How to stay consistent when trying to lose weight?

Sparkle097
Sparkle097 Posts: 83 Member
edited November 29 in Health and Weight Loss
The biggest challenge for me is temptation. When I see sweet food I can’t control my mind. I can’t say no to them. Also my cal goal is decent. It keeps me full. I wanna lose weight so badly but Ughh... all the sweet foods are slowing the process. I’m girl, 18, 5.3ft weight 60kg and my goal is 55kg.
I’ll eat really good for like 5/6 days then I eat crap again. Then the cycle repeats.... whenever I eat so much junk, the cals add up to more than 2500 cals. Ughhh

Replies

  • mitch16
    mitch16 Posts: 2,113 Member
    edited November 2018
    If you can't resist sweet food, then don't be around sweet food. Don't buy it, don't go to bakeries, stay away from the dessert table at parties... Find something else to distract you when cravings hit. Have a big glass of water or hot tea. Go for a walk or exercise. Chew gum. Brush your teeth.
  • amy19355
    amy19355 Posts: 805 Member
    sathmif465 wrote: »
    The biggest challenge for me is temptation. When I see sweet food I can’t control my mind. I can’t say no to them. Also my cal goal is decent. It keeps me full. I wanna lose weight so badly but Ughh... all the sweet foods are slowing the process. I’m girl, 18, 5.3ft weight 60kg and my goal is 55kg.
    I’ll eat really good for like 5/6 days then I eat crap again. Then the cycle repeats.... whenever I eat so much junk, the cals add up to more than 2500 cals. Ughhh

    Look into altering the experience of the food you eat by thinking about how to make the food TASTY to your personal preferences.

    There is nothing that says "good" healthy food has to taste like nothing.

    Make the quality food choices into meals that please you while eating them. Figure out what spices and herbs need to be in your kitchen so you can replicate (and sometime improve) on the yummy stuff found in restaurants.

    for example: I love Mexican food, and so I spent some time sampling things from the Goya brand of products at the grocery, and am able to bring much of those flavors into my dishes. My fave right now is the green Cilantro based sauce in a jar - that stuff is awesome as a cooking sauce as well as a garnish sauce.

    Fat has the advantage of holding flavors nicely, and, when eaten, the taste stays in my mouth longer than if I eat a piece of candy or other mostly sugary treat. Now that I measure carefully all the things I eat, including 'dabs of butter' and 'splash of olive oil', with a little practice and experimenting I can achieve tasty + nutritious, all in one meal.

    After a few months, I find my preferred breakfast is a 'fatty' bowl of corn grits with a dab of butter and two goopy eggs chopped into it, WITH a side of yogurt and fruit. Used to be, the yogurt and fruit was all I ate and two hours later I'd be rummaging for snacks. Now I make it to lunch no problem, and, look forward to the single almond butter stuffed date that is my sweet+fatty fix.

    good luck to you, and good fitness to us all!
    amyfb
  • Sparkle097
    Sparkle097 Posts: 83 Member
    Thank you guys! I guess it’s about moderation. :wink: But the thing is if I eat a small sweet, then I would wanna eat more and more. :neutral:
  • amy19355
    amy19355 Posts: 805 Member
    sathmif465 wrote: »
    Thank you guys! I guess it’s about moderation. :wink: But the thing is if I eat a small sweet, then I would wanna eat more and more. :neutral:

    For a long long time I was a fan of the 'many small meals all day long' school of eating.

    It wasn't easy at first , but, with a little more each morning over the course of a few weeks, I'm mostly at 2 really big meals (breakfast and lunch), and a moderate to smallish dinner with light afternoon snack. once in a while an evening snack of raw veggies or a small piece of fruit.

    I think what the difference is now in the big meals I eat is the nutritional balance that I take time to make happen.

