How To Start Off Wrong (from member experiences)
NovusDies
Posts: 8,940 Member
How have YOU failed?
These are as many of mine as I can think of at the moment:
1) Assumed that I must eat healthy food.
2) Do the same diet my wife is doing.
3) Meal replacement shakes
4) Pills - prescription and OTC
5) Eating very little food
6) Exercise the pounds away mentality
7) Picked a diet because a friend or coworker lost some weight doing it
8) Picked a diet because of internet or similar research
9) Ate foods to speed up my metabolism or fat burning (go grapefruit power!)
10) Ate more often to speed up my metabolism.
11) Believed some scheme because I was told my weight gain was not my fault
12) Believed fat was the enemy
13) Believed a doctor
14) Thought I needed to start off behaving like all the healthy weight people I knew
15) Had cheat meals
These are as many of mine as I can think of at the moment:
1) Assumed that I must eat healthy food.
2) Do the same diet my wife is doing.
3) Meal replacement shakes
4) Pills - prescription and OTC
5) Eating very little food
6) Exercise the pounds away mentality
7) Picked a diet because a friend or coworker lost some weight doing it
8) Picked a diet because of internet or similar research
9) Ate foods to speed up my metabolism or fat burning (go grapefruit power!)
10) Ate more often to speed up my metabolism.
11) Believed some scheme because I was told my weight gain was not my fault
12) Believed fat was the enemy
13) Believed a doctor
14) Thought I needed to start off behaving like all the healthy weight people I knew
15) Had cheat meals
33
Replies
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My biggest ones-
Believed the “starvation mode” myth, AND that I couldn’t have a single carb or “I’d gain weight for sure!”. I lost over 10 years to that crap. 🙄14 -
These run the range from age 16-mid 30s (when I finally began calorie counting)
1. "Kickstart" with an all liquid diet
2. Any kind of plan that encouraged the thinking that the day was "ruined" if I had the wrong foods or ate at the wrong time
3. Less than 1,000 calories a day
4. Eliminating caffeine just because I thought it would keep me from losing weight
5. Raw veganism
6. Extremely low fat diet
7. Exercise as punishment
8. IF to manage weight while ignoring calories consumed or how it fit my preferences/lifestyle
9. Slimfast
10. "Smoking is an appetite suppressant, right?"16 -
Stopped logging food once I hit my calorie limit27
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My list:
1) Cheat meals - undoing an entire week of dieting in an hour.
2) The slippery slope of perfectionism, aka "black or white" thinking.
By which I mean:
Going a few hundred calories over quota and thinking, "Well, the day's no longer perfectly compliant, so I'll just shoot for break even ... which entitles me to another 300 calories", which leads to eating 3 of 7 cookies in the pantry, and then "it's no longer a diet day, so I guess I'll have the last 4 cookies", which leads to "Now I'm over maintenance, I'll just restart tomorrow," which leads to eating everything in the house, which goes past midnight, which leads to waking up the next day thinking that that day too is shot because it already started badly at 12:01 am, which leads to ... 2 years later, starting all over from a much higher weight.
Lesson I learned: If it's either diet perfection or insane binging, the diet is already dead. Gotta learn to be happy with "did fairly well today". A B+ day is still a B+ not an F.
3) Trying to make up for overeating with excessive exercise, instead of addressing my weight issues at the source: the food that goes into my mouth.
4) Making too big a deal about food even while successfully dieting - such as, spending hours or chunks of hours planning out and talking about the next meal - thus never breaking that obese person habit of thinking/planning/dreaming/wanting/craving/needing food constantly. Even while successfully dieting, spending the whole day thinking about the next meal, very understandable given the often-a-little-hungry nature of dieting, contains the seeds of a future diet breakdown.
5) Keeping garbage foods in the house because "I've got everything under control; I've proven myself, so why shouldn't I have a bag of chocolate fudge cookies for when I want ONE cookie". Works great until it doesn't work. Replace with grapes LOL
And finally ...
6) Thinking I was "cured" of obesity behavior because I'd lost a bunch of weight. The opposite is the truth - I am an obese person by nature and if I weighed 140 pounds I'd still be one. Learning that was a huge epiphany for me. You don't suddenly get to some weight and then voila, you're a different person and don't need to log/count/self-monitor/exercise/eat carefully anymore. It's like an alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in a year thinking he isn't an alcoholic anymore so he can just go into a bar and just get a Diet Coke. All my best laid plans about counting calories, eating right, blah blah, can come unwound in 5 minutes if I forget that just having lost weight does not mean I am immune to obesity. Sit me down in an Italian restaurant, put a bottle of wine and an extra large pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni in front of me, and guess what, it's like I was never on a diet - I can revert to my true self in seconds. Constant vigilance is needed and will always be needed, forever.59 -
Calorie counting "diet" meant eating 700 calories a day. This went on my entire childhood.
