So what now....
I needed to know WHY I was overweight; was I an emotional eater (a lot of things fall in this category) ? Addicted to sugar, cake and candy and the like? Or did simply just eat too much at meal time.
I am a recovering emotional eater that ate too much. I would eat when I was depressed (which was a lot), when I was bored (which also was a lot), even when I was happy. Hell, I really didn't need a reason, I would just eat. It was just that it was also how much I was eating. If 2 spoonfulls of ice cream were good then 37 spoonfulls were better. One slice of pizza was great but 6 was about my average with the remaining leftovers eaten at breakfast with mayo smeared all over them. What would really get me is that I would do this kind of eating mainly at night and with how my schedule has been for the past few years dinner has been getting later and later into the evening. It's not so hot to eat a full meal and 20 minutes later head off to bed.
So how did I get this way? Like most kids I was told that whatever I put on my plate, I had to eat no matter how full I was feeling. If I took more than I thought I could eat....too bad, I had to finish it all. Now add this to the fact that I associated food with safety and comfort as I know a lot of people do. Money was always a major issue when I was a kid but no matter what it took, my parents always made sure that there was food on the table (hence the clean your plate bit). From a young age I learned that as long I went to bed with a full tummy that everything was alright. I was safe.
Patterns that are developed at such a young age, under 6, are some of the most deeply routed and most difficult to undo. This will sound goofy but this is the breakthrough I had. I finally realized that if I didn't do anything that I was going to keep gaining weight. I was within sight of crossing over the 400lb mark and I knew that I was at a turning point. I had to fight, to the death. It was either me or the fat and one of us wasn't going to survive.
This was the plan I devised....
- SlimFast shake for breakfast
- SlimFast shake for lunch
- SlimFast shake for afternoon snack or something real to eat
- Real food like a Lean Cuisine or similar prepared meal
- Grand total of 1000 calories per day
- Vitamins everyday and some at night to make sure I wasn't doing any damage
Now when I go to work I pack everything in my cooler bag. Diet soda (yes I'm a soda junkie), water, and my two shakes for the middle of the day. I would have already had my morning one before leaving for work. This way I can tell myself that I can have anything I want to eat today as long as it's in that bag. To me, this forces me to adhere to my program and in a matter of days it's a no-brainer. When I first started I did have hunger pangs but I would just use something like Pepsid or Zantac to get through the day. I was trying to keep to a schedule and spread my meals out evenly through the day. They only lasted maybe two days then they weren't an issue anymore.
Now what funny is that this is only day 2 back on my VLC diet (very low calorie) and I can already feel my mental fog lifting. I have energy again (well it's returning) and I can see my goal again. It feels odd to say this but I'm actually happy to be back on this program. I don't think of it as being very restictive or hard or denying myself things. I think of it as a transition period. I spent over 30 years being fat, yes I used the F-word, so I think I can manage a few months of changing things around so I'm not fat anymore.
I'm back on track now and soon that scale needle will be going in the right direction again.
posted by overstuffedteddybear @ 3:01 p.m.
4 comments
4 Comments:
Hey man:
I too am overweight. I weight 235lbs and would love to be at least 174lbs.
I think, in my opinion that only consuming 1000 calories is not realistic for a guy your size. I think what will happen is that you will be sick and the weight will eventually come back; with interest I might add. You need to find something that would calculate amount of calories you would consume to maintain your weight and bring it down a bit.
For example, to maintain my weight I would be consuming almost 3000 calories; so I'm thinking 1900-2000 calories for me is realistic and manageable because this way Im not food deprived and still have energy to burn.
I know that VLC diets are well to put it bluntly, risky. But what I am doing while I'm losing weight is reprogramming how I feel about myself and about food.
There is a heavily advertised weight loss program called the Dr Bernstein Diet. Now that's one that I'd call unsafe. Granted you have to go to their medical offices 3 times a week for B vitamin injections but you are limited to less than 800 cals/day. He has a high failure rate because it's a damn tough program to stick to. For me, my program isn't tough. I've been on an all-liquid diet before and I've studied up on what I'm doing so I know where the pitfalls are. By no means am I recommending this to anyone else but me.
I have to rewire how I think about food and portions and eating in general. So for me, the best way to do that was to essentially eliminate "food" till I can learn to deal with it again. This is also why I stay away from all the low-cal candies & chocolates. That is just asking for trouble on my part. I've broken my sugar addiction and I'm getting stronger as a result.
Even if I was doing the regular by the book Slim-Fast plan, that's only 1200 cals a day. I've just tweaked it a bit. Believe me I have NO intention of ever seeing this weight back on me again and with how my thinking is changing, it won't come back.
Well, I wish you the best of luck man seriously. Do whatever it takes and keep us all posted
I appreciate your concerns and agree mostly with what your nutritionist has told you.
Yes there is a threshold that the body will tolerate and anything below that and the body will think that it's starving and it will go into self preservation mode. This is when it saves all the fat stores and attacks only muscle/organs to lower the calorie needs of the body in attempts to live through the famine it thinks it's going through.
This threshold varies from person to person but it's in the range of 500-800 calories per day. There are many many medically supervised diets that flirt with this line, Medi-Fast, Optifast, HMR, etc. I am a paramedic and I know what my blood work looks like. I have engineered my diet for me knowing my boundries and what I can and cannot handle. I am fully aware of how risking VLC diets are especially when you finally come off them, this is where all of my behavior modification is coming into play. I don't look at a bag of chips/candy/ice cream/bread whatever and drool and lament that I can't have that item. I have zero desire for them. I'm now looking at how I used to eat and realizing just how stupid it was. My portion sizes were easily twice what they should have been. I'm envisioning now how I will eat after I'm done and I'm looking at how full my plate used to be and I can't fathom eating that much now.
These diets are always controversial but I think they have a legitimate place. If a person has less than 50lbs to lose, stay away from them but if you have more than 100 to lose (like I do) then they do become a legitimate option. You just have to be smart about it and have your doctor keep tabs on things, and that's just what I'm doing.
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