    'back in the day' , a medium chicken cheesesteak with fried onions would be my big meal idea, and I'd suffer heartburn and the desire for a nap after lunch.

    today, my big lunch will be:
    2 servings of chicken noodle soup ( 1 can) plus 1 cup of beans and another 4oz of chicken added into the soup, and my afternoon office productivity won't suffer a bit.

    The other difference in what I'm doing is to eat most of my daily calories before or at work , for the reason of nourishing my body during the time it has to be used physically or mentally.

    Last thought to share: we've all probably heard about how much better students learn in school if they start the day with a nutritious breakfast. I don't think the logic changes when we become adults and have a job to go to every day. Learning, or applying what you learned, it's all using the body and the brain.

    good luck~!
  • SomeMorr
    SomeMorr Posts: 220 Member
    edited November 2018
    sathmif465 wrote: »
    Thank you guys! I guess it’s about moderation. :wink: But the thing is if I eat a small sweet, then I would wanna eat more and more. :neutral:

    Unfortunately, there's no on/off switch to temptation - and for people like me it is easier not to allow the temptation to be around me than to allow a small portion and then stop myself. Every holiday, I would snack on my kid's candy, bake cakes and devour starch heavy veggies. I always felt bad about it after, physically and emotionally.

    I chose to give up sweets and other carbs about five months ago. I have limited carbs to non starchy veggies and nuts. There was no magic, I just made the decision to tell the little girl in me that wanted candy "this will not help you". I keep making that decision, by saying "you've gotten this far, why would you waste that now?".

    Eventually, if you continue to make the same decision it becomes a habit and then it is not an internal struggle of good/bad food. I am a stress and anxiety eater and when I would put myself in the situation of having to decide if I wanted to eat candy, I put myself under stress thinking of why it was a bad idea. I ate it anyways because I was stressing myself out about deciding. Now that I no longer allow myself to have sugar as an option, there's no internal struggle - I just say "I want a snack, let me get some peanuts and a string cheese". This feels so terribly contrived that I wish I had a better explanation, because if someone said this to me earlier this year, I would have just rolled my eyes. But the truth is, the fewer decisions you have to make along the way, each day, each week, the more self-control you have because your actions are automatic and you can reserve your mental energy for things that actually need it.



  • njitaliana
    njitaliana Posts: 813 Member
    Try doing the 80/20 way where 80% of your food is healthy, but 20% of your food is treats. That means you eat healthy meals, but have dessert or a snack. It doesn't have to be exact. Just make most of your food healthy and allow a snack or a dessert each day.
  • COGypsy
    COGypsy Posts: 1,365 Member
    What helped for me was realizing that sweets and treats will always be there. Approximately 98.7294356% of the time, whatever is tempting me in the moment is readily available any old time that I want to get it. Between Amazon and my local grocery store, I really don't need "that thing" right now.

    For example, someone brings donuts in to the office. Grocery store donuts--I can pick some up at a time they fit better in my day. Bonus--I can get exactly the donut I want to have. For me, I can decide to skip a stale, pawed over glazed donut today for a fresh apple fritter tomorrow. I do make exceptions for the truly special things, though. Keeping with the donut example, there is a local donut shop in the part of town I used to live in that is SO GOOD! It's at just about the opposite end of town from me now, so when this one guy brings THOSE in from time to time, I always have one.

    Knowing that right here and right now is not the only time ever that the temptation will be available to me makes it much easier to step back and make a more deliberate decision about what to eat or not eat. I'm more of a moderator, though. I can stay on track knowing that a treat will come. I also make sure to "schedule" a treat of some sort into my plan every day, so I don't feel like I'm deprived. As others upthread have mentioned though, some people need to avoid temptation altogether. I think it comes down to figuring out which approach works best for you.
  • lthames0810
    lthames0810 Posts: 722 Member
    Two things.

    1) Self control / will power is overrated. Is it will power that makes you brush your teeth every day? No, it's habit (and it's gross not to brush, of course). If you establish an eating routine, then going off your plan is like not brushing your teeth. This works for me anyway, because I don't require a lot of variety.

