese plate, but there's no way I could eat vast quantities of super-rich and junk food non-stop for three weeks.

I'm really glad I read the article, because it brought home to me how much my attitude to food has changed.

Lori, this is the direction my thinking has been going. I'm a year behind you in this weight loss/maintenance journey. I had stopped eating candy years before I attempted the weight loss and it was the hardest thing I've ever done. Losing 100 was easier than going cold turkey on the candy habit so I'm afraid of acknowledging some other foods that should move into the never category.