Stop lying to yourself

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  • reggiepe
    reggiepe Posts: 146 Member
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    I agree. It's pretty silly to think that if it isn't in the diary it didn't happen LOL. Your waistline knows it did.

    I have found the diary to be an education and was shocked at how many calories are in the things I used to eat all the time. No point in trying to lie to yourself about it.

    Keep some healthy snacks in the fridge for when you get home from work. You can munch on carrot sticks while waiting for your dinner.

    So true....I started this journal with an open and honest outlook. The first few days of logging anything that I consumed was an eye opener. Now my grocery shopping takes a bit longer, but I now know how to eat healthier and what to look for.

    I keep thin sliced turkey and thin sliced reduced fat provolone cheese in the fridge all of the time. It is real easy to make a 100 calorie snack that is satisfying and tastes good too (a couple of slices of turkey inside a rolled up piece of provolone) That is my go to in the evening between my workout and bedtime.
  • xomelissasue
    xomelissasue Posts: 17
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    good to know that i'm not alone. I also just sort of had a moment where i was like i need to stop lying to myself and hold myself more accountable--- love the motto, if you bite, you write it. But i need to extend to that drinks as well. I am social drinker and need to be sure i realize how many calories i am consuming thru drinks as well. thank you for starting this thread.
  • eleanorblack
    eleanorblack Posts: 25 Member
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    I am terrible for coming home starving and eating before dinner is cooked :-( My tactics are:

    1. Log it AND log it piece by piece, not at the end of the binge! If I eat a piece of cheese I have to enter that before I go eat a couple of slices of ham!

    2. Make tea/drink water

    3. GO OUT OF THE KITCHEN. I often put dinner on and walk straight upstairs and get into the shower.

    4. Already know what dinner is going to be - and ideally make it the night before - coming home with no plan of what to eat is always a disaster for me...

    5. If all this fails and I suddenly find myself eating 2 slices of buttered toast and a forkful of coleslaw while eyeing up a granola bar I find I can pull myself away from carrying on and on by reminding myself that I don't feel full *yet*, but give it 10 minutes and the food will have had a chance to go down - so I'll walk away and say if I still feel starving in ten minutes I can come have something else - of course I never do by then!

    lol - kind of wrote a novel there! But this is my worst, worst time of day....
  • ssitari
    ssitari Posts: 13
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    What I find helps me is to make sure I have some healthy snacks at work in the afternoon (carrot sticks & hummus, some pumpkin seeds, etc). I usually eat that between 3pm - 4pm. That way, when I get home at 5:30, and we start getting dinner done, I'm not thoughtlessly eating as I cook.
  • Sepa
    Sepa Posts: 243 Member
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    Thanks OP for starting this thread, I'm not alone after all!!

    There was a TV programme here in the UK last night called 'Secret Eaters' - it featured this man and woman who wanted to lose weight, and were keeping a food diary, but secret cameras revealed that they were eating WAY more calories than they thought. The woman estimated that she was eating 1300 cals a day but was actually eating, on average, over 3000!! A little snack here, a biscuit with your tea, taking a bit of food from someone else's plate, that burger you 'forgot' you ate on the way home from the pub...where you had 5 pints of beer not the 2 you logged...it all adds up! I cringed as I watched it as I recognise this behaviour in myself sometimes too!

    The psychologist on the show advised making small changes to break habits that lead to secret eating - work out when and why you secretly snack, and then change that behaviour. They did an experiment where they asked half the people at a cinema to eat popcorn as they would normally, and the other half to eat the popcorn with their non-dominant hand. The people eating with their non-dominant hand ate way less popcorn after 20 minutes than those who ate normally!! For me, I have this weird habit where I will always buy something to eat (usually something not very healthy!) when I fill up my car at the petrol station, so now I've started using the 'pay at pump' facility instead. Isn't it weird how we KNOW that snacking is bad for us, but somehow we kind of justify it to ourselves that it's OK 'just this once' or that somehow the calories don't count?!

