Hi everyone,

I'm new here but, unfortunately, not new to the challenges of weight loss. This time around I'm hoping to confront my biggest obstacle head on - my all or nothing approach - and make permanent sustainable changes to my lifestyle. In the past I've always made the mistake of taking my weight loss plan too seriously. I go overboard, lose patience (and my mind!) and then eventually give up.

Does anyone have any advice on tackling this issue? When I'm trying to lose weight it's nearly all I can think about. It consumes me and it brings a lot of negative self talk and negative energy into my life (shame about letting myself get this overweight, not having done this before etc.) What works for me is counting calories and weighing daily. It keeps me on task and I do well for about a week every time. Too well! Until I can't stand my life being all about weight loss anymore.

Help?

I'm in a similar boat, especially with balance and moderation. When I was a teen I struggled EDNOS where I was in 3 months cycles of starving, bingeing and purging, and then bingeing. This created a very unhealthy relationship with food. While I'm no longer quite that extreme I still have an issue with all-or-nothing thinking.

I'm trying to work on accepting what I consider to be failures. I'm allowed bad days, slip-ups, and mistakes. It's okay for me to miss a goal. Buuut.... these are a mindset goal and it's easy to say when I'm doing well. I'm not quite there yet. But I do know in the past that this forum has helped me to remember the bigger picture.

It really does help to get in the mind set of every second of every day is a chance to get back on track. It doesn't have to be "tomorrow" or "next week" or "January 1st"... One bad meal doesn't mean the rest of the day has to be bad.

That all or nothing can get dangerous right quick!

Like berryblondeboys said, treat every moment like a chance to get back up! I find it also helps to try and start with allowing a few treats. Keep one or two things around the house maybe you're allowed once I'm awhile? I get low fat reduced Oreo cookies. Taste like normal, and I eat three as a great trear once or twice a week.

I also don't weight when I calorie count. I eyeball... Maybe you should try that? It could make it way more stressful, or it could make things a little leas intense, who knows? I use this system to help me judge:
1 baseball = 1 cup
1 billard ball = 1/2 cup
1 egg = 1/4 cup
1 ping pong ball = 2 tbsp
1 deck of cards = 2-3 ounces
2 pairs of dice = 1 ounce

I've been able to loose weight consistently eyeballing. You could also just try focusing on finding and creating foods and meals you love for awhile instead of how much you're eating! I love baked green beans in garlic, Brussels sprouts, fish, pho soup, beef and lamb! Be picky, I eat less than I used to, but I love the food I eat more now cause I don't just eat to eat.

I have an All Or Nothing thing going on with treats, so I basically just cut them out and focus on eating healthier foods. That's not to say that everything I swallow is really super-good for me, but a lot of it is. And no junk food.

I cannot seem to eat one or two cookies. If there are 2, I'll eat two. If there are 22, I'll eat 22 - maybe not all at once, but in 2 days (3 tops), they'll be gone.

The cookies are yummy, but they're just not good enough to get in the way of my weight loss. I look at my thighs and I'm like, "No, I don't need freaking cookies!"

This is helpful for losing, but when I took a diet break, I went back to bad habits (worse, I went crazy) and gained fourteen pounds in like six months.

I'm thinking that after I've lost all my weight, I will be one of those people who gains five or ten pounds and then loses them again for life. That's not really what I want, so I'm thinking a lot about how to do all this so that it's more even in the end, so I won't yoyo with the same few pounds.

I can lose fine. It's the Keep It Off that has me puzzling.

Would you say this about a car that you bought? "The Saab works great and then a week later it crashes and burns, but I keep buying more Saabs because they supposedly work great!" Uhm, no. Would you take a medication if your doctor said "This medicine works about 10% of the time for your ailment, just keep taking it until it works." Would you take it? All I'm saying is that if calorie counting works so great for you then why do you crash and burn after a week or so and then end up hating it?

It is crucial to get rid of the all-or-nothing mentality. Just take one day at a time and know that sometimes there will be good days and other times there will be bad days. That's a guarantee, do you think skinny people have all good days or something? No. What's important is that you don't judge yourself when you eat something your body might not have needed. Learn from it, have a laugh and then move on.

The one recurring problem that I see with any diet is that people tend to undereat to an extreme at the start of a diet. Especially with calorie counting because calorie counters tend to save and save and save calories all day and all week and that creates a primal type of hunger that your body will wage war on which is the primary reason for binging. Try to allocate your calories when you need them the most, like in the morning and at lunch. The American ideal of a dinner meal is a little counter intuitive imo, who needs a big huge meal at the end of the day? What are you going to do with all that nourishment right before you go to bed? So if you deprive yourself all day long then it's no wonder that most end up binging at night.

