Carrying On. Sorta?

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  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,117 Member
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    I'm definitely not limited to 6 months on the app, It's nearly 2 years for me. But I'm on Android, and I'm also wondering if being/having been Premium has some sort of an impact.

    On the desktop website I can go back till the beginning (mid 2019).
  • justanotherloser007
    justanotherloser007 Posts: 578 Member
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    springlering62 wrote: »
    We have a dog again now, but he is a nose attached to four legs, has to sniff everything so I get 15-20,000 steps a day now but they tend to be maddeningly slooooow.

    This is soo true!! If it is hot, there is no running. If it is cold, Frank the Tank is running alongside me sniffers or no sniffers!
  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 13,239 Member
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    @vivmom2014

    Breakthroughs are possible. I don't know how or why, but I appear to have made one recently. Something in my brain clicked. I've been on MFP almost five years (February 2018). I did well the first year and got to goal and kept it off a couple years, than had a "relapse" where I struggled for two more. Something changed, and it has become easier. I'm back at goal, so now the hard part starts again - staying here.

    Will it continue to be easier? I will tell you at some point in the future. Is it easy yet? No, but it has become less of a struggle. I really don't know what changed. Maybe through repetition, new habits have finally become ingrained. Maybe I can improve other aspects of my life too getting back to some things I have let slip and maybe tackling others.

    It may never be easy, but it may get less hard. I hope you find that space.
  • vivmom2014
    vivmom2014 Posts: 1,647 Member
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    Thanks for this, @mtaratoot ~ and you've reminded me of something.

    Does the stomach literally shrink with a lower-calorie way of eating? I've gotten frustrated & mad (my two specialties) and decided I'm EATING EVERYTHING. Then I find that I am full, actually full, and it occurs close to my calorie goal. It almost seems too good to be true!

    (So just for good measure I will eat even more, just so I can be right. Omg, it is hell being me sometimes.) But: does the stomach shrink? Or is it mental, and the "full" meter clicks on more readily?
  • vivmom2014
    vivmom2014 Posts: 1,647 Member
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    @mtaratoot

    I love it. Interesting story, and I totally agree about that awful "too full" feeling. I guess humans are fickle beasts (I know I am) and full of contradictions. I don't like to feel overly full, and yet I want to keep eating. I've wondered if I'm a person who struggles with endings (yes, yes, I am.) I don't mind change, but I hate endings. Are they the same thing? (Cue Twilight Zone music)

    This leads me to another question: is successful weight management -- and by that, I mean easily staying within a calorie goal, looking & feeling good, not obsessing -- predicated on getting comfortable with feeling hungry?

    I don't mind feeling hungry. (Not famished, of course.) But I'm not sure I want to feel hungry for the rest of my days.
  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 13,239 Member
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    @springlering62 - I hope this dialogue isn't hijacking your thread; I don't really think it is and apologize if it is.

    @vivmom2014 - I don't like to eat first thing in the morning. I used to keep rolled oats at my office and on the day I drove in rather than rode my bike I'd take some portioned up plain yogurt to eat usually around 10:00 or so. Rather than continuing my tendency to be a raconteur, I won't go into more about my not eating in the morning. You can find that elsewhere on MFP. I will say that when I was going through my first year or so on MFP, I actually got to a point where I sort of enjoyed the "empty" feeling I would have before I'd eat my yogurt. Sometimes I even waited longer to eat it to continue to experience it. It wasn't hunger per se, just "empty."

    🤷‍♂️
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,166 Member
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    vivmom2014 wrote: »
    @mtaratoot

    I love it. Interesting story, and I totally agree about that awful "too full" feeling. I guess humans are fickle beasts (I know I am) and full of contradictions. I don't like to feel overly full, and yet I want to keep eating. I've wondered if I'm a person who struggles with endings (yes, yes, I am.) I don't mind change, but I hate endings. Are they the same thing? (Cue Twilight Zone music)

    This leads me to another question: is successful weight management -- and by that, I mean easily staying within a calorie goal, looking & feeling good, not obsessing -- predicated on getting comfortable with feeling hungry?

    I don't mind feeling hungry. (Not famished, of course.) But I'm not sure I want to feel hungry for the rest of my days.

    Imma go with mtaratoot's assumption that Spring will be OK with a digression on this sub-thread. Fingers crossed!