    I only saw part of this program. May watch it on 4od. Funnily enough the bits I did catch was the popcorn bit (not the results) and the woman who thought she ate 1300 cals!
  • 81Katz
    81Katz Posts: 7,074 Member
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    I was lying to myself at times too when I had a couple OOPS moments. I used to not log them, shame or embarrassed at myself I guess. Now I have logged the recent ones. WOW, what an eye opener. Sure it makes me feel like sh^t to see the writing on the wall so to speak but it just makes me try to do better through out the rest of the week. Of course I might go 6 days doing GREAT and then again recently I have another OOPS moment. Kind of been a recurring thing the last few weekends. Luckily not an entire cheat day, more just a cheat snack of anything but certainly MORE damage than it's worth because the next day I feel awful, physically AND mentally.
  • debrapeterson
    debrapeterson Posts: 84 Member
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    So I am the first person to admit that I am lying to myself and I am now changing this.

    Yesterday I got home from work and I was starving. I knew the OH wasn't back from work for another 30-40 mins and that my dinner took that long to cook. So what I should have done was wait them 40 minutes out. I didn't I started to eat whatever I could eat. Sandwiches, crisps and chocolate. I didn't add it to my diary either. Why didn't I add it to my food diary. Because if I lied to myself about how much I had eaten I thought I could get away with it. The problem is with this is your body knows you have consumed these extra (in my case over 1000) calories.

    Today I have gone back and added these calories. If I don't add them I don't learn and I forget in a few days about my lie and I leve myself open to do it again. I don't like red numbers In my diary. Especially on a non exercise day.

    Today I have decided that all calories that enter my body will be logged in my diary. This way I become accountable for my food and I learn by my mistakes.

    Now I know I can't be the only one who does this. But hopefully together we can stop it!

    Hope your all making the right food choices today :)
  • debrapeterson
    debrapeterson Posts: 84 Member
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    I have a tendancy not to want to record but I force myself for fear I will go completly off track. I also print out my reports and highlight where I went over. I know this is to much but this is how bad I want MFP to work for me. The only thing I still hide from friends/family is my weight. Just not ready to come out on that. Each day when I complete my diary I record in my day planner what my weight will be 5 weeks later so I will be able to see how I'm doing in 5 weeks. With all this I still fall short on my water and fitness but I will keep trying. So always record to much is better than not enough.
  • Sepa
    Sepa Posts: 243 Member
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    I just went on to reports and the stupid work computer has a "missing plug in" so cant view it 'stamps feet'
  • strikerjb007
    strikerjb007 Posts: 443 Member
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    So I am the first person to admit that I am lying to myself and I am now changing this.

    Yesterday I got home from work and I was starving. I knew the OH wasn't back from work for another 30-40 mins and that my dinner took that long to cook. So what I should have done was wait them 40 minutes out. I didn't I started to eat whatever I could eat. Sandwiches, crisps and chocolate. I didn't add it to my diary either. Why didn't I add it to my food diary. Because if I lied to myself about how much I had eaten I thought I could get away with it. The problem is with this is your body knows you have consumed these extra (in my case over 1000) calories.

    Today I have gone back and added these calories. If I don't add them I don't learn and I forget in a few days about my lie and I leve myself open to do it again. I don't like red numbers In my diary. Especially on a non exercise day.

    Today I have decided that all calories that enter my body will be logged in my diary. This way I become accountable for my food and I learn by my mistakes.

    Now I know I can't be the only one who does this. But hopefully together we can stop it!

    Hope your all making the right food choices today :)

    That's awesome.

    If more people did this, then you wouldn't have 1000's of posts from people claiming that they can't lose weight.
  • RunHardBeStrong
    RunHardBeStrong Posts: 33,069 Member
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    No you are not the only person who does this. I try to think of things that I need to do as soon as I get home so that I don't binge. I then walk through the door with a plan in my head that will be something like, feed the cats, get changed, prepare the dinner, while it cooks put the washing away, do the ironing, clean the bathroom, etc etc. Simple things but if you formulate a plan and write it down then you are less likely to end up in the kitchen eating without thinking. It's a hard one to break though.