Well Future,
I think that you will get a lot of support on this site. It gives support motivation and accountability along with great advice and sometimes laughs from others. I think this site is the first step to making a sustainable change

Palestrina- I am in complete agreement about dinner. You have all day to work off what you ate for lunch and breakfast yet we tend to eat the most for dinner. I've switched to really light dinners because it makes sense that you don't load yourself up before you are inactive. There is a French saying that says "Eat like a king at breakfast, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper."

It doesn't seem like it's your all or nothing mentality that is the problem. All diets are hard to start. It's a fact. The first couple weeks/months are the worst. Especially if you have a lot to lose. It's overwhelming, especially when it doesn't come off as fast as you want. But, as we all know, it's not an overnight process. On the days I want to give up, I try to remind myself why I started in the first place. I think about the person I want to become and know that if I give into that binge, it's not going to help me. Try to make an inspiration board (notice I didn't say thinspiration, don't aspire for someone elses body. Aspire for you own version of healthy). And if you do give in, so what, tomorrow is another day. It all comes down to if you really want it, if you want it badly then you will fight for it. Even if that means fighting yourself.

Calorie counting has NOTHING to do with all or nothing mentality. They are completely separate. She's not saying it's the calorie counting that is the problem. She can try different foods or different calorie level and see if that helps with losing control or not. She just has to get to the mentality of one mistake is not the same as failure and does not mean to just give up.

Goes the same with your intuitive eating. You could be eating intuitively, but then have a day where you had a meal where you gave into stress and overate. The all or nothing mentality would say, "Screw it. Today I'm just going to eat as much as I want and not think about if I'm hungry for it or not."

All GOOD diet plans (and you are on a diet plan) should allow for intuitive eating so that the out of control eating doesn't happen. There are days I eat more than I planned to eat when I got up in the morning because I was just too hungry at the lower calorie count later in the day. There are days I eat way less than my calorie count because I simply wasn't hungry. I account for it all, but I still track calories. The all or nothing would say, "Well, if I'm hungrier than my allotted 1500 and give in and eat an ice cream cone thus feeling like a failure, then I can just say screw it and eat the entire container of ice cream." A more rational approach would be, "Ok, I ate the ice cream cone. I really wanted it. But now back to the plan."

There is no such thing as IE + diet plan. IE is the opposite of dieting, they can't coexist. For example you say "A more rational approach would be, "Ok, I ate the ice cream cone. I really wanted it. But now back to the plan." - with IE there is no "plan" so there's nothing to get back on plan with. The ice cream cone is just part of what you ate that day, it has no moral significance and doesn't fit into a category of "good" or "bad" or "right" or "wrong." Diets are about what you eat and how much you eat. IE is only about why you eat and how you eat.

What you ate yesterday should never make a difference in what you eat today. Every day is a blank slate.

Some people need that all or nothing attitude. I've found personally that denying something for me has never worked. For example, if I want ice cream, I have it. I have 150 cal sandwich instead of most of a half gallon.

Just do the best you can. The goal is to have a diet you can be both happy and healthy with.

I forgot to add...the obsessiveness over weight loss is very common from the comments I've read on here. The only solution ive ever found is sleeping (ha) and doing something I enjoy so much that I forget about it for a few minutes.

Any way you eat is a diet. Eating what you want is a diet. It is how you decide to eat.

What is IE?

It's sounding like, "I eat whatever I want, whenever is want it." Obviously, this is not something those of us who would love to eat nothing but donuts, cakes and cookies all the time could do and still lose weight.

So, what is it?

Technically I do eat whatever I want whenever I want it, we all do. I'll just cite what wiki says about IE "Intuitive eating is a nutrition philosophy based on the premise that becoming more attuned to the body's natural hunger signals is a more effective way to attain a healthy weight, rather than keeping track of the amounts of energy and fats in foods. It's a process that is intended to create a healthy relationship with food, mind and body, making it a popular treatment for disordered eating and eating disorders. Intuitive eating, just like many other dieting philosophies, goes by many names, including non-dieting or the non-diet approach, normal eating, wisdom eating, conscious eating and more"

And for the record, all I ever wanted to eat was fast food, donuts, chips, cheetos, and cake for my entire adulthood. And with IE I'm past that, eating a healthy and varied diet and not binging. So no, it's not "obviously" something that would hurt someone who likes junk food. More people eat intuitively than you think, all people who are normal around food eat this way. Unfortunately the diet industry discredits normal eaters by calling them "lucky" and claiming that they have fast metabolisms.