Posts by mad4moon

Bravo!

Original Post by jjasperse:

I don't usually go to bed until after 2am so it can be up to 8 hours since dinner.  You get hungry...My problem and most snackers problems are portion control...I've gone to using little snack bowls, little ones you would feed your dog from, and telling myself that's all I get.

Grapes are good for cravings and I've taken to nuts which are good to kill the hunger (remember just to eat a small handful)...if you get your body out of the habit of eating sweets or large quantities that late, you'll notice the cravings aren't so bad.  And you don't see it on the scale in the morning.  The trick is to get your mind back in control and not your stomach (sound like a recording, don't I).  Train your brain not to crave the bad stuff. 

Or maybe we should just all go to sleep!

Good "food for thought", jjasperse!  I like your message of portion control and looking at the types of foods being eaten late in the night. 

My thought is this:  If I am truly hungry, why wouldn't I eat a meal?  If you're up 8 hours after your last meal, sounds like another small meal of real food 3-5 hours after dinner is in order. 

When people say "I'm hungry late at night" why are they eating dessert/chips/alcohol (with or without a lot of calories)?  That doesn't sound like hunger, that sounds like craving.  And as you said, jjasperse, unhealthy habits can be broken.  Cravings are resistable - we do not have to give in to our impulses!

Learning the difference between genuine hunger and habitual craving has been a very important task of mine in this journey to health and weight-loss.

dallasjaded, that was a terrific description of the sleep-walking aspect of binge-eating - the trance-like numbness that we all seek.  For me, it was like taking a break from life, like a vacation, inside my own head.  Unfortunately, by abusing myself with emo-eating, I created more unhappiness for myself, more reasons to want to hide from life with food. 

Eventually, it became such a habit that I didn't even need to be binging because of emotional distress, it was just a hobby, recreation, what I did to pass the time.  Ug.

I like the suggestion of the mirror.  Actually, anything that keeps me from going into the dissociative numbness is effective.  I spent a lot of time practicing how to combat those sabotaging thoughts that promote binges.  So now what works for me is stopping myself before I descend into the darkness - actively thinking "How do you want to feel later?" instead of falling for the lies of "don't think about it" or "just this once" or my former favorite:  "I don't give an eff." 

It has been my experience that thoughts are very powerful, but also controllable.  I do not believe "I can't control myself."  For me, it was more a matter of "I don't want to control myself."

What awesome responses.  I don't know about you, justice4me, but every single post on this thread had me nodding my head and saying "Yes!  Yes!" like a sinner at a revival meeting.  

I have been a white sugar/white flour "addict" my entire life and there was a time when I would bleet "I can't help it" and I was right.  As long as I turned my control over to the trigger foods, all I could do is binge and hate myself (and then, naturally, emo-eat some more to numb out the self-loathing - you know the drill).

Once I went from "I can't" to "I don't want to" (where jennya222 was over 10 days ago), I experienced the first step to personal control and freedom.  It now became my choice - the cookies and cakes and ice creams and chips were not the boss, I was, and I was choosing to eat like a pig at a trough.  An unhealthfully-stocked trough, no less.

Finally, I went from "I don't want to" to "I will" and that's when my life changed.  Yes, it's not easy at first.  Us compulsive overeaters seem to share a common aversion to the short-term difficult and uncomfortable.  Instead, we opt for instant gratification and settle for long-term miserable and painful.

I can affirm what others on this thread have said:  The cravings go away.  I still like a good snack from time to time.  I agree that single-servings of good-quality recreational sugar cannot be beat.  Funny, though, the ordinary crap holds no attraction for me, and the gourmet stuff is very satisfying in small amounts.

I have changed.  You can too.  How bad do you want it?

Thank you, nancybehrend, for sharing your story.  I went on a long weekend trip, then had my birthday this week, and didn't weigh myself until today hoping I could repair some damage before facing the music.

Well, the tune was a sorry one:  I gained 3.9 pounds in two weeks.  I can hear you saying "I WISH I had only gained 4 pounds!" but the principle is the same - we can really put on the pounds when we want to!  I don't know about you, but some of my off-plan eating wasn't even any fun at the time, I was just stuffing it in because I could.  And I was discouraged because, like you, I was far more active than I ever have been on vacations and at home, and yet, there's the weight gain.

Remember, some of it is water and will shed fast with a return to the discipline of logging calories and exercise.

I love all the great suggestions others have offered you, and I'm going to use them myself because in a week I'm going away for a 12 day trip with my father to small-town Arkansas, where my people believe "if it ain't fried, it ain't food."  These people either survive into their 90's no matter what they eat, or die early of heart disease with fat greasy smiles on their faces.

