Thanks for trying to help me, But I’m terrible with any kind of diaries. Not just about eating. I can’t log my hours at work, either.
No one said anything about bulemia. Just…how is “eating too much” not “overeating”?
Something that has largely been missing from this thread is any real discussion of exercise. I also can be lazy about watching what I eat, taking that extra slice of pizza, etc.
Good cardio may be the “Magic Bullet” you’re looking for. What if you waited 60 more days, ate as you normally would, but spent 30 minutes a day getting seriously sweaty and out of breath?
I’d bet you’d start melting pounds off right away. I find that doing cardio is far easier for me than to closely monitor every calorie I put in my mouth. You just take the calories off on the other side of the equation.
I think she means “compulsive eating”. Disordered behavior. She’s using it as a term of art.
Oh my God, you were trying to count calories using notebooks? I have also had zero success with such a difficult, labour-intensive pain-in-the-ass method. I use Fitday, my husband uses LoseIt on his iTouch. Since we basically eat the same foods every day, it’s a matter of minutes to put my food and exercise in each day.
You say you can’t log your hours at work, either, but I have a feeling if your boss told you you’d be fired if you couldn’t find a way to start logging them, you’d find a way. I really don’t want to harp on online calorie-counting, but I can’t stress enough how little effort I have to make to lose weight this way. Willpower has nothing to do with it. You’re a psychologist; you know that it takes four weeks to develop a habit. Once I developed the habit of recording my food daily with a couple of clicks, it’s just like brushing my teeth now.
You know, with my husband and my success, everyone is asking us how we’re doing it, and we tell them and send them links and all, and no one else is using the online calorie counting method that we’re finding so easy. Maybe it is just us, that this is a good fit for us. You’ve got two months, though - what do you say you give an online, much easier calorie counter a try?
I’m not exactly amazed that you attempted to log your food in the most complicated, difficult, boring, self-defeating way… and then concluded you can’t count calories. (well I am slightly amazed that you extrapolated from such an extreme and unlikely data point). I couldn’t count calories either if it involved a pencil, math, and carrying a little book around!
Luckily such measures are hardly necessary. I use fitday.com, as noted above there are other, similar websites. They even have phone apps that do the same thing on a slightly more basic level. (Fitay and similar, also analyze your nutrition, track your weight, track your exercise, mood journal, and a million other little features).
If your son say to you, here in a few years, “Sorry. I can’t keep my room clean or do my own laundry. I’ve tried. It’s just not something I can do”, are you going to take him at his word, assuming he’s totally sincere?
Did you walk into math class, flip to the back of the book, try to work some problems and then decide that you’re terrible with figures?
People often think they can’t do something. Really, they just haven’t figured out how to yet.
Another voice chiming in with support for online calorie counting.
The day I joined Weight Watchers, I thought I would hate tracking what I ate. Everyone says it’s key to changing your eating habits, but it sounded like such a chore. But I’ll agree with everyone else: online tracking makes it super easy. Once you’ve gotten your favorite things entered, it’s click click click. And yes, after a while the numbers sort of sit in your head and you can ballpark stuff pretty well, same as anything else: it comes with practice.
One caveat. It’s going to take more than a few days to get super easy. Good grief, of course it takes an effort of more than a few days for ANYTHING to get easy! You wouldn’t take a guitar lesson, practice for a few days, and then quit because you’re not Eddie Van Halen.
I’m also :dubious: about the idea that “can’t” isn’t really “don’t like to” or simply “won’t.” Sometimes we have to do things in life that we don’t specifically enjoy; they’re just things we have to do. I run/walk at least 5K every day now. I don’t love it (yet); if you told me that I could quit right now and never had to do it again, I’d say, “Oh thank you,” and toss my running shoes in the trash. But I look at it as something that I need to do, like a bodily function, in order to keep those 70 pounds off. Nobody loves brushing their teeth, or going to the bathroom, or having a colonoscopy, but we do it because it’s necessary to our well-being. That said, I do my best to find things to enjoy about running: having my tunes on, wearing cute little workout clothes, getting into the occasional groove where I feel like my legs are moving of their own accord and I could run forever. In other words, fake it till you make it.
Yeah, that seemed bizarre to me, too. Of all the mental health professionals I’ve known (and I’ve known quite a few), I’ve never heard any of them insist that “overeating” was defined only as “binge eating.” (I assume you don’t mean that binging and purging are required to be an overeater – that makes even less sense.)
No one said anything about eating disorders, either. Bad eating and exercise habits, or emotional eating, or fear of failure/success, don’t need to rise to the level of an actual eating disorder for it to be a problem, and for most people it doesn’t.
I’ll also point out that your own link on the long-term success/failure of weight loss points out that those who were successful permanently changed their eating and exercise habits, rather than “going on a diet” and then promptly reverting to old bad habits. With or without surgery, permanent lifestyle changes are required. There is no magic bullet.
Honestly, if you’re so sure that you’ve done all you can with your eating habits, why aren’t you looking at your exercise habits?
