My personality is very all-or-nothing, unfortunately. That's why dieting has failed for me so often. I feel like if I'm not going 100%, giving up every little thing that's "bad", then I might as well be stuffing my face with junk food.

I'm not exactly maintaining yet. I'm 10.8 pounds from (what I hope is) my final goal weight. But I'm fine losing at a slower rate now because I don't want to replace my clothes until I'm out of debt in February/March. I'm aiming for a loss of one pound a week.

How do I break this unhealthy attitude of thinking one little treat is going to make me gain 50 pounds? I can barely enjoy meals out with my family once in a blue moon because I'm constantly computing the calories in my head, picturing myself at 196, and thinking No, no, no, I don't want to go back. In the short-run, this mindset is helping me lose weight, but in the long run, I feel like it's unhealthy mentally to deny myself any treats whatsoever. I'm not going to gain 50 pounds back overnight, but it's hard to convince myself of that when I'm staring at a plate of P.F. Chang's kung pao chicken. Help! Has anyone else experienced this?

Hi,
It sounds like some underlying psychological issue because you realize that it is not going to make you gain a lot of weight from one treat.

I say brave up and eat it anyway and the scale will point out that it is OK.

Good luck

Sheridan

I was like this with sugar. I gave it up entirely for 6 months and then tried to introduce it again. I had a rough time for awhile and even binged a few times. However, I really tried to make myself aware of what was going on and I just had to check my all or nothing attitude at the door. I came up with ideas of how I could introduce it without going nuts for instance,

- Only buying single serving chocolate bars once a week
- never keeping it in the house but allowing myself treats on certain occasions
- not baking stuff at home

Now I can keep it even in the house and it's not an issue but it's a process. I had to start slow and slowly incorporate it back into my life.

Why not try that with your diet too? Come of with strategies where you can SLOWLY introduce more going out meals. Pick safe environments where you're not going to go overboard or order in so you're not tempted to buy too many drinks off of the menu etc. Plan ahead to eat a light lunch before hand etc.

So, if you want Kung Pao chicken, why not bring it home, make a salad, put it on the salad (instead of eating it with rice) and it enjoy it that way? Or cut back on calories earlier in the day so you can eat a bit more at dinner. Plan on just one going out meal a week and don't add anything else in until you feel like you can handle going out well enough. Ultimately, you have to find a strategy that works for you but the best thing for me was slowly introducing the forbidden foods in a very controlled manner and planning ahead.

Good luck!

Katie- YES!!!!!!!!!!!! I struggle with it everyday, but I know it will just take time to see that you can be NORMAL and THIN. Like someone else wrote on here, "you aren't going to be suddenly STRUCK fat".

I don't indulge a lot right now, b/c I am focusing more on finding my maintenance calorie range. A few days in the past weeks, I;ve thrown caution to the wind and had a some foods I wouldn't normally eat. At the end of those days I added up my cals (instead of doing it as I go) and EACH time I was either on target for maintenance calories or just a smidge above.

I don't know about you, but my stomach is just SMALLER and I know what real hunger is. My body can have a treat, etc, and it just ends up working itself out by not being as hungry later, etc.

I'd love to talk as we go, b/c I feel like a weirdo that I am so OCD about what I eat and being fearful or gaining weight again.

For me it took a lot of time. I've been maintaining 8 years now and I can say it has taken those 8 years to feel comfortable with balancing food, intuition, body satisfaction, etc. I would love to tell everyone that maintenance brings a sudden peace but for most of us it does not. For me, it was doing this over time and the age/growing/wisdom that came with it.

It's taken some time, like 20 years, but I finally realized I needed to redefine "normal"!

"Normal" means that most of the time, I have to count my WW points and stay on track, because if I don't I'll gain the weight back. But also, once in awhile, it's ok to splurge a bit.

I used to lose the weight and think now, I can eat like a normal person. What I finally realized is that most healthy weight, fit (normal) people don't eat at the quick trip for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch and then hit happy hour for beer and burgers.

Those folks, eat properly most days, workout on a regular basis, and yeah, they go out now and then for a beer or a burger, or other food based function with family. But, even then they compromise. At Thanksgiving, they might (I did), fore go the roll and butter, so they can have stuffing, they might, (I did), walk 5 miles Thanksgiving morning, so I would feel fine about having pie.

It's all about balance and compromise. None of are perfect, or we wouldn't be here.

Thanks for the advice, everyone! It really helps to know I'm not the only one experiencing this - makes me feel a bit less crazy.

