Carrying On. Sorta?
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I'm in maintenance range, but gaining quickly. I have been less active because of a knee injury and swelling, coupled with holiday eating and sleeping/lounging.6
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I’ve cut my calories drastically due to less activity. Hate to do it but what else can you do? No Covid from travels, but one side of my nose is swollen. Dr Google indicates sinus infection. Went to yoga last night and was falling all over the place. No balance whatsoever. Guess Dr Google was right!7
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I so related to this. I have been in maintenance forever after losing 28 pounds maybe 10 years ago.
I say maintenance, but first lost, then regained 15 pounds during the pandemic shut down. I'm still in the healthy BMI, but I felt better 15 pounds lighter - where I was.
Unfortunately, I don't quite know what to do. I had stopped logging during the pandemic. However, I recommitted last summer and am not only well within my calories, but I'm 5'10", set at 1230 calories (net), and not losing. I should not and am not and will not go lower than that.
I have recently upped my activity because I know being sedentary is critical for me and all maintainers. I will bloop up and down 8 pounds - obviously it's water. But why? Usually 35% carbs are important to me, but I'm consistently under 40% and what I get for carbs are like apples and pears. My husband has celiac and bread is simply not part of our menu.
Clothes are still the same size, but tighter than they were.
So I feel . . . . at a loss. Recommitting to more walking, which makes me feel good no matter what my weight. Trying to stick to basics.10 -
I feel ya @nxd10
Instead of a resolution, I’ve decided to simply recommit to the good habits that got me here.
I log carefully, so that one’s good.
Reviewed data from the past few years, including lockdown, which was when I dropped too low. I was doing a lot of brisk walking on an empty trail back then.
We have a dog again now, but he is a nose attached to four legs, has to sniff everything so I get 15-20,000 steps a day now but they tend to be maddeningly slooooow.
Need to get more “brisk” steps back in. Going to make him run (slowly) with me and if he can’t hack it, he’ll have to sit at home and mope once or twice a day.
Also trying to get back to high protein and less everything else.
It’s nice to have the data to refer back to, to compare loss, maintenance and gaining periods.
Still trying to figure out how to review actual foods beyond six months. I’m told you can do it on the actual website, that it’s the app that limits viewing foods to six months?6 -
I'm definitely not limited to 6 months on the app, It's nearly 2 years for me. But I'm on Android, and I'm also wondering if being/having been Premium has some sort of an impact.
On the desktop website I can go back till the beginning (mid 2019).2 -
springlering62 wrote: »We have a dog again now, but he is a nose attached to four legs, has to sniff everything so I get 15-20,000 steps a day now but they tend to be maddeningly slooooow.
This is soo true!! If it is hot, there is no running. If it is cold, Frank the Tank is running alongside me sniffers or no sniffers!
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I see a lot of myself in @springlering62 ~ and especially this:
"Why is this so hard?"
My question encompasses comparing myself to other people, so that's bad, but I just want to know: is it either be overweight or chained to MFP for me? It isn't for other people! (Waaah, waaah!) Sure, "other people" (women I know) complain persistently about their weight, but apparently not enough to slavishly check in with a weight loss app or exercise for more calories.
And even with my slavish logging, I can SO EASILY justify eating whatever the heck I want ~ which is always too late at night, and nothing remotely low calorie or all that nourishing.
So I play this game of "over calorie limit, start again tomorrow..." and I just think: this is my life sentence?
Indeed: why is it so hard?!
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@vivmom2014
Breakthroughs are possible. I don't know how or why, but I appear to have made one recently. Something in my brain clicked. I've been on MFP almost five years (February 2018). I did well the first year and got to goal and kept it off a couple years, than had a "relapse" where I struggled for two more. Something changed, and it has become easier. I'm back at goal, so now the hard part starts again - staying here.