I’m off to bed now and a busy day at work tomorrow…
Not to snark, but…
“La, la, la, la…I’m not listening, etc.”
Not a very mechanism for coping with a serious problem.
This. My weight loss over the last month is pretty obvious- even though I’m a big fatty with a lot to lose, I’m a short fatty, so my face thins out in a snap (I think I lost 15 lbs in my chin, actually! :p). Everyone- and I mean everyone- is asking me what I’m doing. When I say that I’m using and loving MyPlate by Livestrong, they pooh pooh and say that they “can’t” count calories. Myplate is seriously the most brainless thing I have done this year- it takes no effort on my behalf! And with the Blackberry App (that cost $2), I can keep track throughout the day, compare restaurant lunches, etc.- all without interfering with my day.
As a teacher, what I often find is that people think they’ve tried something, but what they mean is that they’ve 1. Really wanted to be able to do it and 2. Made themselves really miserable thinking about how they should be doing it. The more miserable they make themselves, the harder they think they’ve tried–and it is real, genuine misery.
But that’s not how you try to do something. You don’t just want it real bad and suffer a certain amount of self-administered punishment. You try to do something like you solve a video game level–trial and error, experimentation, serious reflection about last time you failed (i.e., WTF just happened?!) , consulting with others who’ve played the same game, and, more than anything else, stubborn persistence.
Personally, I’ve found that the idea that losing weight (and I’m down ~30 pounds now) is all up to me to be incredibly helpful. There are no health issues or mental disorder keeping me from being thin… it’s just me and I have complete control of that. Though it isn’t easy (changing usually isn’t), it is very simple. I’d rather have the freedom to pig out now and then with the only consequence being a few extra pounds that I could then get rid of, rather than worry that it might kill me or do other damage.
I won’t try to talk you into this surgery, as I think it’s a bad idea for reasons mentioned previously, but if you’ve got your heart set on it I wish you the best.
Similarly, I found SparkPeople to be really helpful. It’s amazing how quickly the calories can add up for the day, even when you’re making your own food at home. That “serving” of pasta is probably more like 2 or more if you really check the box and weigh it out, and so on.
Another thing that was useful to me is Brian Wansink’s book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. It’s not a diet book. It’s an easy-to-read book about the research that he and others have done into how we constantly miscalculate how many calories our food has, how much we’ve eaten, etc., plus information on how we can try to work against these tendencies.
I tend to fluctuate between about right and 10-15 lbs overweight if I’m not carefully watching what I eat. My problem is comfort eating. I know I’m over if my pants are fitting tight, so I crack down again. I really need to stick better to tracking on SparkPeople so I can stay at my ideal weight instead of wavering up and down.
I loved Mindless Eating, I found it extremely helpful in understanding why I did some things. Like…how do most people know they are finished eating? Their plate is empty. So, now I put less on my plate since I know I have a tendency to finish my plate.
July will be my 6 year anniversary from the day I changed my life. I am still the same person, I still love to eat, I’m still horribly lazy, I’m still making it work. If you had told me all the stuff I would have to do, and keep doing for my entire life 6.5 years ago, I would have said you were INSANE. Turns out, it wasn’t so bad after all. I wish I had known it 20 years ago.
OP, you’ve admitted that you have an eating problem. You should be seeing a psychiatrist or a therapist, not a surgeon.
It appears she is one, so you’d think the importance of therapy would ring a little more true with her than it is.
I wonder how much the OP’s difficulty with calorie counting is her mind’s subconscious attempt to make WLS a more justified option. If WLS didn’t exist, how much harder would she have tried to watch her diet or exercise?
Since I’ve never had to lose weight, perhaps I’m talking out my ass here. But if simply eating one too many servings of meatloaf every night is the problem, not anything deeper, it seems like relatively simple changes plus time and patience should lead to the changes she wants. If it is deeper than this (and only the OP would know) then the OP’s has gotta be prepared for WLS not doing much.
Maastricht, it sounds like you are at the end of your rope and feel as if WSL will be your savior. Maybe your doctor is right, and it’ll be the best thing that happens to you. But to me, it sounds like you could possibly lose a lot from this, and I’m not talking about weight. How will you feel if something goes wrong with this surgery and it causes permanent damage that drastically affects the quality of your life? It’s one thing if you were to become sick or debilitated by something out of your control. But to voluntarily take on these risks, when other less risky options exist, will be something that could haunt you forever if the worst should happen.
Not trying to scare you, honestly. I simply believe that if an organ isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Your stomach and the rest of the GI tract are in good working order. I could see inviting a surgeon to go in there to tinker with shit because your weight is on the verge of killing you and the potential costs of WSL are outweighed by the potential positives. But you’re doing it because calorie counting is hard and it’s a challenge to not eat that extra piece of bread. If it goes horribly wrong, will your reaction be one of collossal remorse or will you say “well, this sucks, but I can live with these consequences because I had no other choice”.
I may well print this out and frame it. It applies so much more widely than just to weight loss.