"Just stop eating."

The BBQ Pit
1

That’s what my mother told me, in response to my efforts to lose weight. While the BMI has me in the acceptable range, I’m just not comfortable weighing 160lbs, particularly since the majority of the extra weight I’ve put on over the past few months is around my waist. So I try exercise. I try controlling what I eat and finding ways to deal with food cravings in the midst of stress.

This morning, I lamented the fact that I’m still hovering at 160lbs on the scale and my mother told me, “Your problem is that you’re fixated on food and losing weight. You keep eating things you think will be good for you. If you really want to lose weight, you need to just stop eating.”

She then asked me what I’d had for breakfast and I told her I had three homemade bran and whole wheat vegan pancakes, two meatless “sausage” patties and a glass of V8. She gloated that, indeed, this was my problem, since before I started trying to lose weight I didn’t eat breakfast. Now, I’m eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus two small snacks throughout the day!

My mother was an anorexic when I was a small child and then had bouts with bulimia later. She’s never once allowed any of her children to be in the same room with her when she’s weighed herself. Once, when I was fourteen and at the height of gawkiness from my growth spurt, she screamed at me in the middle of a restaurant for starving myself (I wasn’t) and told me that if I vomited up what I’d ordered she’d force me to eat it. So, now I’m really disgusted that she’s trying to encourage me to have a fucking eating disorder. Yes, perhaps if I stopped eating I would lose weight. I might also lose my hair and my teeth.

Obviously, I just shouldn’t have said anything to her at all. Trying to change my food lifestyle once again is hard, and progress might be slow, but I know if I can keep with it I’ll keep the weight off better than I would with a temporary diet. So, fuck me for being whiny and impatient, but fuck her for doing her damnedest to bring another anorexic into the family.

2

Best of luck!

FWIW, I think I’d rather stop eating entirely than try something called a “meatless sausage patty”.

3

Outside of the “Don’t eat” part, she doesn’t sound to be too wrong.

If you eat large portions of low-calorie food, you’re sort of defeating the purpose. I could see eating one or two pancakes and a single sausage patty as a reasonable portion size. You’ve just eaten double that amount. You should figure out how many calories you need to hit to be fit, and eat according to that, not according to whether there is or isn’t a “Low Fat!” label on the box of food you’re eating. And learning to eat a non-American, healthy portion size is what’s going to keep you fit in perpetuity.

4

They’re actually pretty darn good. Very sausage-like.

Well, at least you know that the problem lies with your mom, and it just takes an act of will to not involve her in this/ not really stew about what she says. Your parents, as the saying goes, know how to push your buttons because they installed them. Mothers are very hard to cope with.

5

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a good thing to eat breakfast, and to spread out your food intake through the day, to keep your metabolism up?

(On a side note, when my gather first started seeing a dietitian, he was having a hard time eating the meals she was suggesting, because of the large portion sizes. And yes, he lost weight following her advice and he says he feels healthier now)

6

[hijack] On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to eat a capybara. [del]You[/del] They look delicious. [/hj]

7

I’d actually give you the opposite advice of your mother: stop weighing yourself. Weight isn’t the be-all end-all of how fit you are. If you’re healthy and strong, and you find that the exercise, while not changing your weight, redistributes it, and you feel and look good, who cares about the scale? No one has to know your weight but you and your doctor. Focus on taking good care of yourself and not a number.

8

You’re taking “just stop eating” out of the its context, which you supply in the next paragraph:

She may not be correct in her assessment of your situation but judging by your description she does not seem to have said it with an agenda of “doing her damnedest to bring another anorexic into the family.”

9

Yes it is. People who skip breakfast in an attempt to save on calories simply make up for it by snacking in the mid morning (and it’s usually on chocolate and crisps etc).

CaerieD, good for you on being determined not to buy into your mother’s (clearly projected) bullshit. Just remember that weight loss is a marathon, not a sprint. I hate to sound like a paid representative for them or anything (I’m not) but I can’t recommend weight watchers enough. Give it a try, it works!