Will it continue to be easier? I will tell you at some point in the future. Is it easy yet? No, but it has become less of a struggle. I really don't know what changed. Maybe through repetition, new habits have finally become ingrained. Maybe I can improve other aspects of my life too getting back to some things I have let slip and maybe tackling others.
It may never be easy, but it may get less hard. I hope you find that space.4 -
Thanks for this, @mtaratoot ~ and you've reminded me of something.
Does the stomach literally shrink with a lower-calorie way of eating? I've gotten frustrated & mad (my two specialties) and decided I'm EATING EVERYTHING. Then I find that I am full, actually full, and it occurs close to my calorie goal. It almost seems too good to be true!
(So just for good measure I will eat even more, just so I can be right. Omg, it is hell being me sometimes.) But: does the stomach shrink? Or is it mental, and the "full" meter clicks on more readily?3 -
@vivmom2014
I don't know that it literally "shrinks." It might, but I don't know. I suspect not. I am fairly sure it can expand when we put a lot in it, but I think it's temporary and returns to "normal" size. Does "normal" change if you stretch it less? Someone with deeper knowledge than I will know.
I do think there are some changes, though, and I don't think they are just mental. I think that the hormones that tell our brains we're hungry or not may change in how they are released as we moderate our intake. As I am wont to do, I'll share a story that I've shared here before:
A few years back, I was on a live-aboard dive boat in the California Channel Islands. Not a luxury boat; a 90 foot dive boat where everyone slept in a small rack in the lower deck. We were a group of just under 30 divers; our local dive shop would charter the boat a couple times a year. Anyway, the food is great. It is amazing the amount and quality of food that two galley crew can get out of that tiny, tiny galley.
On our annual trip, they usually made grilled tri-tip one night. There was a large grill on the back deck that got used several times during the five-day trip. I had already lost weight down to my goal. That was neat because I could use a lot less lead to get off the surface. The tri-tip was delicious as always, as was the rice and broccoli that they served us. I went back to the galley for some more broccoli and a little more rice. The crew asked if I wanted any more meat. I knew that whatever we didn't eat would get turned into a fabulous breakfast the next day, so my answer wasn't informed by trying to prevent food waste. I hate food waste. Yet I said yes for some reason. It really was that tasty. We burn a lot of calories diving.
So I sat down and ate more food. As I was done, I realized I would have been full without adding that second serving of tri-tip. Soon I was uncomfortably full. My stomach was stretched. I remember thinking to myself, "This is pretty much how I used to feel after most meals." I also realized that in the past I had actually ENJOYED this feeling. Well, I didn't enjoy it that night. It passed, but it taught me a lesson. I may have repeated that experience a couple of times during feasts around some holidays, but otherwise I avoid it.
So the answer is.... maybe? The good news is you can develop these habits and not feel like you need to just keep eating.
I say this as someone who loves to cook and loves to eat.
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@mtaratoot
I love it. Interesting story, and I totally agree about that awful "too full" feeling. I guess humans are fickle beasts (I know I am) and full of contradictions. I don't like to feel overly full, and yet I want to keep eating. I've wondered if I'm a person who struggles with endings (yes, yes, I am.) I don't mind change, but I hate endings. Are they the same thing? (Cue Twilight Zone music)
This leads me to another question: is successful weight management -- and by that, I mean easily staying within a calorie goal, looking & feeling good, not obsessing -- predicated on getting comfortable with feeling hungry?
I don't mind feeling hungry. (Not famished, of course.) But I'm not sure I want to feel hungry for the rest of my days.2 -
@springlering62 - I hope this dialogue isn't hijacking your thread; I don't really think it is and apologize if it is.
@vivmom2014 - I don't like to eat first thing in the morning. I used to keep rolled oats at my office and on the day I drove in rather than rode my bike I'd take some portioned up plain yogurt to eat usually around 10:00 or so. Rather than continuing my tendency to be a raconteur, I won't go into more about my not eating in the morning. You can find that elsewhere on MFP. I will say that when I was going through my first year or so on MFP, I actually got to a point where I sort of enjoyed the "empty" feeling I would have before I'd eat my yogurt. Sometimes I even waited longer to eat it to continue to experience it. It wasn't hunger per se, just "empty."
