The FastDay Forum

@Norwegian_girl congrats on the weight loss! that is fantastic. I can only dream of losing that fast. When did you eat yesterday? On a fast day I skip breakfast and don't eat until around 3 or 4 when I have a large portion of vegetables and some protein. It gets me stuffed and I still have some calories left for the evening if I get peckish. Speaking of fasting, today is my second day this week. I'm hoping it goes as well as Monday's did. I'll make some tofu stir-fry in the morning before I go to work so it will be ready to pop in the microwave when I come home from work at 3.
Take care all! enjoy your "feast" day, I'll see you tomorrow.

@Norwegian_girl congrats on the weight loss! that is fantastic. I can only dream of losing that fast. When did you eat yesterday? On a fast day I skip breakfast and don't eat until around 3 or 4 when I have a large portion of vegetables and some protein. It gets me stuffed and I still have some calories left for the evening if I get peckish. Speaking of fasting, today is my second day this week. I'm hoping it goes as well as Monday's did. I'll make some tofu stir-fry in the morning before I go to work so it will be ready to pop in the microwave when I come home from work at 3.
Take care all! enjoy your "feast" day, I'll see you tomorrow.

I split my 500`s in three meals. I skip breakfast, have lunch at work, then dinner and last a snack on about 50-70 calories.
I have to try and see how that goes:)

[Tracieknits]

Some of us find it's easier to control our hunger until we eat on fast days. Others really find their fast days go better if they have a bit of protein and veg at breakfast and/or lunch as well as dinner. None are wrong - it's whatever works best for you.

I've already been slightly naughty. I had half of a dairy milk bar today. But that's my only naughty eating today so far. if I don't do much more than that, I'll be okay. I have some mexican chicken lime soup in the fridge (with black beans, onions, carrots, poblano peppers, corn and cilantro in it). We'll either have that for dinner tonight or tomorrow.

Non-fasting day again. When I woke up sunday morning my first thought was actually "how good it would feel to have a fast day today, after all the junk food I had saturday". But we were having friends over for lunch, so that was`nt happening.
Next fast day is tomorrow, on tuesday. I am actually starting to look forward to those days, as so many of you kindly warned me that I would. Haha...

After a large dinner of chicken and salad last night I still feel stuffed so just a coffee and cream this morning and see when I next get hungry, hopefully dinner time :0)

Edit: cold chicken GF sandwich at 3.30pm, not too bad!

OMG it seems that this tent is made for me....
I think fast days are so much easier than eating days...
I do 3:4 and last Friday and Saturday I've completely engorged. I was glad it was Sunday again, I was back on track ...
Usually Mondays and Wednesdays are good, then I can behave well ... but Fridays and Saturdays, for unclear reasons they are so difficult for me. These are the days that I think: I can eat anything, so I do that very intensive (I eat 1000 cal more than my TDEE)
I read once that you have less craving for 'bad' food after a fastday. For me that is certainly not true.
Fortunately, or rather unfortunate I read that there are more people like me who just go wild on a eat-day.
I hope we can support each other here by not going crazy on junkfood

[Tracieknits]

I've been a mess for the past month, not losing weight and probably eating too much. So I'm going to do MyFitnessPal combined with the Fitbit site (they talk to each other, if you give them permission), and I'm going to log my food. I'm not sure how much of my stall is me being naughty and how much may be my thyroid.

But today's a fast day.

Something has changed with me these last few days. After a successful (to me) fast yesterday (630 calories, but enough to get me under 135 lbs this morning, my goal for the week) today I am not as hungry and am not bingeing like on other eating days. I had a small serving of tofu with "fried" rice, only a bit of oil for the rice after I sauteed the vegetables in water. I also had some cantaloupe and a couple of strawberries and I have no desire to eat more. I like not feeling hungry and not feeling over full, stuffed to the gills so much that my stomach hurts. I think perhaps the fasting routine is kicking in and that elusive 'not feeling as hungry on feast days' part of this WOL is happening. I've also had no desire to eat junk food after last Wednesday's binge. Adam had Popeyes chicken last night which he bought for himself with the money he earns from his little job. Not the healthiest choice for him to make but it was a treat What was amazing was that I only ate two of the fries. I haven't even had any of the leftovers. I looked up the calorie count of the biscuit online last night thinking I might be able to have half even on a fast day - 406 calories in 1 biscuit!! Needless to say I didn't have any of it. I'm hoping my son will keep his word and make chicken pot pie with me tonight. Neither of us felt like cooking yesterday, our usual cooking together day. Anyway, just wanted to share how well I am doing and how big a change it is. Perhaps it is the beautiful weather we are having - sunny and mild. I even went for two walks yesterday.
I hope all of you are doing well today. Enjoy the day wherever you are and no matter the weather!

Good for you, stephd!

I'm here to congratulate myself on buying a bean salad instead of a bag of tootsie rolls. I really don't need any more sweets today, and I certainly don't need a bag of tootsie rolls.

I have copied this info from carorees from the maintaining thread, in case you haven't seen it. Although long, you may find something that helps.

"I have recently been reading a book by Gillian Riley "Ditching Diets" that was very interesting and had some good ideas about how to stop overeating. I think that the book by Amanda Salis "Don't go hungry diet" may also have some useful insights.

The key premise of Gillian Riley's book is to move the focus away from weight, and instead to focus on the eating habits that you can sustain for their health benefits (especially the health benefits that you can really feel, such as more energy due to lower carbs, rather than the putative health benefits that you can't actually feel but just hope are happening), even though not using weight as a goal might result in you stabilising at a higher weight than you would like, as peebles has speculated.