10

I recall using one of those clever diet plans to make my meal plans. Most of the meals I didn’t like, but there were a few quite tasty ones. I was a little astonished by the good breakfast it suggested, though: a two egg-white omelet bursting with vegetables, a sprinkling of cheese, and some strawberries and skim milk.

I barely finished the omelet, feeling stuffed to the gills. Depending on size and content (are these plate-sized flapjacks or the ones that have a four inch diameter? The big honking sausage patties or the finger-length links? And what is the nutritional content of each?) it might be a perfectly reasonable meal.

I keep saying I want to go back to that diet. Snacks of fresh strawberries and almonds and milk. Lunch of a small sauteed chicken breast on tasty wheat bread and raw veggies. Really, really good stir fry for dinner.

11

I’ve heard this before and in my case it’s not true. I have the same thing for breakfast every morning, a skim latte, and it holds me over fine till lunch. People tried to tell me “No! You need to eat more for breakfast! Then you won’t eat as big a lunch!” So I tried it. Nope, still ate the same size lunch every day whether I ate breakfast or not.
Portion control and meal size was key for me. Before eating dinner I would be hungry and decided I needed two chicken breasts, a mountain of green beans, and a mountain of rice because I was hungry dammit!
But I knocked it down to one chicken breast and small portions of rice and beans.
Could I have eaten more? Yes. Was I still hungry? No.
Just because food is healthy doesn’t mean you can eat a ton of it. Calories in, calories out.

12

She’s crazy, OP. You need to recognize that and distance yourself. I can’t tell from your post, but it sounds like you’re a grown woman living outside her house (?).

You should refuse to talk to her about it. Come up with your own litany, something like, “This always leads to a fight…” or whatever and nip it right there. If you are in fact on your own, not a child she’s still raising, then it’s NONE of her business and you have every right to put boundaries on your relationship with her. If she doesn’t want to cut the cord, that’s her problem.

Weight Watchers worked for me. I dropped about 85 lbs, at a rate of about 3 lbs a week and it wasn’t painful. Unfortunately I stopped going and have gained about half of it back. But I’ll share a little of what I learned:

Starving yourself isn’t how you lose weight: Your body will go into starvation mode, refuse to give up the fat. IIRC the body starts eating muscle, so you lose tone. Totally avoiding food with fat is bad. If you forced yourself to eat zero fat, your hair would probably start falling out. Your body needs some fat or else it will hold on to what you have in your body, so look for monounsaturated varieties.

Load up on fresh raw fruits and veggies. Try a new fruit or veggie each week. Watch out for salad dressings, butter, other condiments…OTOH salsa, mustard, and some other condiments are fine and you can knock yourself out.

Bread is generally bad because there’s little fiber in it…I lurrrrrv bread and although it isn’t forbidden on the plan, it “costs” more points than I was willing to budget. My alternative: Mission Carb Balance tortillas, which are a gift direct from God/Og. I eat them straight out of the package, or make roll ups. Technically, they’re zero points because the fiber is so high.

Drink a lot of water.

  1. It fills your stomach, helping to trigger the brain that you’re “full.”
  2. It substitutes for sugar in sodas, which everybody knows contain a lot of empty calories, and fruit juices (which usually contain a lot as well and present other problems).
  3. Your body needs water to detox.

Exercise. You don’t need to provoke a heart attack. Just get out and walk half an hour a day. You don’t have to dork walk or anything, but make it 30 minutes of continuous exercise so you get your heart rate up a bit and sustain it.

Period. Done. It will raise your metabolism and help trigger the sleep response.

IMO the single biggest thing I did to lose weight was to read labels. IIRC the formula for the points is:

(Calories divided by 50) + (Total fat grams divided by 12) -(Fiber grams divided by 5)=points

Some carry a little point calculator, like a little slide rule. I could do the math in my head.

The single biggest thing that was done for me: companies providing low-cal frozen entrees etc. Some of that Lean Cuisine is very good stuff, for instance, and they print how many points right on the package! It’s more expensive, but if you have a little money to throw at the problem, it can pay rewards.