    This is what I do as well! After dinner I clean up, let it digest a little then get my workout on! Then I relax. Though I am a person that can't relax until I know everything I need to do is done!
  • Sweet_Pea_82
    Sweet_Pea_82 Posts: 41 Member
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    In a way, I was the opposite. Before I joined MFP, I thought I ate a LOT, so my first thought was to stop eating. When I signed up for MFP and actually logged what I ate the first three days while excersising, I had less than 1,000 calories a day and then counting excersising, I netted less than 800 on some of those days. No wonder I felt tired, drug out and sluggish; I was starving myself and didn't even realize it all the while still gaining weight. After reading posts on here and doing some research I found out that I was doing way more harm than good by not eating at all. So, I have to really THINK about eating throughout the day and making sure I hit my water intake. The last two weeks I have been eating at least 1200 calories (trying to be healthy all the time, but there are a few treats) and getting my water everyday and I feel SO much better! I have more energy and it has been quite the eye opener and I have lost 24 lbs so far (not too shabby) :-) Great thread and really good advice!
  • prov31jd
    prov31jd Posts: 153 Member
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    Great Post, OP. This is so true!

    To combat this tendancy in myself, I try to plan what I will eat, and I log my calories BEFORE I eat it -- so I'm sure how much it will be. Not too long ago I made the mistake of eating something, "estimating" (very poorly!) the nutritional content . . . logged it afterward, and was APPALLED to find I'd gone about 500 cals over for the day. I had to spend extra time on the treadmill. It was pizza -- I ate three pieces. If I had stopped at 1.5 or even 2 pieces, I would have been OK calorie-wise, and frankly, I would have been satisfied. Lesson learned.
  • lolabluola
    lolabluola Posts: 212 Member
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    "Your body keeps an accurate journal regardless of what you write down... "
  • JeepBaja
    JeepBaja Posts: 1,824 Member
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    I wasted six months telling myself the extra food is OK because I was averaging six miles a day of walking and I was hiking quite a bit. I have always had a horrible diet even when I lost my 1st 30lbs. It was because I ate less.. plain and simple.

    It wasn't until after the holidays when I started to gain weight, went from losing 34lbs. to just 20lbs.... I knew what I was doing and it wasn't working. I was just fooling myself.

    So now I am back to what I know works, less food and though it is still a horrible diet, it is far less than I used to eat and quite frankly, it doesn't feel like a diet, just like the 1st time around. It works so I am going to stick with this for a while.
  • TXBelle1174
    TXBelle1174 Posts: 615 Member
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    I think my biggest problem is that I will eat a late lunch - 2pm or so. Then I am not hungry for dinner so I only eat a little. Right around 8pm I am starving and want to eat everything - usually everything sweet. Of course, its the end of the day so I am nearing my calorie goal and the things I want to eat are more calories than I have left.
    Also sometimes I underestimate the sizes of portions that I have. I will "think" its only a TBSP of PB but its really closer to two. Or I will "forget" to log the piece of chocolate, or the three bites of Mac N Cheese that I had while cooking for the kids. Those things add up - QUICKLY! Especially when they are the less desireable types of food - chocolate, sweets, etc.
  • skinnylion
    skinnylion Posts: 213
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    Good for you! Moving forward and learning from your mistakes are a great way to maintain a positive attitude. :)
  • LuLuRunner1
    LuLuRunner1 Posts: 329 Member
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    We all do this on occassion. I try to hit the "complete food diary" button and convince myself that after I hit that button, I cannot add anymore food to the diary, so I can't eat anymore (no, it doesn't always work). The other day, though, I felt like I had been eating all day and to make myself pay for it, I started logging everything I ate and rounding those serving sizes up. Amazingly, I was actually under my calorie goal for that day. It was a nice change.
  • diddyh
    diddyh Posts: 131 Member
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    If I were really struggling to wait until my dinner, I would incorporate a snack for when I get home. Maybe a piece of cheese, a yogart, a piece of fruit, etc. Make the allowance for it. This should tide you over until dinner.
  • joe7880
    joe7880 Posts: 92 Member
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    Yesterday I got home from work and I was starving.

    Having that feeling of being starved when you get home can really hurt you nomatter what your good intentions are. You should consider drinking a tall glass of water and having a healthy snack sometime before you leave work. I like having an apple or a fiber one brownie in the late afternoon because without it I will be starving when I get home after fighting traffic, etc.

    Edit: Lol, exactly as suggested above :ohwell:

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