Oh, definitely! Part of the problem for me, too, is that I felt like I did gain the 20 pounds that put me into obese territory overnight. Intellectually, I know it didn't happen that way. But it did seem like I was a normal size, then POOF one day I couldn't button my pants!

That has been a surprise for me too, finding that I can throw in a treat and still be well within my maintenance calories. (I maintained for all of two weeks before deciding I wanted to lose 12 more pounds.)

That is one thing I am so thankful for, the ability to know when I'm hungry and when I'm not. Like you said, most of the time I just cannot eat the foods I did before, especially not in the portions I used to eat. It's just not physically possible without making myself sick. Sadly, I've also learned that the "normal" foods I used to indulge in (*cough* downtown nachos *cough*) make me feel miserable now because my body recognizes that I'm shoveling in a lot of crap food. I've splurged on the nachos once since I really started my journey in July (though, like many, this feels like it's been a lifelong journey), and I really can't imagine eating them again. That's how awful I felt.

Based on the responses here, this must be something a lot of people experience. My own mother did the Curves diet (and looked amazing - so much muscle definition!), and she told me recently that it took a while after she lost the weight to realize that she didn't have to eat perfectly 100 percent of the time to keep the weight off. Maybe this is just something that I have to be patient with!

Do you exercise much? I feel similarly about exercise. Like, if I skip one day at the gym, all of my muscle tone is going to disappear. Irrational!

I was like KatieC87 for a long time, thinking that one meal was going to make me "struck fat" overnight. Then my husband told me that I fretted so much about what to order when we ate out, I was turning what ought should be a pleasant occasion into an ordeal. That made me rethink things and loosen up a bit.

Totally agree with this. I could have written it (with the edits).

And like Katie, I used to think that if I skipped one session at the gym, I'd turn to flab overnight.

I think this is a stage we all go through. We have all had such a disordered relationship with food, it can take a long time for us to define our version of "normal".

Katie- ditto about old-faves now making me sick. It has been eye-opening that most high-fat, high-sugar foods make me physically ill. Now it's like "DUH", but when I look at a cheeseburger, it doesn't LOOK like death. LOL It took a while, and a few tummyaches, to realize that if I just stick to what makes me feel good and not filling my stomach to the point of discomfort, I can truly eat a great variety of food!

I don't eat things that make me feel like a yucky food coma, and I only eat portions that my stomach can handle. These two things automatically ensure that I'm staying within a desirable calorie range. The PROBLEM that I'm encountering lately is trying to eat ENOUGH. Which, by defination, is scary!! BUt if I eat good foods, it takes a larger volume to get to 1800 cals. And since I can't eat large portions at any one time, I feel like I am eating, eating, eating all day to try to hit that 1800 range.

I LOVE to workout, but part of my "not eating enough" struggle has the unpleasant side-effect of making me feel weak when I workout. I've been playing around with eating certain things before and after workouts, trying to find a good fit.

I've heard some people say they have a 10% (or maybe 20%) rule where that much of what they eat (whether calories or points) can be junk and they still do fine. I find I can do okay with 20%, though my "treats" are things like homemade cookies with WW flour or chai tea with whole milk - not completely sinful but definitely not perfect either.

I also find that writing things down and keeping my trackers (I know, NERD alert) helps because I can look back and see that I was losing weight and I wasn't eating perfectly. I feel better when I eat better, but I can eat bad a little and the world doesn't come to an end.

I've had to remind myself time and time again that the thin people you see indulging at restaurants do a lot of things when they're NOT at restaurants that I don't necessarily know about. They probably work out regularly and really watch what they eat the rest of the time. Becoming part of the "slim world" has opened my eyes to where I think at least 80% of the people who are slim are not that way without some kind of effort. I find that to be a great comfort.

Yep, I used to think that slim people were "lucky". But since I've made a habit of secretly studying them, I've come to the same conclusion.

Ditto! I used to go to the gym and just illogically assume that all the people there were just naturally thin and that if I were that thin, I wouldn't even bother working out. Really stupid, I know.

One thing that I believe is different between me and "naturally" thin people is that they do not focus on food as much as I do. I have learned to accept that difference, though, which has made it easier for me to accept a lifestyle in which I'll have to keep track of my eating and exercise more than the average person.

This is spot on correct. People (especially always skinny people) tell me about their eating habits. They are very conscious of what they are eating and how to correct excesses. It is not luck or magic. They KNOW their bodies and then take corrective measures. These measures to stay on track vary among the people I know, but they do not ignore their bounces up.