Then WW gives you a number of points you can eat per day, yadda, and you get a bonus of 2 pts for every half hour you exercise. You get to eat those 2 points, in other words, woo hoo!

For some, it was also helpful to go to meetings because then you cheer each other on etc. I’m not into the rah rah so much but I knew I’d be weighing in, so it was kind of like how working on a deadline motivates you. Some would come in and oops, they gained a pound and others rallied support. BTW they don’t announce your weight but they may ask, in discussion, if you gained or lost.

Realize that your mom has her own weird head, and you need to avoid buying into that at all costs. I’d guess that a good part of your weight issue has to do with her weird programming, and IMO you need to be kind to yourself. In that sense, some support group (WW or other) may do you a lot of good.

Best of luck!

13

I agree with that. For whatever reason, food has become much more than food in your relationship.
I’ve been there - my mother was on “diet pills” for a great deal of the time when I was growing up. It changed her personality. Food and looks are still paramount in her life. When she and my uncle get together (both in their mid-eighties) the first thing they discuss is who gained and/or lost weight. It’s sick.
It took me a very long time to gain understanding about what was going on and take all the emotional baggage away from eating. What’s helping me more than anything (and I’ve tried every diet out there) is this book.

I’d second and third the advise of this thread - stop discussing food, weight, and apearence with your mother. Completely. No good can come of it.

14

The sausage patties are about the same size as the pork sausage patties you’d have in a restaurant, but since they’re made of vegetable protein both of them together are 100 calories. Two of the pancakes were about five inches in diameter and the third was a little silver-dollar sized one made up of the leftover batter. Since it’s homemade, I wasn’t sure what the calorie content in them is. They don’t have eggs or milk, but the wheat flour is still going to be calorie dense. If I plug the ingredients into a calorie calculator it looks like all three with the oil I greased the pan with and syrup would come out to 256. Assuming the calculator is correct, adding in the sausage and V8 brings it to 406 calories, with 18g of protein, 16g of sugar, 14g of fiber, and 15g of fat, with zero saturated fat or cholesterol. Reasonable, IMHO, but it occurs to me that my mother didn’t know what all went into them and might have been thinking of more standard pancakes. So…maybe I was a little hasty in getting angry at her over it.

lobotomyboy63, you’re absolutely right about making the switch to lots of water! I’ve cut out soda entirely from my diet recently. When I’d lost weight before, that had been one of the things I cut out and it worked really well, but unfortunately I’d been sneaking it back in, justifying it by telling myself that I’d lost so much weight I could “afford” to splurge on a pop once a week…which quickly turned into a 42 ounce fountain soda five times a week. :smack:

And yes, the lesson in all of this is to simply never discuss my weight, appearance, clothing, or food with my mother. It only makes us both miserable. Me, because I feel judged and “wrong” about whatever I’m doing. Her, because clearly she thinks she’s being helpful and I’m rejecting her “assistance.”

Fuck. I need to stop being so diplomatic over my own pit topics.

15

I can totally sympathize. My grandmother has some odd ideas about what people should weigh. She says a woman should weigh five pounds over 100 pounds for every inch over five feet that she is. Meaning that I, at 5’3", should weigh 115 pounds. Yeah, right. I looked disgustingly skinny at that weight (almost 10 years ago…). I look pretty hot right around 135, and I don’t look too bad at my current weight of 160, either, although I am technically overweight (but not obese). My grandmother (bless her heart, she’s really just trying to help) once referred to me as “fat, just like her mother” to a fitting room attendant while I was trying on clothes. My mother had just finished her chemo course at that time, and was far from fat.

I don’t think your breakfast sounded unreasonable, but I’m no dietician. I’m totally with you on the “I’m okay the way I am, but I wouldn’t mind looking/feeling a little more trimmed/toned”. Just stick with it, and don’t let the crazy people get you down!

16

IIRC a quick spray of canola for cooking is 1 point. Perhaps you can avoid that with microwaveable stuff.

406/50 + 15/12 -14/5
8.1 + 1.25 -2.8
about 6.5 total points

That’s not bad because you’d probably have 25 or so points to “spend” + 35 flex points to be spent any time during the week, so effectively 32 pts/day.