🤷♂️3 -
vivmom2014 wrote: »@mtaratoot
I love it. Interesting story, and I totally agree about that awful "too full" feeling. I guess humans are fickle beasts (I know I am) and full of contradictions. I don't like to feel overly full, and yet I want to keep eating. I've wondered if I'm a person who struggles with endings (yes, yes, I am.) I don't mind change, but I hate endings. Are they the same thing? (Cue Twilight Zone music)
This leads me to another question: is successful weight management -- and by that, I mean easily staying within a calorie goal, looking & feeling good, not obsessing -- predicated on getting comfortable with feeling hungry?
I don't mind feeling hungry. (Not famished, of course.) But I'm not sure I want to feel hungry for the rest of my days.
Imma go with mtaratoot's assumption that Spring will be OK with a digression on this sub-thread. Fingers crossed!
To the bolded:
From reading here, there do seem to be a few people who find that they need to be comfortable with feeling hungry, longer term. But I don't think that's the most common scenario among the long-term maintainers (among whom I count myself now, at 7 years at a healthy weight after decades of overweight/obesity), based on what I've read here.
For me, so far, it does take long term attention, maybe even vigilance. But it doesn't feel obsessive, or like a sufferfest. (I think my situation may be mildly complicated by being a hedonist by nature: I want to eat all the things because I like yummy. That's unlikely to change. I'm not saying everyone needs to go this route, but I expect to be calorie counting long term, because I want to get every last delicious calorie I've burned while staying at a healthy weight, and counting doesn't feel obsessive or slavish to me. Those feelings will vary from one person to the next.)
I do think it's pretty important to find personalized, sustainable, relatively happy eating/activity patterns that can become near-autopilot habits most of the time, as life gets complicated. How that looks specifically will vary individually, because we all have different lifestyles, preferences, strengths, and challenges.vivmom2014 wrote: »I see a lot of myself in @springlering62 ~ and especially this:
"Why is this so hard?"
My question encompasses comparing myself to other people, so that's bad, but I just want to know: is it either be overweight or chained to MFP for me? It isn't for other people! (Waaah, waaah!) Sure, "other people" (women I know) complain persistently about their weight, but apparently not enough to slavishly check in with a weight loss app or exercise for more calories.
And even with my slavish logging, I can SO EASILY justify eating whatever the heck I want ~ which is always too late at night, and nothing remotely low calorie or all that nourishing.
So I play this game of "over calorie limit, start again tomorrow..." and I just think: this is my life sentence?
Indeed: why is it so hard?!
Cynically, I think some of those people don't actually want to lose weight, but feel as if they ought to want to. Commiserating over that can be a form of social bonding, I think. I've been there. At the same time - and this may not apply to everyone - I need to feel that if I'm not willing to put in the work needed to achieve something (anything), then I'm not serious about wanting it. If I justify a treat - and I do (yesterday was a food-fest) - in my case I need to own that as a decision I made, trading off long term good for short-term pleasure. Sometimes that's OK, but it can't be always . . . or future Ann won't have a very good life.
There isn't any magic, in weight loss or any type of skills gain, etc. IMO, it does take some kind of work.
Sadly. Maybe.4 -
Thanks for the input @mtaratoot and @AnnPT77
I don't want to muddy the waters of the OP and will give the floor back to her. Appreciate the thoughts!2 -
I also think that long-term hormone balancing Takes TIME. So if I've been overweight/obese for X number of years, my body has adjusted over time to that amount of fat. Fat is hormonally active. It carries signals and creates changes in the endocrine and neurological systems.
Losing weight means the body has to balance again. That isn't completed at the moment I reach Goal Weight.