    To the bolded:

    From reading here, there do seem to be a few people who find that they need to be comfortable with feeling hungry, longer term. But I don't think that's the most common scenario among the long-term maintainers (among whom I count myself now, at 7 years at a healthy weight after decades of overweight/obesity), based on what I've read here.

    For me, so far, it does take long term attention, maybe even vigilance. But it doesn't feel obsessive, or like a sufferfest. (I think my situation may be mildly complicated by being a hedonist by nature: I want to eat all the things because I like yummy. That's unlikely to change. I'm not saying everyone needs to go this route, but I expect to be calorie counting long term, because I want to get every last delicious calorie I've burned while staying at a healthy weight, and counting doesn't feel obsessive or slavish to me. Those feelings will vary from one person to the next.)

    I do think it's pretty important to find personalized, sustainable, relatively happy eating/activity patterns that can become near-autopilot habits most of the time, as life gets complicated. How that looks specifically will vary individually, because we all have different lifestyles, preferences, strengths, and challenges.
    vivmom2014 wrote: »
    I see a lot of myself in @springlering62 ~ and especially this:

    "Why is this so hard?"

    My question encompasses comparing myself to other people, so that's bad, but I just want to know: is it either be overweight or chained to MFP for me? It isn't for other people! (Waaah, waaah!) Sure, "other people" (women I know) complain persistently about their weight, but apparently not enough to slavishly check in with a weight loss app or exercise for more calories.

    And even with my slavish logging, I can SO EASILY justify eating whatever the heck I want ~ which is always too late at night, and nothing remotely low calorie or all that nourishing.

    So I play this game of "over calorie limit, start again tomorrow..." and I just think: this is my life sentence?

    Indeed: why is it so hard?!

    Cynically, I think some of those people don't actually want to lose weight, but feel as if they ought to want to. Commiserating over that can be a form of social bonding, I think. I've been there. At the same time - and this may not apply to everyone - I need to feel that if I'm not willing to put in the work needed to achieve something (anything), then I'm not serious about wanting it. If I justify a treat - and I do (yesterday was a food-fest) - in my case I need to own that as a decision I made, trading off long term good for short-term pleasure. Sometimes that's OK, but it can't be always . . . or future Ann won't have a very good life.

    There isn't any magic, in weight loss or any type of skills gain, etc. IMO, it does take some kind of work.

    Sadly. Maybe.
  • vivmom2014
    vivmom2014 Posts: 1,647 Member
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    Thanks for the input @mtaratoot and @AnnPT77

    I don't want to muddy the waters of the OP and will give the floor back to her. Appreciate the thoughts!
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,961 Member
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    I also think that long-term hormone balancing Takes TIME. So if I've been overweight/obese for X number of years, my body has adjusted over time to that amount of fat. Fat is hormonally active. It carries signals and creates changes in the endocrine and neurological systems.

    Losing weight means the body has to balance again. That isn't completed at the moment I reach Goal Weight.

    That first year or two post weight loss (80 pound loss after 20 years of being overweight) was rough. It was very hard for me to stay at that lower weight. I feel like it was biological, not psychological. I also hadn't completely changed my nutrition. Yet. I wanted my French bread, my cereal, crackers, easy comfort food I had mostly given up to lose the weight.

    Yeah, that doesn't work long-term. Living on those foods causes all kinds of insulin problems. I had to go all the way back to the basics. Protein, healthy fats, fiber, 500-800g of fresh produce daily. Exercise on most days. (I shoot for a one hour walk five out of seven days.) I still log food, because I can't trust myself AND because I am like Ann - I want to eat all the food to which I am entitled, dangit. Without logging I tend to stray into way under or way over.

    Technically I know the calorie amounts of most of the food I eat these days and I can do it without logging but I don't find logging to be a burden. I just do it.

  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 13,239 Member
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    @cmriverside and @springlering62

    Thank you both for that. Very much to the point.

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,166 Member
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    vivmom2014 wrote: »
    Thanks for this, @mtaratoot ~ and you've reminded me of something.

    Does the stomach literally shrink with a lower-calorie way of eating? I've gotten frustrated & mad (my two specialties) and decided I'm EATING EVERYTHING. Then I find that I am full, actually full, and it occurs close to my calorie goal. It almost seems too good to be true!