How long did it satisfy you? If you made it to lunch, excellent!

For anybody thinking 'Soy? :dubious: ’ Some of it’s pretty good. Boca lasagne is tasty, for instance. Others, like the faux chicken patties, don’t do it for me.

IIRC Morningstar makes “crumbles,” which are like pellets of soy that resemble browned and well-drained hamburger. The texture’s pretty good and the “missing” flavor is fat. Very handy to have around if you want to add to recipes like spaghetti sauce.

I like to nuke some of those with taco spice seasoning and a little lime juice. Wrap it in a tortilla as I stated above and make tacos—salsa, lettuce, tomato don’t “cost” any points. A little cheese, sour cream within reason and you can have a pretty satisfying TexMex experience.

One other bit: whatever happened to that “Calorie Commando” guy on Food Network? His show was fascinating…he’d take favorite foods and substitute ingredients, slashing the calories and fat while keeping a very satisfactory flavor.

17

As this is a weight loss thread, it’s obligatory to contradict wherever possible, and I’ll chime in to say that in my case, focussing on the number is what’s kept me going for the last ten and a half months. I’m healthy, strong and feeling and looking good (a lot better than before on three counts out of four, and certainly as strong as before), but keeping score has helped and is still helping, as I can say “Well, 95 pounds is good, but I figured at the outset that 110 would be better, so let’s see if I can’t get there”.

Ditto the observation about the marathon - also, it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. On the one hand the OP has someone saying “You’re eating too much”, and on the other I’ve had people telling me I’m not eating enough, so we all have our crosses to bear and whatever problems we have, someone has the exact opposite, and it’s no better that way round.

Stick with it - learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all, or something, and it sure helps with the old fat control.

18

Sure, numbers work for some (and they helped me). Others might find that dress size or which notch on the belt are also good indicators. Weight is probably best because it gives encouragement on small increments—2 or 3 lbs is a success you can have every week, whereas we don’t make the bigger leaps to a new clothes size very often. And there are others, like “I was only able to walk 20 minutes this week before getting out of breath…but this week, I’m doing 25!” or even “I’ve worked my way up to eight glasses of water a day!” Whatever works to motivate and inspire is fine.

Gotta say “Amen” to the marathon thing (where’s the sheepish smiley when you need one?). One of the problems I’ve encountered is that they’ve discontinued some products.

E.g. Michelina’s used to make a turkey and vegetables entree. It was 99 cents for 8 oz of food and only two points. Imagine being able to eat 8 oz x 15, or 7.5 lbs of food—in one day, and still being on target.

Random weight loss comment: about Olestra, the fat substitute. On the topic of bowel movements, a comedian on TV once said that it’s great to be “regular” but quite another to be “UNSTOPPABLE.” Olestra: don’t_even_go_there.

19

I’ve been working on weight loss myself - I started going to the gym and working with a trainer. In about 10 weeks I’ve only lost about 5lbs - but I have gone down 3 sizes! My trainer is constantly telling me I need to eat more often and that has been the hardest part for me. I am stuck in the mindset of: eat less = lose weight, plus Georgia heat in the summer kills my appetite. Years of yo-you dieting have killed my metabolism, but the exercise is working. I don’t really care what I weigh - if I can get down to a size 12 or so I will be happy. I started at a size 22. I am now at 18 and it is starting to get loose on me. So I do recommend exercise!

20

lobotomyboy63 - I did make it to lunch, actually. Since I try to reserve my snacks for the afternoon (when I tend to get the hungriest) that’s definitely a good thing. I’ve noticed before that loading up on a lot of fiber helps me to stay full for longer, so anything to encourage me to keep a good dose of fiber in every meal is a good thing. I may check out Weight Watchers, since it sounds like that could help quite a bit with meal planning.

Congratulations, SnakesCatLady! I have been adding exercise to my daily regime, though it can be hard to set the time aside for it. When I figure out a way to combine reading/surfing the 'net with exercise, all my troubles will be solved!