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It's been a while, but I bought into the frequent small meals/snacks thing. I was never satiated and I just ended up eating regular meals and smaller meals and snacks on top of that, eating more instead of less.8
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Thinking that eating "healthy food" was the solution to being overweight, without realising that the volume on my plate still meant I was eating far more calories than my 5'1" female self needed.10
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Oh man, I have a few of these from over the years!
1. Jumping in too quickly and trying to do ALL of the things at once - track calories, eat only healthy foods, exercise intensely for an hour a day etc. etc. - I've now learned that baby steps are much more manageable for me and I need to make changes slowly over time so that they become habit.
2. Not giving my efforts time to have an effect before giving up - I ate under range yesterday and I exercised and my scale still reads the same! No fair! Apparently you gotta give it time!
3. Lying to myself about how much I'm eating - by eyeballing measurements or forgetting to log (sometimes on purpose).
4. Thinking I can go from eating 2,500 calories a day to 1,200 a day just like that.
5. Shakes and other fad diets - yeah, they work, in the short term!
6. Negative self-talk. These days I'm all about the positivity!
7. Approaching it as a diet rather than a lifestyle change. This isn't something I can just do for a while. If I go back to my old habits, I will gain the weight back and I don't want that. So I need to make sure the changes I make are sustainable for the rest of my life. If it means a lifetime without pizza or nachos? Probably not gonna happen. But if it means having those foods only once in a while and eating a smaller portion of them? That's more sustainable to me.
8. Not being consistent - I can't count the number of diets or workout programs I've started and never finished. I'll do it for a week, maybe two, then life gets in the way and I have to break the routine for a day or two and I lose my momentum. Kinda links back to number 1, and number 2.
9. Having a perfectionist attitude. Like life, weight loss isn't all black and white. It's ok to sometimes go above your calories as long as you don't do it all the time. You don't have to "make up for it" the next day. You just write that day off as a day where things didn't go to plan, and you start again tomorrow as normal.16 -
My list:
4) Making too big a deal about food even while successfully dieting - such as, spending hours or chunks of hours planning out and talking about the next meal - thus never breaking that obese person habit of thinking/planning/dreaming/wanting/craving/needing food constantly. Even while successfully dieting, spending the whole day thinking about the next meal, very understandable given the often-a-little-hungry nature of dieting, contains the seeds of a future diet breakdown.
This is where I'm at, even after a year, maybe not hours, maybe not constant, but yes, this hits a chord.
How do you move past it?1 -
Thinking that since all those Biggest Loser contestants can lose double digits of weight per weight, I should be able to lose two pounds per week, EASY!10
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Oh, probably trying to overcome my deep and well-established self-indulgent hedonist bent by overcoming it through sheer willpower, instead of trying to work with it or game it. Heh.
I'm really bad at willpower, besides. 😆10 -
I only eat 1400 calories per day. Thus I can't be gaining weight. (hint: I did!). That was before I came here.4
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teresadannar wrote: »
4) Making too big a deal about food even while successfully dieting - such as, spending hours or chunks of hours planning out and talking about the next meal - thus never breaking that obese person habit of thinking/planning/dreaming/wanting/craving/needing food constantly. Even while successfully dieting, spending the whole day thinking about the next meal, very understandable given the often-a-little-hungry nature of dieting, contains the seeds of a future diet breakdown.
This is where I'm at, even after a year, maybe not hours, maybe not constant, but yes, this hits a chord.
How do you move past it?
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. My wife and I (we've been dieting together for 14 months) decided, first, to stop talking about food so much, and later, to really try not to talk about food at all LOL Other than the bare minimum, like "what do we want for dinner tonight"? That's really helped.
But the main thing we did was to stop treating every meal like some big "OHH MY GOD WE GET TO EAT AGAIN!!! WE'RE STARRRRVVVVIIIIINNNNNNGGGGG" event where we spend hours discussing, preparing, and cooking the food like we were two starving people in a dessert who just happened upon an oasis. At least a few times a week, we have very quick, prepared foods, like mac and cheese out of a box, just to get our focus off fine cuisine and off making the meal the centerpiece of the day. That actually has worked pretty well. I can spend allllllll day debating the fine points of Beef Bourgoinoin vs Lasagne for dinner, but really how excited can you get and how much time can you spend thinking about whether you're going to have a little cardboard box of mac and cheese vs a pre-made burrito? Both suck, either will fill up your stomach, and you're done eating in 5-10 minutes and that's the end of that. Doing that a few times a week has helped both of us stop looking forward to dinner as some major event in our lives, and I think that's helped. We are both amateur chefs and it was quite painful to let go of dinner as the spiritual cornerstone of our day, but doing so made a difference.