    (So just for good measure I will eat even more, just so I can be right. Omg, it is hell being me sometimes.) But: does the stomach shrink? Or is it mental, and the "full" meter clicks on more readily?

    With the slightest excuse of Spring having accepted digressions, I'm going to chance replying to this.

    To the bolded: Literally, no. Think about it. If signals from pressure/fullness in the stomach were the big deal, how does that relate to calories? If anything, it would relate to food volume, it seems to me. Volume and calorie content aren't tightly linked.

    Anecdotally, we regularly see people here saying they can't eat all their (greatly reduced) goal calories because they've switched to foods - usually so-called "whole foods" - that they find more filling.

    Like others, I think hormones are the big deal in hunger/appetite, including in all likelihood some blood sugar level triggers (for some people, anyway).

    But: Bariatric surgery works in part by making the stomach smaller, and reportedly the surgery affects appetite. There are those people sated (subjectively) by lower calories when switching to a significantly different eating pattern. Some people here say that they can feel more sated if they drink water, or choose high-fluid foods like soups. That makes me think that fullness signals from the stomach aren't totally irrelevant in the practical problem of eating fewer calories.

    But I think that's about appetite, more than actually hunger. On another thread, someone said they distinguish between "mouth hunger" (which I'd call appetite or cravings) and actual hunger (need for nutrients or fuel).

    My appetite is triggered by low food volume, by habits (I get crave-y at times I usually eat, or in certain social situations), and that sort of thing. I can eat near endless high-calorie refined flour/sugar cookies or candy without feeling full, but not near-endless apples. If all my friends are having a deep-fried appetizer at a restaurant, I crave one, too.

    Even appetite, I think, has hormonal triggers. There's a fun study that compared the effects of a "healthy shake" vs. an "indulgent shake" on a group of volunteers. In reality, they were exactly the same shakes, in both groups. Not only was the "indulgent shake" perceived as less filling, but the differences were reflected in tests of the volunteers' hunger/appetite hormone levels**.

    The volume and habit things can be worked through, when losing weight, I think . . . and it doesn't necessarily take a lot of time, for most of us. My habitual cravings seem to fade within a couple of weeks, if I don't indulge them. (From reading posts here, I don't assume it's universally that quick/easy.)

    I don't think actual hunger occurs very often, among us lucky folks in the developed world who have access to food, and money to buy it. That it's not actual hunger doesn't mean a lot for our weight management efforts, because it's appetite we're struggling with. I do think that habitual dimension of this means that we can perceive that our stomach shrinks after a period of time eating at a calorie-appropriate levels . . . and it probably doesn't matter whether that's literally the case or not.

    ** https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21574706/

    I learned about that study in a radio show/podcast called Hidden Brain. This small study is discussed in an episode about surprising effects of mindset (not just for weight management), along with a number of other studies that have involved mindset and its literal physiological (bodily) effects. Worth a bit of a think, maybe. Here's the episode:

    https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/reframing-your-reality-part-2/

    It's a little long (52 minutes), but IMO very interesting and applicable to our weight management plans. It's not a super-technical science show: It's intended to make information accessible to non-science folks. There was also a part 1, more about mindset and stress response, i.e., more the psychology of mindset in part 1, vs. the impact on the body in part 2.
  • BartBVanBockstaele
    BartBVanBockstaele Posts: 623 Member
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    vivmom2014 wrote: »
    "Why is this so hard?"
    Simple: it is supposed to be hard. It is called biology. When, in nature, have we (and any other species) lived through enough generations of plenty to lose the drive to (over)eat? The answer to this is that no one has ever found evidence of such times. This has now changed, but only in a really significant way in the last 40 to 50 years or so. IF we can keep this up, we will likely de-evolve the drive to overeat. Unfortunately for us, that will be at a time no one will remember that we even existed and even that will only happen if our species does not become exinct before that, and it quite probably will do just that, unless it is very-very-very lucky.

    Some people do not have the drive to (over)eat, they are a rarity, a biological curiosity but they do exist. For the majority of us, the only hope is to concentrate on eating well-controlled portions, and nothing more. If we manage that, we will die at a normal weight. If not, we will die sooner at a higher weight, not taking into account infectious disease, accidents and more of those "nice" things.

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