Binged for the past 4 days. Ashamed.

You won't have ruined all your progress - you've lost 50 pounds, which is amazing and excellent, and there's absolutely no way 4 days of over-eating wipes all of that achievement out. The scale may be on a roller coaster for a few days, but that'll be significantly water weight and digestive contents (waste en route through your digestive tract), not just fat-mass changes.

IMO, the thing to do is to give some serious thought to *why* this happened. You mention stress. Have you considered what other stress management options might help you, in future cases of difficult stress? Some people use exercise, meditation, prayer, aromatherapy bubble baths, music, nature walks, and who knows what else, to help them manage increased stress. Is there something that could help you? (If the problem isn't hunger or nutrition, the true and lasting solution isn't food.)

If it's a difficult struggle for you, I'd encourage you to speak with a professional. We hire personal trainers when we need help with exercise, dietitians when we need help figuring out eating strategies, physicians when we need medical treatment. Talking to a trained person when we need help with managing thought patterns should be no different - should have no more stigma - than any of those other things. There are even online/phone options these days, plus books about cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) that some have found helpful.

I know it's very hard to do, but personally I feel that shame about something like this is not helpful. Instead, this is a learning opportunity. Something went wrong, and you had difficulty sticking with your plan. What was it?

Had you been over-restricting, such as losing weight unsustainably fast, or maybe denying yourself even sensible portions of foods you enjoy, and would be capable of moderating? Have you been getting enough sleep? How's your overall nutrition been? Energy level? I already mentioned thinking about stress management alternatives. Might it be time to take a couple of weeks' break at maintenance calories? (Info here about why that might help: http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1).

So, maybe try to think of what went wrong, so that your plans derailed temporarily. Is there some change you can make in your routine, to improve that plan, make it easier to sustain going forward? I'd encourage you, if you can, to think of this as a practical problem to be solved, an obstacle you can overcome, rather than as "a failure". Food is not sin, it's just food. We need to eat some, and we can learn to manage it, though that isn't easy at every single moment, I know. (I was obese for several decades, before being at a healthy weight for 4+ years now, since.)

You've accomplished a great deal. You can continue doing so - you've proven it. Just resume . . . and improve your plan, if you can think of ways to do so.

Hang in there - wishing you much future success!

Shame is a lousy motivator. It relies on self-punishment which is really not terribly healthy or affirming. For four days, you did something self-defeating. You could either continue that or do something else that is more life affirming.

You know from your work with your therapist that your emotional/mental maladies make the judgments you make of yourself somewhat suspect. Eating well should be a celebration, not a further punishment. You simply fell off the wagon for four days and need to analyze how it made you feel -- not in terms of present shame but more literally, how the actual eating made you feel. Eventually, you said, you ate and ate until you felt sick. What was it about eating that made you do that? Was it mouth pleasure? Was it a feeling of defiance? Was it wanting to feel stomach pain? What was it? It's different for each of us.

My excess eating is in the evening after hubby goes to bed. Do I need to sneak my eating past him? No, he doesn't care. Why do I care that he might see my excess snarfing? It's self-defeating in terms of weight control. It's unnecessary. Every time I do it now, I try to analyze it as a behavior that I want to change long term. If shaming myself worked, I wouldn't be doing it. I'm trying to change the habits of a lifetime and analysis of them is far more effective for finding solutions that change things.

Meanwhile, continue any drugs and therapy appropriate to your conditions. I take my daily Prozac and Welbutrin like clockwork and now, in advanced age with much therapy under my belt, call and get it when I need it. No shame.

ZeeLed wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

You won't have ruined all your progress - you've lost 50 pounds, which is amazing and excellent, and there's absolutely no way 4 days of over-eating wipes all of that achievement out. The scale may be on a roller coaster for a few days, but that'll be significantly water weight and digestive contents (waste en route through your digestive tract), not just fat-mass changes.

IMO, the thing to do is to give some serious thought to *why* this happened. You mention stress. Have you considered what other stress management options might help you, in future cases of difficult stress? Some people use exercise, meditation, prayer, aromatherapy bubble baths, music, nature walks, and who knows what else, to help them manage increased stress. Is there something that could help you? (If the problem isn't hunger or nutrition, the true and lasting solution isn't food.)

If it's a difficult struggle for you, I'd encourage you to speak with a professional. We hire personal trainers when we need help with exercise, dietitians when we need help figuring out eating strategies, physicians when we need medical treatment. Talking to a trained person when we need help with managing thought patterns should be no different - should have no more stigma - than any of those other things. There are even online/phone options these days, plus books about cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) that some have found helpful.

I know it's very hard to do, but personally I feel that shame about something like this is not helpful. Instead, this is a learning opportunity. Something went wrong, and you had difficulty sticking with your plan. What was it?

Had you been over-restricting, such as losing weight unsustainably fast, or maybe denying yourself even sensible portions of foods you enjoy, and would be capable of moderating? Have you been getting enough sleep? How's your overall nutrition been? Energy level? I already mentioned thinking about stress management alternatives. Might it be time to take a couple of weeks' break at maintenance calories? (Info here about why that might help: http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1).

So, maybe try to think of what went wrong, so that your plans derailed temporarily. Is there some change you can make in your routine, to improve that plan, make it easier to sustain going forward? I'd encourage you, if you can, to think of this as a practical problem to be solved, an obstacle you can overcome, rather than as "a failure". Food is not sin, it's just food. We need to eat some, and we can learn to manage it, though that isn't easy at every single moment, I know. (I was obese for several decades, before being at a healthy weight for 4+ years now, since.)

You've accomplished a great deal. You can continue doing so - you've proven it. Just resume . . . and improve your plan, if you can think of ways to do so.

