I can't keep motivated
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BrendonP13
Posts: 3 Member
Hi everybody,
So I struggle with binge eating. Main 2 factors are stress and boredom. What's the best way to stay motivated? I can't seem to string together more than a week of solid eating habits without reverting to a big binge meal. I tried intermittent fasting but I don't think it's working for me, when I do eat I just don't get full. I have 3 kids at home and I really need to lose 100lbs, I'm currently 330 lbs. Please any suggestions are welcome.
So I struggle with binge eating. Main 2 factors are stress and boredom. What's the best way to stay motivated? I can't seem to string together more than a week of solid eating habits without reverting to a big binge meal. I tried intermittent fasting but I don't think it's working for me, when I do eat I just don't get full. I have 3 kids at home and I really need to lose 100lbs, I'm currently 330 lbs. Please any suggestions are welcome.
4
Replies
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I am not an expert so please keep that in mind. But I would think if you have a tendency to binge, avoiding as much restriction as possible might be a good strategy. The more willpower you use on restrictions, the more likely you'll break and binge.
Perhaps try to just start out aiming for a small deficit, like 1 lb per week. Don't overly restrict your food choices and make sure to plan in treat foods that you enjoy. Meanwhile, brainstorm other things you can do to deal with stress and boredom - stock up on flavored teas, face masks, puzzles, books, creative projects, whatever works. Try getting up an walking around your home if you get snack-ey, try a meditation app on your phone, stuff like that.
Then once you stick to that for awhile, you can try increasing your deficit so you can see faster progress.
Hopefully you will get advice from others who have dealt with the same problem. Hang in there :flowerforyou:4 -
Baby steps. Are you trying to change too many things all at once? This is stressful and can be overwhelming.
Losing weight is just the first step. After weight loss comes life-long maintenance. Motivation is going to be up and down. It's not about xxx number of perfect days. 2 steps forward and one back is still progress.
Intermittent fasting is just one method that helps some people reduce calories pretty consistently. But it may not be a method for you.
Staying full on fewer calories takes patience and practice. Patience in that you should not try to drop the weight too fast. A slower rate of loss gives your more calories. Practice in that you need to find what is filling for you. Protein, fat, and fiber are filling components. But, what keeps you full, may not work for someone else.
You might start by tweaking one meal at a time. Example - my typical breakfast was cold cereal & milk. When I started logging I found out the portions were puny. This just wasn't filling enough. I wanted more bang for my calorie buck, so to speak. After trial and error, I found that a Greek yogurt "parfait" would give me a decent amount of protein and fiber (with Fiber One sprinkles). I love this with semi-frozen blueberries.
Read the stickies - here are a couple good ones
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1235566/so-youre-new-here/p1
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1080242/a-guide-to-get-you-started-on-your-path-to-sexypants/p12 -
You should probably enlist the help of a mental healthcare professional if you haven't already, they can give you much better tools to manage binge eating than random Internet strangers can. If your job has an employee assistance program (EAP), you might even be able to get a few free sessions (usually around 6-7 in my experience).
Take a week or two to honestly log what you eat normally - get a sense of how you actually do eat, before you get all wrapped up in ideas about how you should eat. Ideally you would weigh everything to get more accurate data at this stage, but you can take the first week to get in the habit of logging at all before you add in building the habit of weighing your food first. If it will upset your brain-weasels to see a big red number at the top of your diary and you can't ignore it easily, manually reset your calorie goal to something wild like 60,000 calories per day, something you can't possibly go over. (Go to Home > Goals > Edit on the desktop site, hamburger menu > Goals > Calorie, Carbs, Protein and Fat Goals under Nutrition Goals on the Android app.)
Once you have data about how you actually do eat, you should be able to identify one or two easy changes you could make to reduce the number of calories you consume in a day. Just for one possible example, if you drink coffee with creamer and sugar, you can probably use a bit less of those things and shave off a few calories that way. Give yourself time to get used to whatever you decide to change, then once that's second nature, find another easy change and focus on that for a week or two. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
This is probably my 15th run at the whole weight-loss process in as many years, and my thinking this time around is this: when I get to goal weight, I will still need to eat food, and it will still have calories. So, in the process of becoming a person who weighs X lbs, I need to learn how to eat like someone who weighs X lbs. If I treat the changes and choices I make now as temporary things in service of a goal, what happens when I get there? I go back to living my life the way I was before? That will get me right back to where I started. No, these changes I'm making need to be permanent and sustainable, which means slow and steady and one at a time, for me. The routine and behaviors of "log food," "weigh food for accurate logging," and "choose food with the goal of consuming fewer than X calories in a day" are three different habits that I've cultivated one at a time, roughly in that order. Maybe someone out there has been successful with just discarding all aspects of their Life as a Fat Person, emptying their fridge and refilling it with all new foods and starting over Day 1 with a whole new routine from scratch, but that sounds exhausting just to think about.6 -
Yeah I'm cutrently doing therapy, it's helping me understand WHY I make the choices I do I'm just having a hard time stopping them still. Thsbdky for the suggestions there are definitely some good ones!4
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BrendonP13 wrote: »Hi everybody,
So I struggle with binge eating. Main 2 factors are stress and boredom. What's the best way to stay motivated? I can't seem to string together more than a week of solid eating habits without reverting to a big binge meal. I tried intermittent fasting but I don't think it's working for me, when I do eat I just don't get full. I have 3 kids at home and I really need to lose 100lbs, I'm currently 330 lbs. Please any suggestions are welcome.
Are you eating enough? Are you only heating so-called healthy things or are you also indulging and eating things you enjoy? Both can be the reason for giving up.
Also, why are you bored? Find things that interest you.1 -
anytime you make things too restrictive, it is hard to keep to it. that is the reason most 'diets' fail.
there is no good food or bad food. Some food is more NUTRITIOUS than others, but that alone does not make something good or bad.
I lost 130 pounds eating what I wanted as long as it fits in my calories. that includes meals out and cookies. I'm still actively losing and doing it the same way.
Keeping 'binge' foods out of the house helps. I buy junk food that hubby and son like, but I can leave alone. chips and ice cream hold little appeal to me. I have sweets nearly every day. But its 3 oreos, or 6 if I have room. not half a package with a giant glass of milk.2 -
I've went low carb, definitely lost the cravings, never really feel hungry, First time I've felt like this losing weight, so for me this works!0
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No one is always motivated. That's where self discipline is a necessity. Something I'm still learning lol3
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