Your only hope is to somehow acquire the mental discipline and dedication that is necessary to lose weight. I don’t know how a person acquires these things. Can they be learned? I don’t know. But this is the area you should be focusing on. In other words, forget about food for now. Your problem is not food. (It never was.) Your problem is that you do not have discipline and dedication when it comes to food urges, both of which are mental/psychological problems. Fix those problems, and losing weight will be easy.
But again, I have no idea how a person acquires these attributes. If you believe it is impossible to become a person of discipline, you have no chance of losing weight, in which case you will be much better off not trying to lose weight.
And for those keeping score: my chile rellenos, which, aside from a small tangerine, my coffee with cream, and a handful of macadamia nuts, were all I had to eat yesterday, were 684 calories. Assuming my crappy batter absorbed two tablespoons of oil and that I ate it all, which I didn’t.
No more than I dislike alchoholics that “aren’t allowed” to enjoy their booze.
Its not a moral judgement. But at some point reality has to set in.
Imagine me bitching for years about getting a handle on my booze problem. I am nearly famous here on the SDMB for it. Then, in another thread, I ask about making the perfect margaritta.
Yeah, its not the margaritta. Any reasonable person can drink em in moderation and be fine :rolleyes:
It’s not about the calories in the nutmeg cake, it’s just that it shows such a lack of discipline when it comes to food. Which, you know, I’m not busting you for that…I’m not the most disciplined person in the world. I’m just saying that your self-reporting to us tends to sound really really unhealthy and unbalanced. And then you say no no no, it never really adds up to very many calories. But even if that’s true…and I didn’t go to the calorie-counting link you posted, so I’m going to assume that it is, in fact, true…it just sounds really really unhealthy and unbalanced.
That, I will never argue with. I have almost no impulse control of any kind: food, money, sex, love, mouth. I am a woman who goes with her flow, even when I wish like I hell I could stop myself. You are someone who will never be able to imagine what it is to feel very much out of control, to feel as though you are trapped inside a body that has been taken over by someone else, and all you can do is scream inside your own head: “STOP!!!”. It is completely beyond the understanding of someone like you, and you should be very grateful…
But I’ll bet Zyada understands.
So no, I didn’t overcome my serious compulsive issues by discipline and dedication, I overcame them by no longer needing to use food to soothe myself, something I achieved via loads of therapy. Now I just like what I like and I suck at denying myself. And what I like is more, and more carby, than is effective for me to be slim, but it is not a ridiculously unreasonable amount of food or calories, which was the point of the thread! (Read the OP!) If I’d managed to overcome my food compulsions when I was 16 instead of 36, I would never have become obese, even without much impulse control. But yo-yo dieting for almost 30 years, well…
Anyway, low carb is the answer for me. If I can’t make it work, well, I’ll just have to accept my obesity and enjoy my life in spite of it.
And it is! But it isn’t how I live, it’s an occasional thing. I don’t believe a single person in here honestly thinks that indulging myself on nutmeg cake for two days every three months means a damn thing.
And as I just posted, I AM undisciplined! Horribly so. It is a HUGE issue in ways that have nothing at all to do with my eating. But I can’t change it- that’s the terrible nature of it. So I have to find ways to manage it, to not let it consume or destroy me. To be honest with myself about it. And letting myself eat nutmeg cake for two days is one way to do that, because it’s less damaging than trying to be artificially balanced, eat food I don’t want, and STILL EAT THE CAKE. Because then I’d eat 3000 calories! Better to just be honest with myself, indulge in cake, and be sick of it by day three, when I am happy to make a nice big salad!
So I’m not allowed to say anything even vaguely mocking about Taubes, but you can bad mouth the scientists that didn’t focus their limited time and money on your favourite theory?
Well, it* is* the Stoid’s thread. And even though you can prove she contradicted her OP, you can’t call the OP irrelevant. So I guess that mocking a pseudoscientific hack is out of the question as well.
No, but it’s not just that. We heard about eating cornbread (JUST cornbread) for a meal…and you didn’t eat all the cornbread at once, so it was probably a couple meals. And, you’ve stated that this is a habit with you, and it probably involves a whole lot of different indulgence foods, and more than two days every three months. It’s just not a healthy eating pattern. Look at it this way…if I told you I was feeding my kids that way, would you think it was a good idea? Well, it’s not a good idea for you, either. Even if you weighed 140 pounds, it wouldn’t be a good idea for you.
I’ve got ADD issues, too, so I do know all about managing this kind of thing…it’s a lifelong process. Have you tried any medications for it?