Hang in there - wishing you much future success!

Thank you for your reply. I have found the whole process of losing weight to be extremely overwhelming in itself.

I see a therapist twice a month for my bipolar depression, anxiety, and OCD. I have never really brought up my issues with food, because I already have so much to discuss that it feels like too much. I guess it is time to discuss this with her. I think food is a coping mechanism for my struggles with these issues.

As far as weight loss, I lost nearly 50 pounds between late March 2020 and July 2020. After early July my weight loss stalled.I looked into eating at maintenance for a while, but that caused me to go off the deep end and eat a lot of bad foods. I've tried calculating my calories based off of my stats (5'8" and 197 pounds), but I'm always terrified the calories are too much or too little and I won't lose. I have a Fitbit Versa 2 that I use for calorie counting and steps, but I've heard that the Fitbit devices can give you more calories than you've actually burned so I feel terrified to eat those calories back. I've also tried logging my exercise, but I fear that I am not accurate enough and that if I eat those calories back I'll gain.

It has been a really frustrating process, and I feel that I may have been too restrictive and that has caused a lot of these problems. I am just really terrified of gaining and I worry that I won't do any of this right and none of my hard work will matter in the long run.

I don't feel that I truly have a good understanding of calories, exercise, and nutrition. I've been trying to read blogs and a lot of other posts, but I get so overwhelmed that it's hard to retain the information.

It's wonderful that you've undertaken therapy already: So many people are not willing or ready to take that step toward growth. Good show!

I can understand how weight loss could seem overwhelming at times.

May I suggest what I think is a somewhat simplified approach, though it requires an investment of time and patience?

Start by picking a calorie target in MFP, and believing your Fitbit adjustment. (They actually are pretty close for a lot of people, and many of the studies saying otherwise have significant flaws - and they can also *underestimate* calorie needs for some people**, so it isn't all overestimates. But it's just a starting point - bear with me.)

(** My tracker, not a Fitbit but a similar respected brand, underestimates my calorie needs by several hundred calories daily. But I can still manage my weight, despite that.)

Set yourself up with a slow loss rate in MFP - maybe a pound a week? (Slow is better than on-and-off, for most people). Don't worry about good and bad foods, just eat foods you enjoy that you find filling, and try to come close to your calorie target most days - a little under, a little over, all fine. If you have a way-over moment, treat it as a learning experience to improve your plan, then let it go and proceed forward.

Stick with this for a whole month (since you're male; women sometimes need a different duration). Try not to worry about any scale ups and downs along the way.

Compare your weight at the end of the month to your weight at the beginning of the month.

* Did you lose weight at approximately the sensible weight loss rate you requested? If so, you're all set. Just keep going. (You might want to reassess and adjust again the same way after losing another 10-15 pounds.)
* Did you gain weight (unlikely, and certainly won't be much, even if you did). If you gained, subtract a couple of hundred calories or so from your daily goal, and go on with that.
* Did you lose weight faster than your target rate? If it was just a little faster, it may be OK, but if it's a lot faster, add some calories daily to put your expected loss rate around your target rate (use the assumption that 500 calories per day = a pound a week, to adjust your goal).

Then go on, for another month. Reassess again at the end of the month, and so forth.

It's your *actual weight loss results* - not day to day, but over a multi-week period - that tell you what your actual calorie goal should be. All the so-called "calorie calculators" and estimates from "fitness trackers" - those just give you a reasonable starting point for your personal experiment.

I can understand being terrified of regaining. I truly think your best odds, if you can manage to get it started, are to lose slowly and patiently, with a minimum of rules about good/bad foods. It's fine, a good idea, to try to eat generally nutritiously, but there are no individual foods that are magically good or bad. You can develop an idea of what foods are useful to you, because they keep you full and taste good to you, at what seems to be a reasonable calorie "cost" given your calorie "budget". It doesn't need to be more complicated than that, for now.

You've done this in the past. You've proven you can do it. You can do it again. Occasionally, there may be stalls or plateaus, and that's part of the process.

If you've been losing at a good rate, and suddenly stall with no change in daily life activity level, exercise, or eating, then it's overwhelmingly likely that it's just one of those weird things that bodies do now and then. If your loss stalled in the beginning of July, and we're writing these messages at August 1, that's not an abnormal length of time for weight to stabilize temporarily. Many of us here wouldn't consider something a true plateau requiring action until it's lasted 3-4 weeks. Some people find they have that stall, then suddenly drop a big chunk of weight suddenly (it has to do with water retention weirdness - bodies can be like that). If you've been losing well, then stall suddenly, patience is usually the best strategy. (I know it's hard!)

It sounds like you'd been losing around 10 pounds a month, March to July. That's a fast rate of loss, especially if you're at 30 pounds to goal. Fast loss can make those temporary stalls more likely to show up, for some. Also, fast loss can lead to eating over goal, from over-restriction, especially if one has been avoiding a bunch of foods that one enjoys (but that could be fit into a sensible calorie goal in reasonable amounts).

Also, you don't need to fix everything all at once: Weight, fitness, nutrition, food choices, etc. This is a set of things we can work on gradually, sequentially.

Usually, if we have a meaningful amount of weight to lose, the best thing we can do for our health is to lose it, focusing on the calories and that process.

If one doesn't have a pre-existing, doctor-diagnosed nutritional deficiency or food-affected disease (such as diabetes), then fine-tuning nutrition can wait, until the calorie part is pretty dialed-in. We don't become malnourished in an instant, eating a standard sort of way. It'll be fine. Once the calorie situation is under control, you can start working on improving nutrition, if you wish: Slow and steady positive progress.

Hang in there, you can get a handle on this. Think of me as your concerned internet auntie (because I'm old enough ): I'm cheering for you!