Mind games

shirleygirl910

I know most of us have this problem, but how do we get over it. Do you ever find yourself associating eating with say...the clock? It's 12 so I know I should eat lunch. It's 6 pm so I know I should eat dinner. Or do you notice yourself eating different and more often at work? Do you notice yourseld not eating around certain activities or in certain places. This is all head games we play. For alot of us we have played these games most of our lives and now that we are trying to change our eating habits for life, we find ourselves having to deal with the mind and not just the stomach.

What have you noticed mentally, and how do you deal with it? Or are you baffled too?

soleilxo

For all my life my eating has centered around my wants & needs (so I used to eat whenever wherever) and now im actually trying to change this completely. i want to eat properly based on the time and how I feel. Its soooo hardd but im trying so hard and I make sure I have a plan. Plans for me are very important ive learnt! I just want to grow up to eat as a routine ..yeah

kms1320

I stay on schedule if I'm hungry or not. I eat every 2 hours, so if I'm hungry I'll look at the clock and say to myself "only 30 minutes til I can eat" then drink 8-16 oz of water, that usually squashes hunger long enough. It's a trained thing, it works well for me. I also pre-log meals so I know what to look forward to, it helps.

akashelly

I am baffled. I find myself feeling like I need to snack anytime I am stuck at my desk, Like right now. I am not really that hungry, but I am feeling like I should go get a salty snack.

wcso911mn

I've noticed that since I changed my way of eating and what I eat, I seem to be hungrier more often because I'm not filling up on carbs (specifically starches like rice and bread). So, whenever I feel hungry, I eat. However, I'm eating healthier stuff now (more fruits and veggies) and snacks that have less carbs. I don't watch the clock when I eat, because my 10-hour shift at work is different every day (I'm a 911 Dispatch Supervisor). However, I do try to take my dinner break at the same time each night I work. But on my days off, basically anything goes.

EvanKeel

I'm not sure I know what you mean.

Eating is one element of my schedule. There are others. Most of the time eating is a secondary concern. If I'm feeling my blood sugar get low, then eating becomes more primary.

Usually eating is secondary to other scheduling components, like my work schedule. If I have nothing in particular to do in a day, a weekend day for example, then I'll just eat when I feel the need/desire. Since I'm tracking what I'm eating, it's not a big deal.

Perhaps I'm not seeing the Mind Game here. When, or in what context, I eat isn't a significant issue for me. Knowing what I'm actually consuming in a sitting in relation to the entire day is what matters for me. Tracking allows me to control any unfortunate habit I may picked up in my "eat 4k calories and not gain a pound" teenage years.

kms1320

eat protein at every meal with your carbs, you'll feel full longer. If you have say, a bag of chips with no protein, you're going to be hungry a lot sooner after. Even half a serving of a protein shake with your snack will do wonders.

AnvilHead

I've worked shift work for the last 30+ years and was never able to have "set" eating times, especially during work - you ate whenever you could - so I've never really had the concept of eating at certain times. Meal/nutrient timing is irrelevant anyway (barring certain medical conditions), so I don't put any thought into it - I eat when I'm hungry and make sure I hit my calorie/macronutrient goals for the day. Sometimes I eat breakfast, sometimes I don't; sometimes I eat dinner at 5:00, other times it's at 9:00. At the end of the day, calories and nutrients is all that matters - not when you eat them.

d_Mode

Yes, but I'm diabetic so I have to do my best to eat according to schedule...it's no big deal.