    2) Sweets are treats and if you eat a sweet every day, then it isn't much of a treat. Save the sweet eating for a special occasion and try to make sure that sweet is super good, high quality stuff that's really worth it. I mostly only eat a dessert if I go out to a fancy restaurant. Or on holidays.

    If all else fails, I have a mint (Altoid) and the sweet craving vanishes.
  • Panini911
    Panini911 Posts: 2,325 Member
    I guess I read your post and think two seperate things:
    - allow some treats daily that fit in your daily calorie goal. include foods you LIKE in your daily and weekly routine not just what people call "diet food". you may have to pick what you can have that doesn't blow the calorie budget so this means not EVERYTHING but find at least some ways to include "treats" and food you enjoy.
    For me I include a dessert which lunch and dinner daily, usually chocolate. I make my own healthier protein bars for my lunch "dessert" and a few items in my dessert rotation (currently 5 0cal pudding cup with a tablespoon of whip cream).

    - i still have a very very hard time with self control when food is RIGHTINFRONTOFME. at work if I don't smell it and it's not in visual range i am good. plus people mostly bring donuts which are not my weakness so that helps. At home for the first while i can't keep some things in the house but honestly once i get INTO logging and routine eating I am able to start keeping some things around but not in day to day visual range and actually forget about the,or see them and think "oh yeah, but not now". this was not something i could do initially.
    however if i am sitting with family-friend for hours around temptation that is where i fail. Depending on who it is, I may pass around the cookies and then ask if they mind if I put them say in the kitchen (out of sight). My issue here is it isn't self control once. but it is self control repeated every minute. I guess with a bigger party I could ensure to settle myself away from the most tempting foods.

  • maureenkhilde
    maureenkhilde Posts: 849 Member
    My take on your post was that for 5/6 days you are good. Then there is the day where you just seem to go sweet crazy. So by chance is it the same day of the week this is happening on? Where or what are you doing that all of a sudden all of these sweets are surrounding you?

    Maybe you bank calories so that one or two days you have room for a treat that you learn to look forward to. But keep reasonable. That has worked for me pretty well, has kept me from going hog wild on sweets, which is in the past has been my downfall. I think moderation yes is good, but first really identify when and why you are wanting treats. Will assist you in getting past this.
  • yayamom3
    yayamom3 Posts: 939 Member
    This probably sounds trivial, but it has really helped me, so I thought I'd share. I've struggled with bingeing for a long time. I decided to really focus on making my biggest goal each day to be binge-free. I installed a tally mark app on my phone, and every night at bedtime, I increase the tally for a successful day. I'd get to three over and over and then start again at one. Then one day, I made it to five. So far, my longest streak is ten days binge-free. I'm currently working on breaking that streak (currently on day seven). For some reason, it's really motivating to do the tally on my phone and to try and beat my record. Oh, and I've lost 11 pounds in the process. So there's that, too.
  • AnvilHead
    AnvilHead Posts: 18,343 Member
    As others have said - some people are moderators, some are abstainers. If moderation doesn't work for you because you can't withstand the temptation, then perhaps abstaining entirely would be a better strategy.
  • Sparkle097
    Sparkle097 Posts: 83 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    If I recall correctly from other threads, you were eating at a fairly low calorie level, probably targeting a weight loss rate faster than 0.5lbs (0.25Kg approximately) per week. (Fast loss would be inappropriate and unhealthy with so little weight to lose.)

    I also understand from this and your several other threads (that all cover this same general topic, from only slightly different perspectives), that you're not having major trouble sticking with that probably-too-low calorie goal most of the time. If I recall correctly, there's usually one day a week when your family (or whoever) shows up, bring sweet treats that you "can't resist".

    Four things:

    1. Set your calorie goal to lose only 0.25kg per week, and log/add a reasonable percentage of your exercise calories on top of that.