I won't be anywhere near a wired universe, so taking my laptop and sticking with CC is out of the question.  Some CC friends have suggested a hand-written journal (!!!) and that's what I'm going to do to keep myself conscious and within maintenance calories.  I can do 2000 calories a day - it's the 3000, 4000, 5000 calorie days that do me in.  Naturally - our bodies know the math even if we want to ignore it.

I share your discouragement, nancy, but I remind myself "What choice do I have?"  I like dave98z3's "so what test".  I can either get back on the wagon and learn what I need to learn in order to strengthen my healthy habits.  Or I can continue to eat and gain and be miserable.  I choose health and happiness today. 

One of the reasons I value CC is the abundance of people who believe in losing weight and being healthy "the old fashioned way", i.e., through healthy diet and sane physical activity.  I think it is sad that I am considered a bizarre anomaly at my work because I lost nearly 100 pounds this way - the couple other formerly big girls used surgery, and I have no idea how many acquaintances are taking Hydroxycut or other supplements in desperate attempts to juice their weight loss.

To me, it is somewhat irrelevant whether or not Hydroxycut will hurt me physically.  Even if it is 100% harmless, if I do not learn how to make food and exercise choices that support my health and happiness, then I continue to live in the problem which is:  "I want it all and I want it now!"  This is the kind of thinking that led me to compulsively overeat in the first place.

I think the bottom line about diet supplements comes from that weight-loss guru Albert Einstein:  "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Original Post by gi-jane:

The 'life' of an ED is like that of a vampire - it's a parasitical half-life, it has none of its own.  Food and nourishment to an ED are like the beams of sunlight to a vampire.... so keep eating and watch it fizzle away and turn to dust.

Oh, what an excellent metaphor, gi-jane! 

Easy peasy - food is fuel.  The body receives fuel, it wants to burn it.  You woke up probably because your body was on empty and was desperate for fuel.  Then you're awake because your body has a full tank of gas (excessive calories) and wants to run.

I hope you will immediately start increasing your healthy daily calories, broom_closet.  If you are unable to do it alone, I hope you are obtaining medical assistance.  Underweight/excessive caloric restriction is the fast track to serious and potentially unfixable physical problems, as I'm sure you already know.  Every day that you practice unhealthy habits makes those habits stronger.  Please tend to your physical and emotional health...You are more than an ED...

I have no tips about an analog scale and I also am not interested in all the lights and buzzers of a fancy digital scale.  But I just have to add a post about the Weight Watcher's digital scale - $25 at Costco - and akasharaine's post about it being a "liar and a cheat".  I guess I'm a fool because it has told me that I've lost 63 pounds and it has convinced the stores to change all their clothing sizes to support this lie.

I love my plain digital scale.  No squinting to determine if the needle is on the top of bottom half of the slash mark, no making mistakes by mis-reading the scale in the early morning hours.  I like weighing once a week - I have rarely found that the number on the scale does not match my awareness of my eating/exercise plan during the week, so I have used this data as confirmation of my efforts to re-train my brain so that it communicates well with my body.  My brain can be a bigger "liar and cheat" than any scale I've ever met!

Thank you x 5 to all of you who pointed out that 100 cal or less is not a meal.  I thought I had entered an anorexic's dream!

An extra thanks to clairelaine - those recipes look great as a part of a meal, or as a snack to hold me over...

Original Post by jnielsen006:

I feel beautiful

 That's the most amazing physical/emotional success - I'm 51 years old, and this is the first time in my life I've felt beautiful.

Another success is wanting to go out and be physically active on a sunny day - yesterday I went with my husband on a 2+ hour bike ride and I felt like a kid again.  And wanting to eat healthy food because I like how it makes me feel physically - amazing!

Great forum topic, madamq!  After years of false starts and quick rebounds, changing my thinking has been key to my success...

What did you change in your thinking that helped you to drop your old, "fat" thinking?  I changed the belief that I could not be uncomfortable, that if I was hungry or craving something it was an emergency that needed to be addressed that second.  Breaking the thinking habit of expecting immediately gratification was tough, and very important.  Part of what led me to be morbidly obese was attachment to the instant reward of eating junk foods.  I needed to retrain my brain to think about how I would feel on weigh day, tomorrow, heck, 15 minutes from now! - in order to withstand temptations and maintain healthy eating.

Many people here have talked about making healthy habits stick, and that's been very important to me too.  I realized that every time I emo-eat I am reinforcing a long-ingrained behavior pattern that would make it harder to change.  That's another message I would tell myself when I was tempted to eat off plan - "I wanna practice a healthier response to this urge." 

