In my non-professional opinion, there’s a good chance you have sufficient willpower to stop the binges forever and in fact to starve yourself to death if you are not careful. It’s just a matter of applying it correctly.
Which may seem a bit odd, since there would appear to be a huge difference between 48 hours and decades. However, you need to keep in mind that your inner screw-up – the part of you which is responsible for your eating problems – does not really have a well developed sense of time. For that part of your brain, 48 hours is basically forever.
Anyway, I am happy to explain to you how – in my non-professional opinion – you can use your limited willpower to stop the binges for as long as you choose.
But first please tell me the definition of “binge” that you used. (You did write it down, right?) Also, please tell me exactly what you marked down in your calendar to mark the beginning and end of the 48 hours.
If you don’t want to eat certain things, don’t have them in the house. Ever. If you’ve got to go to the store to get it, you’re much more likely to give in to the innate laziness everyone has, and choose to stay at home instead. That extra effort changes the calculus of “hungry”.
If I lived alone, I wouldn’t have bread in the house. I can hardly expect my husband and son to give up what is, for most people, a staple because I can’t stop eating bread once I’ve started.
I think this would be helpful for a lot of people, but in the West, junk food is too easily available, ubiquitous, and heavily pushed for this to be something you can rely on as the means to successfully modify your diet.
In fact I would say there is a danger in this approach that you will have some initial success, get overconfident, and then one day a food pusher brings donuts to the office on the same day the boss yells at you, and then blammo, you’re off the wagon and your diet has blown up in your face. Again.
I get your point but I think it’s important to know that if you have a couple of donuts you have not in fact fallen off the wagon and had your diet blow up in your face. For me anyway it’s important to know that if you have a donut today the best thing to do is don’t have one tomorrow, not conclude that you failed and now you can gorge yourself.
Well it depends on what your diet permits and forbids.
I’m not sure what the best way to think about a slip is. Common sense says that if you don’t see it as a serious failure, you will probably repeat it. On the other hand, I do agree that there is a “what the hell” problem.
I do know that failed diets start with slips. And I’m pretty confident that for most people, it’s impractical to avoid slips by avoiding their forbidden foods.
I do think that more research needs to be done into this area. Participants in the NWCR should be asked if they ever have slips and if so, how they handle it.
Depends on how important it is to both you and them. It is more difficult to maintain any behavior modification if you either don’t have support — or worse, active opposition — from your family. I personally think it’s bullshit to have to make two different styles of meals; one for you, one for the rest of the family. If they want bread, they can damn well go out and get it for themselves.
Of course, I say this as someone who just doesn’t eat things that I don’t want to eat. My wife does most of the cooking because I don’t even get home until after 7 p.m. 5–6 days a week. She eats bread occasionally, rice more often. I’m not low-carb all the time, but I generally avoid eating bread and the only candy I eat is a few small pieces of chocolate on occasion. If she makes something with a bread or rice component, I sometimes eat it, but usually don’t. She knows I generally don’t eat bread, so the concession she makes is that it’s an optional component.
I just learned another cause of weight plateaus and gains I couldn’t explain before: salt intake. My salt intake had slowly crept up unnoticed. Once my attention was called to it, and I cut out the excess salt, I dropped seven pounds of water in a week, lost an inch from my waist and half from each thigh. I didn’t even go to a full-on low sodium diet; just dropped the extra.
How did my salt intake creep up so much? Black truffle salt was the gateway drug, followed by Penzey’s Turkish seasoning (first ingredient is salt) and Savory’s Peruvian Chile Lime seasoning. I now need to invent salt free versions of these delicious seasonings for my roasted veggies.
One, eating all of whatever is there- If I have a loaf of bread, I make sandwiches until there’s no bread left. If there’s a package of lunch meat, the entire package gets eaten. I don’t stop until there’s no food.
Two, strangely enough, eating while driving. For whatever reason, my sense of proportion and what is ‘okay’ for me goes right out the window while I’m behind the wheel. Fast food and chips always get picked up somewhere, and (as I found over the last two nights) it is a -serious- effort of will in order to short-circuit this ideation.
As for the calendar thing, I didn’t use words or any such… Just put a check mark there. shrug
For those speaking about not having things in the house; that’s another short-circuit. I shop for myself and no one else, but I want to get things I -want- to eat, y’know? I’ll get lower-calorie versions of things I like, but I find it -really- difficult not to buy them at all. Yes, I know, that leads to downfall, but I can’t… Not do it.
(And as talking about this is a minor anxiety trigger, I’ll leave it be for now and see where brazil84 and every/anybody else wants to go with this.
Well down the road (so to speak), you are going to have to work with the definition since eating all of the potato chips except for one doesn’t qualify as a binge. But I think it’s okay for now. In my non-professional opinion, of course.
That’s fine too (in my non-professional opinion) although you will probably have to tweak this down the road as well.