    2. On a daily basis, that 5-6 days per week, eat the number of calories you've been eating when you had too aggressive a goal. That will give you calories left over each day. Don't eat those daily. Bank them, like a calorie savings account, for later.

    3. When your family shows up with treats, take those calories you've had left over, add up the ones left over on days since your last treat-fest, and use that as your maximum calorie allowance for the treats. Eat that many treat calories, then stop. It will probably help if you eat a treat, savoring it, wait awhile, think whether you'd like more and have more calories available to cover it, then eat more if your calorie budget allows, spacing out the treats over the period of time they're there, savoring each, then waiting a while. It would be extra nice if you can leave a few calories in your savings account for the next round (not toooo many), just as an exercise in self-management.

    4. Stop saying "I can't resist" or "can't control my mind" or whatever. Don't even say it inside your own head. Your choices about your own self-definition are very powerful. Stop thinking of yourself as someone who "can't". Start thinking of yourself as someone who enjoys treats, but knows how to enjoy them sensibly, and in a way that will support both short-term happiness and long-term health. Or, think of yourself as someone who's had difficulty moderating treats in the past, but who is working at changing that, and is going to keep working until you succeed.

    You're making a choice here, and saying "you can't" make a different one. You can; you simply haven't chosen to. You have a choice. Don't take away the power you have over your own behavior by self-defining in a powerless way. And stop making post after post about this perceived powerlessness, and take some responsibility for doing something about it. You'll be a better woman for it.

    Signed,

    Mean Granny ;)

    Thank u for this. But I dnt understand point 2 and 3? Wat do u mean?
  • kikjarman
    kikjarman Posts: 1 Member
    I plan my day in advance ..put in my normal breakfast,lunch & dinner .. then I start on the indulgent bits rangeing from:
    Proper corn sea salt 10g bag - 42 cals
    Options hot chocolate - 39 cals (takes that edge off)
    Warbatons fruit loaf - 87 cals a slice
    10 Cal jelly - which only works out at 4 cals

    That way I know I can have them but I will try not to have them...that satisfaction of them deleting them from the log and seeing saved calories is another boost that today you did well!! It’s all mind tricks!!
    Good luck
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,598 Member
    sathmif465 wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    If I recall correctly from other threads, you were eating at a fairly low calorie level, probably targeting a weight loss rate faster than 0.5lbs (0.25Kg approximately) per week. (Fast loss would be inappropriate and unhealthy with so little weight to lose.)

    I also understand from this and your several other threads (that all cover this same general topic, from only slightly different perspectives), that you're not having major trouble sticking with that probably-too-low calorie goal most of the time. If I recall correctly, there's usually one day a week when your family (or whoever) shows up, bring sweet treats that you "can't resist".

    Four things:

    1. Set your calorie goal to lose only 0.25kg per week, and log/add a reasonable percentage of your exercise calories on top of that.

    2. On a daily basis, that 5-6 days per week, eat the number of calories you've been eating when you had too aggressive a goal. That will give you calories left over each day. Don't eat those daily. Bank them, like a calorie savings account, for later.

    3. When your family shows up with treats, take those calories you've had left over, add up the ones left over on days since your last treat-fest, and use that as your maximum calorie allowance for the treats. Eat that many treat calories, then stop. It will probably help if you eat a treat, savoring it, wait awhile, think whether you'd like more and have more calories available to cover it, then eat more if your calorie budget allows, spacing out the treats over the period of time they're there, savoring each, then waiting a while. It would be extra nice if you can leave a few calories in your savings account for the next round (not toooo many), just as an exercise in self-management.

    4. Stop saying "I can't resist" or "can't control my mind" or whatever. Don't even say it inside your own head. Your choices about your own self-definition are very powerful. Stop thinking of yourself as someone who "can't". Start thinking of yourself as someone who enjoys treats, but knows how to enjoy them sensibly, and in a way that will support both short-term happiness and long-term health. Or, think of yourself as someone who's had difficulty moderating treats in the past, but who is working at changing that, and is going to keep working until you succeed.