I also needed to stop verbally abusing myself.  I treated myself in ways I would not tolerate from anyone else.  Discouraging thoughts and self-loathing led me to the numbness of binge eating way too often.  Who wouldn't want to escape the critical hostility that was going on in my head?  The negative attitude needed to change before I lost any weight - waiting until I was slender to feel good about myself never worked!

Did you use positive self talk or some other technique?  Certainly positive self-talk has been part of my plan.  It has been equally important to be mindful, to pay attention to what I'm thinking and feeling, so that I don't just switch into automatic pilot (which of course means I'm going to act on well-practiced bad habits).  I've had to teach myself to pay attention to that tiny, weak little voice that said "You don't feel good when you eat that way."  Originally, the fat voice would respond, "I don't care, I want it!"  I had to learn to shove that loudmouth aside and encourage the teeny voice that had my best interests at heart.  As time goes by, that little voice has gotten stronger and bigger.

What keeps you holding on to your old unhealthy thought patterns?  The comfort of familiarity.  Sometimes I miss taking a day off work, going to the store first thing, buying every kind of crap I love and spending the day watching old movies and eating until I feel like I'll explode.  This was a way of "taking a break" from real life.  And I really needed to "take a break" since real life, carting around 100 extra pounds, was difficult and unhappy.  Of course, by escaping into binge eating, I was comforting myself with the problem.

Sometimes I split into a responsible adult and a rebellious child.  The child will resent the healthy lifestyle, start complaining and wanting junk food.  I have to remember that I am rebelling against my own desires, which of course is a ridiculous path to follow.

What thought patterns do you still want to change and why do you think it is important to change that pattern?  I have lost 98.6 of the 100 I want to lose, and yet I still feel "fat" all too often.  I am structurally large and while I wasn't overweight for most of my childhood and young adulthood, I always felt way too big.  In some ways, becoming obese just confirmed a self-image I had held all my life.  So now, despite the size of my new clothes, despite the number on the scale, despite the positive feedback from friends and family, despite being able to leap out of bed in the morning instead of heaving myself out, despite having energy to bound instead of lumber - I still sometimes feel too large.

It is very important for me to change this pattern, because if I don't, I believe I am doomed to regain some or all of the weight - I will be who I think I am.  So I need to continue work on knowing I am the physically healthy and strong woman I am!

In a way, rangerx3x, you and I have an advantage over faeriewhings - having struggled with weight our entire lives, we are used to being aware of our issues with food - she is only now having to develop that mindfulness.

I also am an emotional eater (there's a group for us, called, funnily enough, "Emotional Eaters").  I also lost weight (88 pounds) then gained a lot of it back (55 pounds), then struggled to "flip the switch" to get back on the wagon.  It took me a year of false starts before I kept on-plan.  Now, I have lost 62 pounds and hit my target weight on Easter.

I've pondered a lot about what led me to successfully stay on plan after so many failures (like you, rangerx3x, the longest false start was two weeks long).  My latest theory is that when I started yet again, on 9/1/08, I made a plan that included awareness that it would be emotionally tough at first, especially the first month, and I set some bottom-line expectations for myself.

I didn't expect myself to exercise at first, and then when I did, I set really low goals so that I could be successful.  I planned my food out ahead of time, shopped once a week, and made sure I had plenty of healthy snack foods.  I excised all trigger foods from my house.  I ate 5-6 times a day so that I was never overly-hungry.  I am more likely to emo-eat when I am already starving.

And then I just buckled my seatbelt and got ready for a bumpy flight.  I knew that I had a lot of bad habits when it came to food, and that changing these habits would be really hard at first.  I had a "no matter what" attitude - at first, all I did was grit my teeth and grip my food plan with both pudgy hands.

I couldn't have kept that up, but I didn't have to.  After the first month of success, my healthy habits became stronger, I became more willing to increase exercise, I explored more variety in my diet, and I continued to work on the sabotaging thoughts that would lead me back to emo-eating over and over again in the past.  A great book to help with the thinking errors is "The Beck Diet Solution."

Best wishes, rangerx3x.  You can do it.  The question to ask yourself is "How bad do I want it?" because it's hard work in the beginning and not for the squeamish.

I think the question is not whether it is common or uncommon to be jealous of the "naturally thin".  The question to me is whether it is helpful to focus on whether life is fair or unfair.  That kind of thinking promotes unhappiness and resentment within me, which leads me to emo-eat.

Yeah, I want pastries with whipped cream too.  And I will probably have some when I go away for my anniversary in a couple weeks. 

You're right, thin_girl, this topic has provoked a lot of strong feelings!  Thanks for giving us all the opportunity to explore why that is for each of us...