Very frustrating day! The diet mentality is rampant around this holiday! I'm holding steady, though.

Happy Halloween everybody!!!

Just wanted to pop in and say that this is my first time reading this thread - and I'm really appreciating a lot of what you all have to say! Thanks so much for a fresh perspective on food. I'll have to plop down for a while and give this thread a good read through and find out how I can apply these principals in my own daily and weekly routines.

Good evening!!! Today was a pretty good day!! I didn't overeat and I'm not going to have anything else tonight!!!! Evenings are my worst time cause I just want to snack. I'm starting to pay attention to hunger signals, though today I just cut back the amount of food a lot. I know this is going to take time. I've got to stop wanting a quick fix. It didn't come on quickly, and I don't want it to come off quickly because I want it to stay off permanently!! Have a wonderful weekend! Only eat that candy if you're hungry!!

Blessings, Lenise

Welcome Bluedande and, yes, Lenise it does come off slowly and except for seasnoal variations, it doesn't come back.

Oh Carol, I'm so sorry.

Welcome, bluedande! Hope you find what you're looking for here, a nd feel free to ask questions and contribute anytime.

Amazinggrace (my FAVORITE hymn, always makes me cry!)--Sounds like you're right on the money. This isn't about drastic, dramatic changes all at once. This is a gradual process that shows respect and care for your body. I'm so glad you care enough about yourself to do that.

Everyone: I've had some sort of virus for a couple of days (not swine flu!) so I've been laying low. I must admit that when I realized I was sick my first thought was, "great, maybe I'll lose a couple of pounds." But I stopped myself on that really quick, and I've been focusing on really giving my body what it needs to fight this and heal itself. Which means half of yesterday all I wanted to do was sleep and drink water, so I did that!

I've also been poking around on the internet looking for IE/demand eating stuff, and I've found a few great resources. I can post links because I'm old as dirt, so here you go:

First check out Kate Harding et al, at Shapely Prose. She's a militant feminist (which can get kind of irritating, honestly) but she has some posts regarding IE that are utterly fantastic. The archives are well worth exploring.

Try Stumbling Toward Ecstasy to address an interesting issue we've talked about in the past: the difference between "eat what you want" and "go hog wild".

Also, when you're ready to delve more into the emotional side of things, read The Fantasy of Being Thin. This one really got to me the first time I read it (a couple of years ago), and I've read it several times since. It makes you stop and think about what you're REALLY doing this for. And some of those answers (at least for me!) were not pretty.

Another blog worth reading is Good With Cheese. Now, she stopped writing this particular blog in 2008, but I'm going back and reading the entries from the beginning. I feel like I could have written them myself, honestly. (Except for the "being a size 4" part. Nope, never been there--my bones aren't that small!!) Since I'm reading Good With Cheese I have not started on her newest blog yet, but there's a link in the last post to the new one if you're interested.

Also check out this very interesting article on self-love and self-acceptance and how that tends to correlate with healthy food behaviors. (Think we're coming at it from the wrong angle, trying to deal with the food thing first? Treating a symptom and not the disease, as it were?) This, also, is an interesting read.

I'm off to lie down again, chickies. I hope everyone is well.

Wow, Sidhe, that should keep me busy for awhile. Thanks a lot for all the links.

Wow, that was a most excellent post. Very relevant to discussions we've had. I kinda wish others on 3FC could be required to read it before making weird comment about mindful eating.

Thanks for the links! I'm going to go look through them now. I waited on hunger but overate at dinnertime. Not nearly as bad as I usually do, but I ate past what I should. It's such a good feeling to know I don't have to eat all the time. There are much more interesting things to do!!

Lenise

I'm really excited!!! This is really working for me!!! I've been wearing a size 24 jeans. I tried on some size 22's that are brand new that I never got to wear and they fit perfect. I wore them today. I even got into some 20's but they are to tight. I know I have a long way to go but I feel perfectly confident that I can do this. I love this way of eating.

I'm still reading Thin Within. I had to do a little thing the other day where you stand in the mirror and look at yourself naked without being critical of yourself. I had to say only good things about myself and realize what a blessing my body is. It was a little difficult at first but I did find out that I have a nice Butt!!! My husband compliments me on this but I never took the time to look at it myself. LOL!!!

How exciting for you, Natoshial! It sounds like you're really listening to what your body needs. Are you feeling more energetic, sleeping better, feeling more awake during the day...?

I am still sick in a feel-fine-while-I'm-down-but-fall-over-when-I-get-up sort of way. I woke up this morning and intensely wanted an orange. I mean, I was dreaming about eating oranges when I woke up! So I got up and peeled/sectioned one, and came through to sit down with my laptop. I've eaten maybe 2/3 of it, and now I'm content. Gee, you think desperately wanting a food that's rich in vitamin C has anything to do with being sick? Yay for listening to my body! If that's not IE, I don't know what is.

Question: does anyone else feel increasingly uncomfortable reading other parts of the forum? I've been around for years under various names (I actually was here before there were any separate forums, waaaaay back when the website first opened) and I've poked my way around most of the subforums. I've noticed, though, that I feel increasingly uncomfortable with the struggle, self-hatred, and self-flaggelation that I'm reading. "This weekend was a failure" "so am I really a failure?" "Managed to pass up my birthday cake!" and all those other sorts of posts are making me really uncomfortable. Is that happening for anyone else, or am I just being too sensitive?

sidhe, I used to respond to more of those "I'm a failure" or "I'm so gross" posts, but I have a hard time with patience with those anymore. So that's more a concern for the poster than for me. I guess it depends on my mood.