Like I said, no easy answer, but at least for me, it's been really important not just to eat less but to stop having my life so dominated by food - because I know where that leads, if not today, then eventually.19 -
teresadannar wrote: »
4) Making too big a deal about food even while successfully dieting - such as, spending hours or chunks of hours planning out and talking about the next meal - thus never breaking that obese person habit of thinking/planning/dreaming/wanting/craving/needing food constantly. Even while successfully dieting, spending the whole day thinking about the next meal, very understandable given the often-a-little-hungry nature of dieting, contains the seeds of a future diet breakdown.
This is where I'm at, even after a year, maybe not hours, maybe not constant, but yes, this hits a chord.
How do you move past it?
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. My wife and I (we've been dieting together for 14 months) decided, first, to stop talking about food so much, and later, to really try not to talk about food at all LOL Other than the bare minimum, like "what do we want for dinner tonight"? That's really helped.
But the main thing we did was to stop treating every meal like some big "OHH MY GOD WE GET TO EAT AGAIN!!! WE'RE STARRRRVVVVIIIIINNNNNNGGGGG" event where we spend hours discussing, preparing, and cooking the food like we were two starving people in a dessert who just happened upon an oasis. At least a few times a week, we have very quick, prepared foods, like mac and cheese out of a box, just to get our focus off fine cuisine and off making the meal the centerpiece of the day. That actually has worked pretty well. I can spend allllllll day debating the fine points of Beef Bourgoinoin vs Lasagne for dinner, but really how excited can you get and how much time can you spend thinking about whether you're going to have a little cardboard box of mac and cheese vs a pre-made burrito? Both suck, either will fill up your stomach, and you're done eating in 5-10 minutes and that's the end of that. Doing that a few times a week has helped both of us stop looking forward to dinner as some major event in our lives, and I think that's helped. We are both amateur chefs and it was quite painful to let go of dinner as the spiritual cornerstone of our day, but doing so made a difference.
Like I said, no easy answer, but at least for me, it's been really important not just to eat less but to stop having my life so dominated by food - because I know where that leads, if not today, then eventually.
Please don't take this as disagreemnt, because it's not.
It's interesting to me how very different all of us are, in what works.
For me, I think I do spend more time thinking about food now, and started doing so while losing weight, and that's been a positive and pleasurable thing, for me.
I mentioned my inner hedonist a few posts back. While obese (and exaggerating slightly, perhaps 😆), I had been shoveling foods into my mouth pretty indiscrimately, if it's available, eat it, and eat alllll of it. Since my husband died (which had been some years back at that point), I'd greatly cut back on cooking, relying more on quick foods, some frozen dinners and such. (I'd decided that, as a cook, I seemed to need some audience appreciation, to bother.)
When I decided my hedonist needed a calorie budget, so future Ann could also have a good life, that changed the equation. I started seeking out truly tasty ingredients (calorie-efficient and nutrition-efficient ones 😉), wanting to try new foods to find more of them, researching recipes, going to farmers markets, and generally spending much more time, happily thinking about food, and then spending more time on preparing things from scratch. My inner hedonist became the audience, in a sense.
I don't feel obsessed by food, but I think I do spend more time thinking/planning/prepping it than I used to, as a pleasure-increasing strategy. Obese me leaned more toward unthinking, indiscrimate volume as a satisfier. Thin me wants all the yummy and nutrition, as the new satisfier. I play calorie/nutrition Tetris, for treats, even.
Different people, different paths. So interesting!
The more I read other people's stories and post - especially ones that are vividly written, as yours are - the more I think that understanding our own inclinations and personality is a key to making weight management work - personalization. 🙂
Thanks for the insight into your process!34 -
TwistedSassette wrote: »Oh man, I have a few of these from over the years!
2. Not giving my efforts time to have an effect before giving up - I ate under range yesterday and I exercised and my scale still reads the same! No fair! Apparently you gotta give it time!
Oh my goodness, yes! I forgot this one.
"I dieted for two whole days and my pants feel the same - I guess it's impossible for me to lose weight!"