That first year or two post weight loss (80 pound loss after 20 years of being overweight) was rough. It was very hard for me to stay at that lower weight. I feel like it was biological, not psychological. I also hadn't completely changed my nutrition. Yet. I wanted my French bread, my cereal, crackers, easy comfort food I had mostly given up to lose the weight.
Yeah, that doesn't work long-term. Living on those foods causes all kinds of insulin problems. I had to go all the way back to the basics. Protein, healthy fats, fiber, 500-800g of fresh produce daily. Exercise on most days. (I shoot for a one hour walk five out of seven days.) I still log food, because I can't trust myself AND because I am like Ann - I want to eat all the food to which I am entitled, dangit. Without logging I tend to stray into way under or way over.
Technically I know the calorie amounts of most of the food I eat these days and I can do it without logging but I don't find logging to be a burden. I just do it.
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Hijack away. The detours are where we learn stuff imho.
I am captivated by @vivmom2014 question “is this my life sentence?”
I’ve never thought of weight loss or maintenance that way. Is it my life sentence to brush my teeth? Wash my clothes? Balance my checkbook? Feed the critters?
I guess I’ve been logging so long, it’s habit. Except those annoying periods when I travel and they drop off, all my favorite foods come up automatically. I’m such a creature of habit I seldom have to find new ones, unless like yesterday, I decided to have pomegranate on my cottage cheese instead of the usual frozen blueberries. It’s just not that difficult. I pretty much log on autopilot.
Even in the throes of some particularly difficult bicep curls this morning, I never think of exercise as punishment. I either think “you can do five more and it won’t 🤬 kill you and dang, girl, she upped the weight anyway, so look at you”, or, as last night, I turned to the older woman next to me and whispered “us old chicks are killing those young gals back there!” (whereupon we got called out for giggling and thank goodness they didn’t know why since competition is frowned upon in yoga).
I’ve always been the most negative, judgmental person I know. But for some reason with weight loss and exercise, I’ve managed to look at the sunny side, and that’s translating into other area of my life.
As far as stomach size, I don’t know, but I calculated I regularly ate 10-12,000/day of mostly candy cookies cake ice cream etc most days before I began. Nowadays, if I have a 4,000 calorie day, which I stupidly do fairly often, despite knowing the effects, I feel awful- nauseous, draggy and low energy, and if I’m dumb enough to eat the bulk of them before bedtime, all night it painfully wants to come back up.
So I don’t know about stomach “size” changing but for me there’s definitely a very vehement physical reaction to over-eating today-me calories versus old-me calories.
My weight is still up, but I’m trying to be patient. Since our epic last minute trip home on the Plague Plane, we’ve both had a round of flu or something, and gym schedules are upside down the first couple weeks of the year anyway, plus, tbh, many instructors hold back because of all the newbs.
I am consistently experiencing wild four and five pound peaks and craters daily. I’ve got a big, soft-as-dough ring around my midsection that literally spills over any size pants I wear. Wearing dresses, as I’m trying to do lately, I see a very round belly poking out from my perspective looking down. I also had friction burns on my bat wings.
Yet my arm muscles are bigger yet again than before and my thighs have thinned out some more and are even more muscular. It just blows my mind. . When I wear that dress and look in the mirror, I can’t see that pooch so much.
I’m trying to temper my frustration by remembering that the last time I had friction burns and oddly soft or misshapen “fluff” was right before something exciting happened with my shape.
I just wish it would hurry up and get on with it. I feel all weird and out of whack, and have for weeks.
Trust in the process is my current mantra.
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And btw, I take the opposite tack from others regarding hunger. If I get hungry, I tend to go wild. So I make it a point to eat regularly throughout the day so the tank is always relatively topped to prevent that from happening.
If you look at my diary, you’ll see regular snacks which I space out every couple of hours.
I do enjoy my snacks, but I also try to think of them as fuel, and eat them even if I’m not hungry, because I know I “need” to eat or I’m going to crash during the next class, or unintentionally binge.6 -
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vivmom2014 wrote: »Thanks for this, @mtaratoot ~ and you've reminded me of something.