JingleMuffin

it is a game. I also pre log. and its harder on days that i run or workout. i get hungrier sooner than the time im "supposed" to or usually do. On thease days i account for it and know thats giong to happen so i bring an extra snack so i can make it till lunch time. i try to eat my dinners not so late so im not too full to workout. i dotn like to eat late. i try to make it a habit to get all of my food for the night in befroe 6 or 7 pm.

kms1320

I've worked shift work for the last 30+ years and was never able to have "set" eating times, especially during work - you ate whenever you could - so I've never really had the concept of eating at certain times. Meal/nutrient timing is irrelevant anyway (barring certain medical conditions), so I don't put any thought into it - I eat when I'm hungry and make sure I hit my calorie/macronutrient goals for the day. Sometimes I eat breakfast, sometimes I don't; sometimes I eat dinner at 5:00, other times it's at 9:00. At the end of the day, calories and nutrients is all that matters - not when you eat them.

Negative, there are different nutrient needs pre and post workout. If you aren't lifting hard I suppose it doesn't matter nearly as much. The rest I can agree with.

AnvilHead

Negative, there are different nutrient needs pre and post workout. If you aren't lifting hard I suppose it doesn't matter nearly as much. The rest I can agree with.

Since the OP didn't specify that she was lifting, I didn't specifically address eating around workouts. Nonetheless, it's simpler than many believe. Here's a commentary from Alan Aragon (Google him if you're not familiar with him) in which he references one of his recent research review articles about pre- and post-workout nutrition:

Big picture is to hit your macros by the end of the day. As it's been mentioned, I just did an article in my research review updating the original nutrient timing series, and I was actually surprised to see the lack of results over a decent battery of non-acute (longer-term) trials shuffling protein &/or carbs around various points relative to the training bout, but no effects occurring as long as the totals were adequate. There's a bunch of interesting things that are seen in the short term (anabolic signalling, amino acid uptake, lower indexes of proteolysis, etc), but these things have for the most part not panned out to impact body composition or strength in the long term -- as long as the totals are hit. There are exceptions, but they definitely are in a narrow cache.

Okay, so with all that said, if I were forced into issuing guidelines, I'd say have a decent hit of protein within an hour of training & within an hour after training. If you have a solid meal preworkout & can't train well with anything you can feel digesting, a 2 hr lag before training will still have you in a state of hyperaminoacidemia during the training bout as long as you don't skimp on protein in your meals.

How much protein per dose? Well, looking at acute effects, the anabolic response seems to be "saturable"... That is to say, beyond a certain amount of protein in a single dose, markers of the anabolic response flatten out. This threshold amount was recently seen to be 25g protein. Adding carbs to this did not further stimulate muscle protein synthesis or inhibit muscle protein breakdown. Not to confuse things more than they need to be, but let it be clear that amounts beyond this will not go to waste; they'll just take longer to process (I've written a full-length article on this in another site).

Important note about the 25g figure - it wasn't a lot of training volume done, and the subjects were 80 kg on average, so you can scale things up accordingly. I'd rather error on the side of abundance & never come up short. That's why I've traditionally recommended a protein dose of 0.2-0.25g/lb LBM (or you can use target bodyweight as a proximal measure of lean mass plus a little extra) taken in solid form at any point 2 hrs prior to training, or in liquid form at any point 1 hr prior to training, and dose it again at any point within an hour after training. Carbs don't appear to be capable of increasing the protein-synthetic response of a single protein dose if the protein dose is large enough (this has already been demonstrated twice in the literature). Therefore carbs can be either consumed or deferred to any point in the day of your choosing (just hit the total target by the day's end).

All of these recommendations change if we're talking about endurance athletes - and they're different still for endurance athletes with multiple glycogen-depleting bouts (of the same muscle group) in a single day.

AnvilHead

Also (too late to edit my last post): If you haven't already, watch "The Protein Roundtable": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFObr7rc1kA (It's over an hour long, but well worth it). Alan Aragon, Eric Helms and Ian McCarthy engage in a lengthy discussion about various nutrition topics relevant to strength training - pre- and post-workout nutrition among them. In Part II, they engage in a very enlightening discussion regarding the folly/ineffectiveness of attempting to stimulate endogenous HGH through post-workout nutrition.

(To OP: apologies for diverging from the original topic, but it's relevant to the "thread drift")