Another thing I take comfort in, which is weird, is that maintaining a loss has a 3-5% chance of success. The odds really are stacked against me. So that I need to be eternally vigilant does not come as a surprise. I can chose to decide if the effort is worth the reward at any time too. Stop the whole thing and get fat. I am not a victim and that is comforting to me.

I think we're all taught to look at weight loss this way - and to blame our personalities for it, rather than the truth - that we've learned it by observation. It's what "everyone does," so we do it too.

Weight loss is taboo enough that we rarely have a lot of role models for doing it right. And in fact (though to a lesser degree today) if you succeeded at it, the odds were you kept quiet about it, and hoped that no one remembered that you had ever had a weight problem to begin with.

Even today you'll hear people talking about not wanting people to know they'd ever been overweight, even talking about "burning all their fat photos," or at least hiding them away.

There aren't many places where it's appropriate to brag about accomplishments (though that's thankfully changeing too).

For me, the first step in escaping the "all-or-nothing" thinking was in realizing that the thoughs weren't really mine (oh yes, I was having them - but I didn't "invent" them - I was taught them). And because I was taught them - and had "absorbed" them as just the way weight loss was done - I had to "unlearn" them.

I had to replace the old messages (that I didn't even realize I had absorbed) by acknowledging them, and substituting something more appropriate - and to recognize that my choices had more value than the "traditions" I had learned.

We all learn what we see - far better than what we hear, which is why the maxim "do as I say, not as I do," is virtually useless. When given the choice between learning what we see and read, and what we're told - we all tend to choose what we see, because the "written and spoken" rules aren't REALLY the rules, the real rule is what people do.

A great example is the "employee handbook." Almost all of us have had a job where we had to read an employee handbook and found that there was at least a few discrepeancies between the written rules and what everyone actually did - and you learn pretty quickly that if you wanted to "get along" with everyone you had to do what everyone else did and NOT what the handbook said.

Dieting is often like that. We learn (by seeing it done) that the socially appropriate thing to do after even a single bite off plan - is to feel guitly, declare the day "blown" and eat with mad abandon until we can "start fresh" at the next appropriate time.

If you overeat on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, you eat like mad until bedtime and start fresh the next morning.

However, if it's past Thursday, you have permission to take a break from dieting untill Monday morning.

However, if it's during the last week of the month, you can start fresh on the first of the month (or the first Monday of the month).

If it's after Halloween (or perhaps Thanksgiving), you can wait until the first of the year.


If you can identify with any of those - that's a pretty good indication that you didn't "invent" them yourself - you learned them just by being in the "diet culture."

It's a lot harder to "unlearn" observational learning, because half the time (maybe even more) you don't even realize that you learned anything at all. It's just your "natural" response, so you blame your personality or your "weakness," especially if that's also what you've learned by watching others (and isn't it? Don't we constantly see not only people making the same "illogical" mistakes and then blaming themselves for them.

Half the battle of unlearning is realizing that you learned the response in the first place.

I have gotten much better at avoiding the "must be perfect" mindset not by realizing it's irrational (we all already know that) but by giving myself permission to be a "rebel" when it came to weight loss. By realizing that the traditional way was the wrong way (because failure is built into the traditional way).

I had to practice breaking the dieting traditions, such as (in no particular order)

1. deciding that "starting over" did not exist. EVERY bite counted, so there was never a way to "start over," or "start fresh." THere was no starting over, just moving on.

2. deciding that the scale couldn't "make" me feel anything. I'd always been told that weighing daily was horrible - because it was so frustrating and disapointing (says who?).

3. deciding that the weight wasn't the most important measure of success (thank God, because I couldn't always see weight loss success, but I could see success in meeting the diet and exercise goals I set for the day)

4. deciding that "not gaining" was actually a bigger success than losing. This is almost weight loss sacrelige. We all know that a stall, and sometimes even only a small loss is almost as bad as a gain (and if you don't think you know this - substitute "feels as if" - and if it "feels real" it is real).

Of course we give up when we make slow success as much of a failure as dismal failure. Hey, if you're going to fail anyway, you might as well get some enjoyment out of life anyway you can.

The premise (that a gain is no worse than a non-loss) sets us up for failure. Because if we see a gain as no worse than a non-loss - it does make sense to binge and start fresh in the future.

I've learned that success with weight loss is a lot more about "unlearning" than learning. Questioning all the things we do because of our "personality." I don't think it's personality at all - I think we've learned to make the mistakes (and the excuses - and the labeling of these learned behaviors AS excuses).

We can succeed, but only by "breaking the rules" that we may not even realize we're obeying.