    You're making a choice here, and saying "you can't" make a different one. You can; you simply haven't chosen to. You have a choice. Don't take away the power you have over your own behavior by self-defining in a powerless way. And stop making post after post about this perceived powerlessness, and take some responsibility for doing something about it. You'll be a better woman for it.

    Signed,

    Mean Granny ;)

    Thank u for this. But I dnt understand point 2 and 3? Wat do u mean?

    If you've been trying to eat 1200 calories daily to lose a pound a week (not the real number, since I don't know your stats), try to average 1450 daily instead to lose half a pound a week. Achieve that by (for example) eating 1200 6 days a week, and 2950 one day a week.

    In that example, (7 x 1450) = ((6 x 1200) + 2950) so either will result in the same weight loss over time. (The peak day will temporarily increase scale weight because of the extra food, but that's just water weight and temporary digestive contents, not fat gain, so nothing to worry about.)

    Like I said, do the arithmetic to get your own actual numbers; that's just an example for illustration.
  • Sparkle097
    Sparkle097 Posts: 83 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    sathmif465 wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    If I recall correctly from other threads, you were eating at a fairly low calorie level, probably targeting a weight loss rate faster than 0.5lbs (0.25Kg approximately) per week. (Fast loss would be inappropriate and unhealthy with so little weight to lose.)

    I also understand from this and your several other threads (that all cover this same general topic, from only slightly different perspectives), that you're not having major trouble sticking with that probably-too-low calorie goal most of the time. If I recall correctly, there's usually one day a week when your family (or whoever) shows up, bring sweet treats that you "can't resist".

    Four things:

    1. Set your calorie goal to lose only 0.25kg per week, and log/add a reasonable percentage of your exercise calories on top of that.

    2. On a daily basis, that 5-6 days per week, eat the number of calories you've been eating when you had too aggressive a goal. That will give you calories left over each day. Don't eat those daily. Bank them, like a calorie savings account, for later.

    3. When your family shows up with treats, take those calories you've had left over, add up the ones left over on days since your last treat-fest, and use that as your maximum calorie allowance for the treats. Eat that many treat calories, then stop. It will probably help if you eat a treat, savoring it, wait awhile, think whether you'd like more and have more calories available to cover it, then eat more if your calorie budget allows, spacing out the treats over the period of time they're there, savoring each, then waiting a while. It would be extra nice if you can leave a few calories in your savings account for the next round (not toooo many), just as an exercise in self-management.

    4. Stop saying "I can't resist" or "can't control my mind" or whatever. Don't even say it inside your own head. Your choices about your own self-definition are very powerful. Stop thinking of yourself as someone who "can't". Start thinking of yourself as someone who enjoys treats, but knows how to enjoy them sensibly, and in a way that will support both short-term happiness and long-term health. Or, think of yourself as someone who's had difficulty moderating treats in the past, but who is working at changing that, and is going to keep working until you succeed.

    You're making a choice here, and saying "you can't" make a different one. You can; you simply haven't chosen to. You have a choice. Don't take away the power you have over your own behavior by self-defining in a powerless way. And stop making post after post about this perceived powerlessness, and take some responsibility for doing something about it. You'll be a better woman for it.

    Signed,

    Mean Granny ;)

    Thank u for this. But I dnt understand point 2 and 3? Wat do u mean?

    If you've been trying to eat 1200 calories daily to lose a pound a week (not the real number, since I don't know your stats), try to average 1450 daily instead to lose half a pound a week. Achieve that by (for example) eating 1200 6 days a week, and 2950 one day a week.

    In that example, (7 x 1450) = ((6 x 1200) + 2950) so either will result in the same weight loss over time. (The peak day will temporarily increase scale weight because of the extra food, but that's just water weight and temporary digestive contents, not fat gain, so nothing to worry about.)

    Like I said, do the arithmetic to get your own actual numbers; that's just an example for illustration.

    Thank u, I’ll try this
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