Recognising hunger for what it is

hi, the women in my family are all large so i have been concious of having to watch what I eat since being a teenager. In my twenties i did various blast diets before holidays and special occasions but not realy taken it seriously.

now I am sixty and this summer suddenly realised that i was actually a stone over wieght, those bulges were not gravity taking their toll but fat. and so in june this year I decided to do something about it.

Lots of research, lots of reading success and failure stories and found them all very interesting because I know I do not have much self control.

so this is what worked for me.

no point starting excercise at my age, never done it never liked it. But tried to increase the walking I do, walk to local shops rather than drive, walk to pub rather than get taxi, use stairs not lifts etc.

cut out refined sugar, anything processed at all(except alcohol, I regard fermentation as a natural growth rather than a process--well thats my excuse)

only eat or drink at the table. If I got hungry or thirsty during a tv program, put it on pause and go and eat or drink a snack at the table(despite howls of protest from the family)

allow myself 1400 calories of food plus half a bottle of wine a day, or if going to the pub no wine the day before or the day after.

decide the day before what those calories would be, and allow 200 of them to be for snacks. then the next day stick to it, no matter how hungry I thought i was. weigh everything, no little licks or picking grapes off the food bowl.

decide that hunger is part of getting used to a new way of eating and embracing it.

if my social life meant I had to deviate from the 1400 calories make sure that the extra food was healthy food and not junk food. (out for a meal--everyone else has desert or cheese --pick the desert with most fruit and no pastry or cake, and realy enjoy the sin of eating something outside the diet) even though ice cream has sugar, home made ice cream from a resturant is wonderful.

It has taken six months but I have lost my stone. I could have done with a bit more support from the family but then I bet everybody has that problem.Now I am having great fun throwing all those oversized clothes away. I will carry on logging my wieght in on this site to make sure it does not creep up again.

This way of loosing weight might not suit everyone, if you have a lot to loose it might be too slow. I  know some people swear by exercise, and it makes sense that burning calories and building muscle should make it easier to shed the pounds, but I cannot see the point of it for me.

sorry i left the main point out--doh!! quite often when I felt the need to eat, especially if I was watching tv or had just got in and was tired then when I thought about going to the table and eating something sensible there was nothing i could think of eating or drinking that would satisfy the urge. and i realised that what I actually wanted was a treat for myself and that I was just used to eating or drinking something nice at that point.

by saying to myself, if you are realy hungry then eating an apple at the table will satisfy the hunger or if you are realy thirsty a glass of water at the table will satisfly that showed me that the normal mental response of --- no I dont fancy that, i want to sit on this comfy sofa and have some crisps and drink beer, or i want to take my shoes off and have a milky coffee and some cheese in a comfy chair---were not because I was hungry but because my body was used to the pleasure it got from these situations at this time. Breaking it was a bit like giving up smoking. I still get the urge, especially when the whole family is eating and drinking as we watch a  movie, but I think about how long I have been sticking to it and how it would be a shame to stop now and put the weight back on.

That sounds like a good system and a good attitude.  However, I would caution you against drinking so much alcohol.  1400 cals of food and 400 (?) cals of wine or more if you go to the pub could set you up for problems.  See article on 'Drunkorexia'.   Having lost a friend this year to sudden liver failure and who was a regular 'half a bottle of wine a night' girl.... I think it would be a good part of your plan to have at least two or three nights a week where you don't drink anything at all.  Give your liver a chance to recover.  'Good health' is so much more than being a healthy weight.

I never, ever drink on an empty stomach. I realy dont think half a bottle a night is challenging my liver too much. I have taken alcohol almost every day of my life since I was a teenager and I cannot see the point of stopping now--the doctors disagree from year to year about safe limits. My grandad drank every day of his life and admitedly it was his liver that got him, but he was 98 and i suppose something had to go, he was in fine health up till then.

I've been learning about DNA in my physiology class. Turns out that Moderately drinking red wine will help keep your Telomeres long. Telomeres are a short idle peice of DNA at the end of the strand.. As we age, these telomeres get shorter and shorter... 

What they find with red wine drinkers is they tend to have longer telomeres than non-red wine drinkers. People who drank Pinot Noir had even longer telomers than that.

There's some pretty cool information if you search for Elizabeth Blackburn at University of California, San Fransico as well as telomere lengthening.

Moral of the story is: Red wine may not be a terrible idea

OH! and they muse that longer telomeres = longer life span. Makes sense. Thats the reason for the rant...

I like it! It's a good attitude. Slow and steady. I lost 50lb in 5 years, Im sure that's too slow for everyone else, but it made me happy. Congrats on the weight loss, that's fantastic.

On the alcohol topic, I *cannot* give up my red wine and my alcohol free nights aren't so frequent either, one or two a week really... but I have changed from a half a bottle a night girl into a quarter of a bottle a night girl, and I never have more than 2-3 drinks even when I go to the pub all night. I think that is more or less within reasonable limits. Perhaps you could try and cut down a wee bit.