This reminds me of my grandma, who was a type 2 diabetic and vastly overweight. She was always indulging herself in little treats: “I haven’t had any chocolate for over a month! I can have a little chocolate today.” “I only get a chance to eat at the State Fair once a year! I can indulge today.” “It’s the family reunion! I haven’t had Aunt Janice’s pie in forever. One piece today won’t kill me.”
You get the picture. Any one particular treat was a rare indulgence, but I’d say she was having a “rare indulgence” probably 2-3 times per week. It did not help her health issues in the slightest. (She died before she was 70, after a major heart attack followed by sudden-onset dementia, and it was not pretty.)
Anyway, I’m not really sure I understand all the rancor between the “You low-cal people don’t enjoy life and you hate food and I can’t live that way!” people on one side and the “You low-carb people are eating nothing but bacon and lard and I can’t live that way!” people on the other. Dude, whatever. If you find a dietary plan that works for you and you can stick to it and it makes you a healthier person, go for it. Plenty of people have succeeded via low-carb plans. Plenty of people have succeeded via low-cal plans. It’s whatever you can make work for you personally.
Generally speaking, I think that having cake around the house is a bad idea, though. Having cake in the house is something that people without food issues can do. I’m not one of those people, and I suspect Stoid isn’t either.
Now let’s talk about this, Crafter_man, because I think you are reacting, instead of considering what you’re saying.
Let’s assume, as we have been doing so far, for the purposes of this part of the discussion, that reduced calories leads to weight loss.
Your statement, within the context of weight loss, makes no sense. If a morbidly obese person can successfully lose weight by eating fewer calories, but all those calories are foods that have been fried in a vat of lard, what exactly is the problem? Are you saying that fat is bad? If so, how is it bad if someone is losing weight eating it? Is it just fat that is added via frying that is bad (surely you dont’ mean that, because of course that makes no sense)?
Because I think you’re just having a knee jerk reaction to the very idea of fried food, which has come to be considered fattening and unhealthy. But since most fried food involves a lot of carbohydrate as well, it’s certainly debatable as to what aspect of fried food is actually the damaging and unhealthy aspect, assuming caloric values are the same.
Or perhaps you object to fat on some other basis, which is a different thing. If you think fat is inherently bad, you are mistaken. If you think that animal fat is inherently bad, you are mistaken. If you think that rapeseed fat is better than butter, you are mistaken. But that’s a different conversation, and we can duel over various studies on that.
Sarahfeena. If I was going to lie AT ALL, why would I tell as much as I do? Does that really make sense to you? Because what you’re saying is that I’m lying. Which is rude, uncalled for, and out of line, but aside from that, it makes no sense. If I felt the need to lie, I’d just lie, period, and not speak of my nutmeg cake or my cornbread at all. But I don’t lie. I tell the truth. Compulsively AND deliberately. Keeps things simple. Therefore, trust me when I tell you that two days of cake is not a regular feature of my life,a nd I do not have a whole lot of “indulgence foods”, because my “indulgence foods” tend to be my own cooking. Baking, actually. And I definitely don’t bake on a regular basis.
As for kids: I’m sure you’ve heard that if you leave kids alone to eat what they like, it seems ocrazy at first, but eventually they end up eating a balanced diet. There’s nothing wrong with with eating any one thing over a couple of days, whether it’s cake or lettuce or anything else. For me or your kids.
Yes, I’ve talked about it in this thread. I find medication useful for gaining clarity over the fog, but it has never helped with impulsivity, unfortunately.
Which is why I don’t generally “have it around the house.” (Although I could have almost any cake around the house without eating it, as long as it wasn’t one of my own. Most cake aint’ that great.)
And your grandma, all due respect, was making excuses to make it ok to eat things that she knew other people, seeing how fat she was, would judge her for eating, a common enough thing.
But since I live alone and the only way anyone on earth would ever even have the slightest clue about a single thing I eat is if I tell them, I really have no reason to lie to anyone. I can just not talk about it all if I want to hide what I eat. It’s a damn sight simpler to say nothing if I dont’ want to say everything.
Where did I “bad mouth the scientists that didn’t focus their limited time and money on [my] favorite theory”? And did this “bad mouthing” include misrepresentation and exaggeration, which would make it comparable to what I was chiding you for? Or is your statement yet more misrepresentation, only this time, of what I said, instead of what Taubes said?
You seem a little obsessed. Let me enlighten you: what a person weighs is not the only, or even the most important thing about them. So your inability to see anything going on in this except the issue of grandma’s weight and whether she would lose any is completely irrelevant.