Overeating...

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rainbow_carrots5
rainbow_carrots5 Posts: 3
in Goal: Maintaining Weight
Hi everyone,
I have never really been concerned with my weight or health until lately, when I started to pay more attention to what I was giving my body. For the most part I ate healthy, but I would eat, and eat sugar or salad and never gain anything. As I started to pay attention to others I realized that this could soon catch up with me and I wanted to not only maintain my weight, but keep myself healthy and not overly exhausted by too many carbs. (As I had a serious carb and sugar addiction) I have been doing really well until recently, as I have overeaten three days straight. Today I had three mini scones, an eclair, a sugar cookie, and 15 pretzels on top of my regular healthy meals. I also ate a box of strawberries and 4 times the serving size of gluten-free granola. Yesterday I had a vegan muffin and chicken. Which is horrible because I was well on my way to becoming a truthful vegan/vegetarian. I was doing so good! I ate under my daily calorie intake of 2,000 by maybe 358 calories and a lot more on one day, when I slept half the day. When the weekend came close though I started indulging in wheat thins, and natures valley bars as well as quinoa and healthy stuff. I just want to know, how much do you need to eat for it to become noticeable fat? Should I really be concerned about my three-day binge? I feel horrible about letting my body down like that. I am moderately active, I lift weights a little bit and I am pretty fit. I just really feel bad about overeating consciously, it's like before I eat my brain comes up with a million ways to justify that it is okay. Then after I feel horrible. Bottom line, I want other people's experience with this, as I know this can be pretty common.

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  • ChelseaWelseyKins
    ChelseaWelseyKins Posts: 272 Member
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    Honestly? If you go back to eating healthy and staying in your goal, you'll be perfectly fine :) A little bump in the road shouldn't stop you from keeping your goals and striving to be the best you possible!
  • Meerataila
    Meerataila Posts: 1,885 Member
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    This is a complex issue because more than one factor is often involved. Our bodies might become appalled over weight loss and often our brains will go nuts with hunger because of that. Being in too large of a calorie deficit can also cause this when we are losing weight. So that is a physical issue.

    Emotionally, we can become vulnerable to eating certain foods in order to stimulate the pleasure centers in the brain. Nothing wrong with those pleasure centers, by the way, that is what drives us to do everything in life, good, bad, or delicious. From saving the world to diving into a pint of ice cream, we are driven by brain chemistry we are barely beginning to understand. However, we can and must, often with great effort, override and control ourselves, either by stopping before we start, or at least stopping before there is nothing left but a few crumbs and a massive load of regret.

    Some of the foods we eat also have addictive properties because they overly stimulate the pleasure centers in our brains, even when we are emotionally perfectly fine.

    As for being vegan: Slipping up once instead of eating carnivore or omnivore business as usual every day still does less harm to whatever you don't want to do harm to, whether it be to your health, other living creatures, or the environment as a whole. Don't let one stumble bring your good intentions down.
  • rainbow_carrots5
    rainbow_carrots5 Posts: 3
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    Thanks. I usually do have a good amount of self-discipline, I just sort of screwed up this one. :)
  • rainbow_carrots5
    rainbow_carrots5 Posts: 3
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    Thank you, that is really helpful. I think I totally over-reacted and wanted to be perfect so badly. We all make mistakes I guess. :)
  • katiewilsonxo
    katiewilsonxo Posts: 85 Member
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    Good on you for admitting that you've had a slip- the most important thing is to register that you did overeat on those three days exclusively but that it is not an overall indicator of how you eat. If you just go back to eating normally, you'll be fine. No one eats perfectly 365 days a year and three days will not derail you in the long term as long as you don't let it become the norm. Do not beat yourself up! Aknowledge that it happened but don't worry about it too much :)
  • SharonNehring
    SharonNehring Posts: 535 Member
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    If I'm reading this correctly, you were still under on calories for two of the three days. If that's true, then you may pick up a little water weight for a day or two from the excess carbs but it'll be gone quickly.

    I think the bigger issue is that you are beating yourself up over it. Don't! You do need to build small treats into your meal plan regularly. If you don't, then that generally leads to a full out binge on all the foods you've been denying yourself.

    The choice of vegan or not is your own. Perhaps following that plan 90% of the time is an acceptable option? Only you can make that decision.
  • cherbearee
    cherbearee Posts: 6
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    Sometimes we do slip... just know you are capable of getting back on track!
    Anyway, your eating habits revolve around pretty healthy foods, so you aren't really getting the saturated/trans fats, added sugar, sodium that may be worrisome. Personally, I'm dealing with over-eating too (except much less healthy foods...), and something that i've been trying out lately is portioning my food a bit, so in that sense, i would grab some food, then put away the rest so that i wouldn't be tempted to eat the whole package. I still do eat too much, but i'd like to think i'm doing better and at the end of the day, improvement is always good! So forgive yourself and try to make little changes each day :)
  • ScottDowell
    ScottDowell Posts: 95 Member
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    Overeating is not good for health. There are experts available you can apply some tips to stop eating when you are comfortable. These tips are like eat slowly, be aware, make the count to the first bite, keep up appearances, choose satisfying foods. Only eat when you are hungry and stop when you are comfortable it is a healthy eating and living.
  • patfriendly
    patfriendly Posts: 263 Member
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    Keeping mind body balance is the key. Don't eat out of boredom or anxiety

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