Does the stomach literally shrink with a lower-calorie way of eating? I've gotten frustrated & mad (my two specialties) and decided I'm EATING EVERYTHING. Then I find that I am full, actually full, and it occurs close to my calorie goal. It almost seems too good to be true!
(So just for good measure I will eat even more, just so I can be right. Omg, it is hell being me sometimes.) But: does the stomach shrink? Or is it mental, and the "full" meter clicks on more readily?
With the slightest excuse of Spring having accepted digressions, I'm going to chance replying to this.
To the bolded: Literally, no. Think about it. If signals from pressure/fullness in the stomach were the big deal, how does that relate to calories? If anything, it would relate to food volume, it seems to me. Volume and calorie content aren't tightly linked.
Anecdotally, we regularly see people here saying they can't eat all their (greatly reduced) goal calories because they've switched to foods - usually so-called "whole foods" - that they find more filling.
Like others, I think hormones are the big deal in hunger/appetite, including in all likelihood some blood sugar level triggers (for some people, anyway).
But: Bariatric surgery works in part by making the stomach smaller, and reportedly the surgery affects appetite. There are those people sated (subjectively) by lower calories when switching to a significantly different eating pattern. Some people here say that they can feel more sated if they drink water, or choose high-fluid foods like soups. That makes me think that fullness signals from the stomach aren't totally irrelevant in the practical problem of eating fewer calories.
But I think that's about appetite, more than actually hunger. On another thread, someone said they distinguish between "mouth hunger" (which I'd call appetite or cravings) and actual hunger (need for nutrients or fuel).
My appetite is triggered by low food volume, by habits (I get crave-y at times I usually eat, or in certain social situations), and that sort of thing. I can eat near endless high-calorie refined flour/sugar cookies or candy without feeling full, but not near-endless apples. If all my friends are having a deep-fried appetizer at a restaurant, I crave one, too.
Even appetite, I think, has hormonal triggers. There's a fun study that compared the effects of a "healthy shake" vs. an "indulgent shake" on a group of volunteers. In reality, they were exactly the same shakes, in both groups. Not only was the "indulgent shake" perceived as less filling, but the differences were reflected in tests of the volunteers' hunger/appetite hormone levels**.
The volume and habit things can be worked through, when losing weight, I think . . . and it doesn't necessarily take a lot of time, for most of us. My habitual cravings seem to fade within a couple of weeks, if I don't indulge them. (From reading posts here, I don't assume it's universally that quick/easy.)
I don't think actual hunger occurs very often, among us lucky folks in the developed world who have access to food, and money to buy it. That it's not actual hunger doesn't mean a lot for our weight management efforts, because it's appetite we're struggling with. I do think that habitual dimension of this means that we can perceive that our stomach shrinks after a period of time eating at a calorie-appropriate levels . . . and it probably doesn't matter whether that's literally the case or not.
** https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21574706/
I learned about that study in a radio show/podcast called Hidden Brain. This small study is discussed in an episode about surprising effects of mindset (not just for weight management), along with a number of other studies that have involved mindset and its literal physiological (bodily) effects. Worth a bit of a think, maybe. Here's the episode:
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/reframing-your-reality-part-2/
It's a little long (52 minutes), but IMO very interesting and applicable to our weight management plans. It's not a super-technical science show: It's intended to make information accessible to non-science folks. There was also a part 1, more about mindset and stress response, i.e., more the psychology of mindset in part 1, vs. the impact on the body in part 2.1 -
vivmom2014 wrote: »"Why is this so hard?"
Some people do not have the drive to (over)eat, they are a rarity, a biological curiosity but they do exist. For the majority of us, the only hope is to concentrate on eating well-controlled portions, and nothing more. If we manage that, we will die at a normal weight. If not, we will die sooner at a higher weight, not taking into account infectious disease, accidents and more of those "nice" things.1
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