The posts that bother me more personally are the ones along the lines of "I had a whole cup of cherries yesterday, but I only planned for a half cup. I have *got* to get back on track!"

It's touchy, because different things work for different people at different times, including me. I try to assume that if I'm irritated, it means *I* have an issue. That's not always true, but it's a good place for me to start, because I can be a little too critical sometimes.

Well, I don't know. I'm having a hard time looking at anything other than here or "General Chatter." I just can't relate to any of the diets and sometimes I am just sad for the person posting. It's disturbing for me to hear how someone passed up their birthday cake or something else when it was a special occasion. So it is better for me and for them that I don't read them. I don't want to discourage them, and I don't want them to influence me.

amazinggrace, it will get better with time, and yes, it is good to know there is life outside of food.

Thanks for the links, Sidhe. I've been looking at them as I have time.

Congrats, Natoshial (I love your name, BTW). It's a great feeling to know that this is working. I saw a friend of mine today that I had not seen in awhile, and she asked me how much weight have I lost! No one had asked me that yet. Then, a little while later my DH's step-mom asked the same thing. I guess it is finally starting to show.

Isn't that great when people start to notice. I've been disappointed in some of the IE letters I get from email. They are now more likely to ask for money. They want you to join this or that. But I guess that is what the internet is about. So when I see they want money I just press delete. I don't read much on other threads except for one girl who was on prednisone like me when I first joined. She hasn't posted for a month and she has lots of health problems. It worries me some. She lost a lot of weight while taking prednisone which is really something.

Good morning, all. I'm 99% better, yay! Still a bit tired, but honestly I think that has more to do with the time change and with my own personal sleeping patterns than with being sick. So I'll pick up and move on.

I've been doing a LOT of reading and a lot of journaling these last 3 days, and I've realized some things. The first thing is that I've been engaged in a LOT of last-supper eating: I've been eating things that I've previously banned, whether I feel good eating them or not, simply because I've banned them in the past.

Cake. Ahhhh, cake. Now, I LOOOOOVE cake. But unless I make gluten-free cake, I swell up like a toad and ache for a good few hours after I eat it. But that hasn't been stopping me. I've been buying myself cake and eating my cake and hoarding my cake and ignoring what my body is telling me because I CAN HAVE CAKE IF I WANT TO, dammit. I've had the same slice of carrot cake in the fridge for the last 4 days, though, and I've been aware of it but not eaten it for all of those 4 days. I finally sat down with my journal and wrote it all out to myself: my anger that cake does this to me, my frustration with not getting to have what I want without consequences, my resentment of people who could eat cake without those same consequences...and finally my acceptance that MY BODY doesn't like cake, and every time I eat it I'm making the choice to hurt myself. OUCH.

I am going to try to remember that when I consider having cake next time. I can totally choose to have it, of course, but the reality is that choice is also a choice to hurt my body. If I attempt to "ban" cake then I get the immediate backlash of replacement-eating and defiant-eating, and I really don't want to do that to myself mentally. So cake is still on the list of foods I can eat (as is everything), but I've taken a really hard look at what it does to me and I'm hoping I will choose to eat it less and less.

I've also noticed that I have "opinions" (judgments) about every single thing I eat except vegetables. I have little 'statements' running through my brain about every single thing I eat and it's really, really tiresome. Too much fat, not whole grain, not enough vegetables, probably too much protein, wrong kind of fat, wrong kind of protein, . So a lot of my eating decisions (well, pretty much all of them, to be honest) have been affected by last-supper eating. I've been eating a LOT of things that I had previously banned for one reason or another. I've been patient about it and trusted that I would come to a point where I could address it, and I have.

In all honesty I don't feel good eating some of those things, and I'm ready to admit that. I was eating them just because they'd been banned, and it felt so good emotionally to break out of those prohibitions. But physically I've been rundown, and I guess getting sick is what it took to bring that home! So everything is, like cake, staying on the list of foods I CAN have if I want them, but I've also faced the consequences and accepted that MY body doesn't feel as good as it could when I eat them.

Two steps forward and one step back, right? I know I've written about all of those before, but I'm going through it again. I've been dieting or living with judgment of my body since I was 8 years old, and it's taking a lot of work to unlearn what was drummed in so hard. I know this was long, if anyone needs me to stop sharing feel free to say so.

Sidhe, I think this is what makes IE so hard. It is really difficult to break out of that pattern of "good" vs. "bad." Just knowing you can have them if you want to, but that you don't have to have them is what helps me get through it. You don't have to hoard or hide or binge. It will always be there.

Carol, yes, I'm very pleased that people have started to notice and ask me what I am doing. I try to explain in general terms.

Well, I am wiped out. Had a loooong weekend, and now I am sick with a cold. I spent the day shopping with a friend and trying to pretend I wasn't sick. She knew something was wrong with me because she gave me some Sudafed. lol She wants to go again tomorrow. I don't see her too often (she works a lot), so it's hard to refuse.