Sorry that this is psychologically uncomfortable for you. As I mentioned above, you seem to have a pretty serious problem, a lot worse than your typical 45-year-old who has gained 30-40 pounds since high school.
But anyway, here is the next step:
Do another 48-hour break from binging, complete with check-marks in your calendar. As before, plan it a day or so in advance so that you can prepare psychologically.
This time, on the morning of the first or second day – but at least 12 hours before the break is scheduled to end – consider putting another check mark in your calendar to extend your break for an extra day. Then do the same thing the next day, and so on. Extend your break from binging for only one day at a time.
When deciding what and when to eat, keep in mind that it’s the calendar that controls, along with the definition of “binge” you posted here.
When the urge to binge hits you (and I promise you it will), keep in mind that (1) you are free to eat whatever you want so long as you stay outside the definition of “binge”; and (2) you are free to wait until midnight on the last day and then binge to your heart’s content. So for example, you are free at any time to go to a fast food restaurant and pig out so long as you eat in the restaurant itself.
As another example, if you have a choice between eating a celery stick while driving and eating a McDonalds hamburger in the restaurant, and you are checkmarked through tomorrow, you will choose the hamburger. Because all you need to do is follow the rule you have laid out, nothing more and nothing less, and only until the last checkmark on your calendar which is never more than a day or two away.
Keep in mind that you will not lose any weight doing the above. The goal is to get control of your mind, not to get control over your body. Once you get control over your mind, losing weight will be easy, if you choose to.
On Nov 1 I signed up for a holiday challenge. For every pound I lost I would donate a pound of food to a food bank. On Dec 21 I dropped off 20 lbs of food to the Northern Illinois Food Bank. I did it through healthy eating and exercise. Losing that much weight during the holidays has really motivated me. Setting a goal really helped and I look forward to continuing in 2014 (I’ll post that goal in the 2014 thread)!
Resurrecting this for the new year! I lost 30# last year, and since then, not a thing, in fact my weight it creeping back up, despite daily workouts, food tracking, maintaining a 1200 cal./day diet. My doctor told me to do 800 calories max. I don’t think I can do that and maintain any level of energy to keep up with my life. Anyone ever do this? He wants me on 2 400 calorie shakes a day, which smells of fad to me, and unsustainable.
You are miscounting which is unsurprising since it is difficult to count calories accurately. Even professional dieticians have a difficult time tracking their own caloric intake.
Of course I know nothing about you personally, but many people have made claims similar to yours and had those claims studied, both formally and informally. Invariably the person turns out to have been eating far more than he realized.
Here’s my free non-professional advice for you:
Instead of counting calories, focus on eating the same amount of food every day. i.e. always have the same meals at the same times with basically the same components in the same quantities. Obviously you will have to be careful to make sure your diet is balanced. You will also need to blow off any special events for the next couple months.
At the same time, track your weight by weighing yourself every day (of course naked when you first get up in the morning and have used the toilet) and computing a moving average of your weight.
Once you get a sense of where your weight is headed, tweak your daily diet downwards until you are steadily losing weight at a modest rate. At that point – if you feel you must – you can carefully measure a day’s worth of food to see how many calories are involved. But there’s really no need to. Your basic daily diet is your old friend which you can turn to if you pig out at a special event and want to lose the weight you gained. You can also tweak your basic daily diet and turn it into a maintenance diet.
The bottom line is that if you want to lose weight, you need to know how much food you are eating, but calories are not the only measure and not necessarily the best.
I can’t really speak to this since I am not a doctor, but I agree it doesn’t sound like such a great idea. I have been informally researching diet and exercise for a couple years now and I think the best way to go is with real food in modest portions. As opposed to junk food; diet food; and junk food which is sold as diet food.
Especially if your “problem foods” tend to be sweet and creamy I would be very wary of having shakes in connection with a diet. You want to get away from anything which has a tendency to foul up your judgment.
I started MyFitnessPal on 8/29/2013 and weighed 270lbs. So far I’ve lost 42 1/2 pounds which puts me exactly half of the way to my goal of 185. I’m trying to stick to around 1200 calories/day. On days that I walk 4 miles briskly, I give myself a few more calories but not many. I hope to at or very near my goal by the end of May. It’s hard but doable.
I’ve lost over 60 lbs and my waistline is 12 inches slimmer :D. I’m lighter than I’ve been in over 25 years and am now slightly above what NIH defines as normal weight. I began losing weight in 2010 and I’m taking it slowly, creating a new goal when I reach my old goal.
My next goal: Lose 20 more lbs and be in the middle of the range NIH defines as normal.
Not very; my BMI is a 23.7, and the NIH defines that as normal. However, I’m pretty sure that’s high for my frame, and my body fat percentage of around 35% (per my digital scale’s measurement) bears out that supposition. I’d like to lose another 5-10 lbs, but I’m completely plateau’d at the moment.
