Anti-Diet vs wanting to lose weight vs accepting your body vs keto vs CICO vs bingeing vs....

It took some work for me to figure out exactly what my triggers were. For me, that process included reflection and taking notes after a day that didn't go as well as I wanted it to.

It sounds like maybe you might be a perfectionist, you're looking for the perfect plan that will work for every kind of day and result in you never feeling restricted but somehow result in the body of your dreams. That plan . . . probably doesn't exist (if you find it, let me know!).

The truth I've found in my own path to sustainable weight management is that sometimes I need different plans for different days. The days I travel for work look very different than the days when I'm at home. Mondays often look different from Sundays. Heck, a Sunday during football season may look very different than a summer Sunday! I don't have a lot of hard and fast rules, it's more like guidelines that I usually observe . . . but sometimes decide to not observe. In some ways it's harder to observe yourself and make your own guidelines than it is to follow the rules that someone else says worked for them . . . but I also think it is more sustainable in the long run.

When you're actively losing weight, you're aiming for a calorie deficit. For most people, this means one will feel some level of restriction. It sounds like just that FEELING is enough to trigger you right now. It might be worth exploring what is underneath that feeling. For me, it was resentment that I needed to do ANYTHING to manage my weight, when my perception was that others didn't and they had the type of body that I wanted to have. What I realized is that EVERYONE with a slender body is restricting themselves to the energy needed to sustain that body, they just may be doing it without any conscious effort (for example, they don't like to eat high quantities of calorie dense foods or they just aren't that hungry). Or maybe they ARE doing things to restrict, but they just aren't advertising it. It doesn't matter, what mattered is that me feeling anger or resentment over that was absolutely useless. It wasn't going to change my situation one bit! I had to grapple with these feelings, but doing it made it possible for me to begin consistently implementing a reasonable deficit without feeling restriction. I looked at it like this: I just need a trick, a tool, to do what slender people are able to do without consciously trying to do it.

Now you may have a different feeling underlying your behavior, weight management is never a "one size fits all" thing.

The point isn't to never feel restriction, because I think everyone is going to have that feeling, in one way or another, while losing weight. The point is to figure out how to manage those feelings and how to implement restriction in a way to minimize the times when it feels overwhelming.

PWR36 wrote: »

You’re so right. I think it’s just getting my head round eating some of the pizza and not the whole pizza..

Personally, as a newbie to doing weight loss in a sustainable and healthy way, I know there are foods that I am not able to eat in moderation right now. Because I want to eat the whole pizza, I absolutely will not buy a whole pizza. I can have pizza but I must purchase it in a single serving. This will be my strategy until I feel I'm at the point where I can have a large quantity of a tempting food in the house and not eat it all in one sitting, and if I'm honest with myself, I might never get there and in that case this rule will become permanent.