Help with consistent diet

danicherrick

I find myself on a good streak for a week or more than have 2-3 days of bad snacking, alcohol, lots of carbs. Looking for help on losing 8lbs a healthy way while remaining consistent.

brenn24179

i know I have been working on 5 lbs all summer. I guess I need to think a bout how good it would feel to see that number on the scale rather than how good the snacks are! Yep, set a boundary with myself, say No and dont back down.

ElizabethKalmbach

Why not just PLAN for the weekend snacking and social drinking by dropping calories on other days and banking them for more social times? It works for many.

Is the problem that you don't know when the urge will strike, or that you get super hungry if you drop your calories on other days?

apullum

Losing weight is 100% about staying in a calorie deficit. It doesn’t have anything to do with carbs, snacking, alcohol, etc. unless those things put you over your calorie goal.

Budget your calories for what you want. Many people prefer to “bank” calories during the week for a larger meal on the weekend. As long as you’re still in a deficit for the week, you will continue to lose weight. You do not have to eat the same number of calories every day if you prefer to go by a weekly calorie goal or “bank” calories.

However, with 8 pounds to lose, many people find it necessary to be extremely accurate with weighing and logging their food. If you are frequently eating food you didn’t cook yourself, not using a food scale, etc. then logging errors can add up to take you out of a deficit.

kenyonhaff

What triggers this? What's going on in your life when this happens?

Is it environmental? (Your co-workers go out for drinks and when that happens, you overdo it?)

Are you being too restrictive? (I see this a lot with people setting calorie limits really low. Or if you're eating really low fat, for example, you might not feel satiated enough and cannot hold out more than a few days before going on an eating binge.)

Are you stuck in black and white thinking? ("I ate an Oreo cookie so I might as well eat a bag of chips while I'm at it?")

There's a number of other things that can contribute -- these are just ideas. But this is a solvable issue, but will need some insight and reflection on YOUR part.

amy19355

I would find ways to include all the foods you like to eat in your regular eating plan. Just modify the portions so they fit within your calorie goals.

1 beer is a lot less calories than a six pack. It's easier for me to slow down and savor the taste of the beer when I am just having one.

It's entirely too easy to put away a six pack on the weekend when feeling deprived of any at all during the week.

good luck.

lgfrie

It's gonna come down to four things:

making sure you're getting foods you like and crave, in sufficient quantity, so that you break the habit of feeling like you're getting to some kind of "finish line" after a hard, depriving push to lose weight, every couple of weeks. You need to make your diet non-depriving, which is doable.

and

willpower: like every other dieter, me included, you are gonna have to learn to stand your ground in the face of temptation. There is no formula, methodology, or stock answer for this. It has to come from inside you. I find it helpful to remind myself how very much I'm going to regret it if I unwind 4 or 5 days of good, solid dieting in order to have 10 minutes of stuffing mozzarella sticks down my throat. You'll have to find your own internal messaging that works for you.

and

a really valuable point I got from @NovusDies , who's full of good advice - try not to make things black and white, where you're either dieting hard or completely losing it. Somewhere in the middle is an unassuming slow grind, where you're just eating your calories, maybe going a few hundred over one day, then getting back on track the next morning, and learning to maintain and stay on track, being gentle and forgiving of yourself when you don't reach your goals one day, but also generally committed to staying on track most of the time.

and

you may need to give up, or radically reduce, your drinking for a while. I had to give it up 100 %. For me it was either lose weight or drink. They couldn't co-exist. Drinking would lower my inhibitions and lead to binging that'd undo days or a whole week of dieting - a terrible cycle that led to demoralization and restarting and stopping and restarting, ad nauseam. The day I gave up drinking, everything fell into place. It's time to stare into the abyss and ask yourself what's more important.

Danp

Sounds to me like a classic restrict/binge cycle.

This is where you rely on "motivation" and "willpower" to under-eat and deny/deprive yourself of the foods you enjoy/want. The problem is that eventually (about a week or so in your case) you'll 'crack' and all bets are off.

Sustainability is the key. If you can only do what you're doing for a week at a time it's not right for you. Change it up and find an approach that you don't need to try and "stick to" because it's just something you do, naturally.

Strudders67

I agree with Danp. I eat snacks and occasionally drink alcohol, but I work those in to my day / week's calories.

What do you have your weight loss rate set to? Is it potentially too aggressive, leading to a restrict/binge cycle? With only 8lb to lose, you shouldn't be trying to lose more than 0.5lb a week.

shaf238

Find a way to fit the things you like to eat into your calorie/macro goal. That should hopefully reduce the chances of you wanting to binge.