12 -
teresadannar wrote: »My list:
4) Making too big a deal about food even while successfully dieting - such as, spending hours or chunks of hours planning out and talking about the next meal - thus never breaking that obese person habit of thinking/planning/dreaming/wanting/craving/needing food constantly. Even while successfully dieting, spending the whole day thinking about the next meal, very understandable given the often-a-little-hungry nature of dieting, contains the seeds of a future diet breakdown.
This is where I'm at, even after a year, maybe not hours, maybe not constant, but yes, this hits a chord.
How do you move past it?
I think it is common to put food on a pedestal but does it really belong there? It might help to gain perspective by making a list of all the ways that the food experience sucks. The goal is not to be anti-food but to have some mental ammunition to shoot down unhelpful thoughts. When I made my list I got quite mad... but I got over it.1 -
Doing 3-5 day water only fasts. Did absolutely nothing! EXCEPT it did make my stomach “shrink” so I was eating less after that and was extremely mindful of what I ate, eating ONLY super nutritious foods. But now I realize I can just stick to low cal super nutritious foods without a 5 day fast!
I’m shocked that you put eating healthy food as a negative! I really enjoy eating healthy food, it makes me feel good about myself and I enjoy the taste better than all the crap a lot of people eat. Once you train yourself to eat only nutritious food, you will no longer have weight problems. I’ve never been above the lower end of ”normal” weight because of that. I’m only here to lose extra vanity pounds to get to the lowest safe weight for my height because they’ve proven that thin people who eat healthy with nutrition packed foods live longer and are less likely to get other diseases like diabetes, heart problems and even cancer (unless genetic.) There is NOTHING WRONG WITH EATING HEALTHY! This is what people should strive for!5 -
AliciaHollywood wrote: »Doing 3-5 day water only fasts. Did absolutely nothing! EXCEPT it did make my stomach “shrink” so I was eating less after that and was extremely mindful of what I ate, eating ONLY super nutritious foods. But now I realize I can just stick to low cal super nutritious foods without a 5 day fast!
I’m shocked that you put eating healthy food as a negative! I really enjoy eating healthy food, it makes me feel good about myself and I enjoy the taste better than all the crap a lot of people eat. Once you train yourself to eat only nutritious food, you will no longer have weight problems. I’ve never been above the lower end of ”normal” weight because of that. I’m only here to lose extra vanity pounds to get to the lowest safe weight for my height because they’ve proven that thin people who eat healthy with nutrition packed foods live longer and are less likely to get other diseases like diabetes, heart problems and even cancer (unless genetic.) There is NOTHING WRONG WITH EATING HEALTHY! This is what people should strive for!
For many of us, the problem isn't the objective experience of eating healthy foods, it's the assigning all foods into categories of either "good" or "bad" and feeling guilty if we eat (or even want to eat) foods in the latter category.
Nobody is saying there is anything wrong with eating healthy. The issue is feeling guilt, stress, and unhappiness when you fail to live up to how you think you "should" eat. And I will say it is personally very unhelpful and even destructive to classify what many people eat as "crap" or consider eating something that I need to "train" myself to do in order to achieve my goals (that is to say, I'm glad it's helpful for you, but it's an approach that is absolutely toxic to me).
If you've never been outside of a normal weight range, it may be useful for you to spend some time listening to those of us who have been and appreciate what life might look like from that perspective.
When you say "This is what people should strive for!", please appreciate that striving for this literally led me to binge and purge and letting go of it has led me to several years of successful weight management while eating tons of nutrient-dense foods.25 -
The "healthy foods" comment is likely that one thinks that is ALL you can have to be successful. And that you can't touch "unhealthy foods" then, and it's a mental pummeling if you do.
As many have proved - you can overeat "healthy" or "clean" or "whatever" type foods.
And you can lose fat on foods with terrible nutritional value.
But there's nothing wrong if you can fulfill nutritional needs with "healthy" foods, and still have what might be considered by others as unhealthy if it fills out the rest of your calories.15 -
AliciaHollywood wrote: »I’m shocked that you put eating healthy food as a negative! I really enjoy eating healthy food, it makes me feel good about myself and I enjoy the taste better than all the crap a lot of people eat. Once you train yourself to eat only nutritious food, you will no longer have weight problems.
[...]
There is NOTHING WRONG WITH EATING HEALTHY! This is what people should strive for!
No one is saying it's wrong to eat healthy, but it's not helpful or sustainable to force ourself to eat only 'healthy' food and ban all foods not considered healthy, if it means depriving ourself of foods that we enjoy.
PS it is most certainly possible to weight too much while only eating nutritious foods, all it takes is eating more than you burn.13
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