Here are some key passages from Gillian's book:

1. AM I CHOOSING? Most people deny choice in an attempt to cut back on their eating, whether or not they are actually managing to cut back. If you keep procrastinating, putting off making good changes or if you feel deprived when you don’t eat something yummy, this is the theme for you. When you eliminate these problems, then you take control. You take control by developing a deep sense of free choice. Only then can you make genuine choices that work for you, choices you really do want to live with.

Most people try to control their eating by thinking in terms of prohibition: commands, restrictions and maybe even threats. They think like an authority figure, a stern parent inside their own heads, shouting out orders. The harder they try, the more urgently this voice shouts at them, judges them and tries to bully them into submission.

The sense that eating less means you are ‘depriving yourself’ is nothing but an attitude, a way of thinking. All that difficulty and negativity is created when you deny your freedom of choice, and you do that by thinking in terms of commands, threats, rules, restrictions and prohibition.

This fear is that if you really let yourself believe you’re completely free to overeat – you will! That’s why you deny choice in the first place, because you hope that if you give yourself rules you might obey them, at least for a while. It can take time to overcome this fear, to throw out the rules and let in a stronger sense of freedom around food. It will take developing trust in yourself to make the choices you really do want to live with. That’s something that can take time,

Setting out ‘to eat what you want in moderation’ is all very well unless eating in moderation leaves you feeling deprived! After all, it is the immoderate amount you eat that you’re trying to control in the first place, isn’t it? The problem is that eating enough to never feel deprived means overeating, and especially it means overeating things that are aren’t so good for your health.

There’s absolutely no need to go ahead and overeat in order to prove that you’re free to. In fact, trying to gain a sense of freedom around food by overeating can be completely counterproductive. This is because you can become even more fearful of acknowledging free choice, and so end up denying it even more strongly. What I’m suggesting is something else completely: that the difference is in whether or not you genuinely believe you’ve got real, open, free choices about what and how much you eat. The difference is in your attitude. It has nothing at all to do with what and how much you are eating. It’s entirely possible not to eat for long periods of time and not feel deprived. It’s entirely possible to feel tempted by food but not eat it and still not feel at all deprived. The reason is because you’re remembering that it’s your own free choice; that nothing about this is being done to you against your will.

Make complete choices by acknowledging the outcome you would expect, based on your experience. For example, ‘I’m choosing to eat this tub of ice cream and to feel nauseous and guilty afterwards’. You are free to eat anything, but different choices produce different outcomes. What you don’t have much of a choice about is what outcomes follow from particular choices.

When you ask yourself: ‘Am I choosing?’ see if you feel and believe that you are totally free to overeat - especially when you’re not eating something that looks good to you.

2. WHY DOES IT MATTER TO ME? Here we look at why you might make one choice over any other. For example, you might ask yourself, ‘Why don’t I eat some more cake?’ Or, ‘Why am I snacking on an apple instead of a bar of chocolate?’ We always have reasons for the things we do but often we lose sight of what they are, and this is important when it comes to making lasting changes.

When you eat the food that your body was designed for, in time, the weight evaporates and the weight loss is fairly easy to maintain. Do you think you’ve been trying to do this already? Maybe, but it’s also likely that your weight has been all that matters. Isn’t that what’s motivating you? Weight loss? Wanting to lose weight is very likely to be the reason you’re reading this book. Assuming you are overweight, that’s a good reason, but no matter how much you want it, it is a weak motivation. It’s weak because it keeps you locked into the effect of the problem.

It’s a very good idea to lose weight, assuming of course that you are overweight to start with. It’s when you can put that to one side and discover other reasons to take control of your overeating that things really start to change. You lose weight too, but it’s a side effect rather than the focus of everything. Then, your weight loss is much more likely to last.

It’s about eating in a way that supports and enhances your emotional and your physical wellbeing. It’s about correcting the balance from a situation where losing weight is everything to just having it be one factor. It’s fine to have both kinds of motivation. Most of us do. We will always want to look as good as we can, and I do too.

When you draw the focus of your attention away from your weight and towards looking after your health, you immediately start to boost your self-esteem. This is because you are affirming that you value yourself enough to give your body what’s best for it. You motivate yourself towards having a healthy relationship with food rather than looking a certain way. You can have both. You can have the best of health and look great too, but if you prioritise your health and self-esteem you will connect with a considerably more powerful and enduring source of motivation. Then, the weight loss pretty much takes care of itself.

3. HOW AM I DEALING WITH TEMPTATION? This theme addresses your desire to overeat; the urge, impulse and attraction towards all that food you don’t really need. In the past you may have tried to control this by avoiding temptation or distracting yourself. But it’s impossible to keep that up forever, so your success gets compromised. You can begin to think differently about feeling tempted and about feeling satisfied. When you do, things really start to change.

We are rewarded with endogenous opioids when we eat, because our survival system assumes we’re doing something that will keep us alive. Food that contains sugar, most other carbohydrates such as wheat, and fat activate these rewards much more powerfully, which is what makes them more attractive - and potentially more addictive.

It’s important to be able to identify even those brief thoughts of desire [for treat foods] because a great deal of overeating can get done in a fairly unconscious way. You may not be aware you are feeding an addictive desire, and maybe not too aware of what and how much you’re eating either. It’s impossible to control something you aren’t aware of, so noticing your desire to eat is a crucial first step. If you just think in terms of ‘craving’ you might miss a lot of it.

Becoming aware of addictive desire is, of course, just the first step. It’s a hugely significant step, but even when you’ve identified it, you’re still feeling a desire to overeat. When you learn how to manage this experience, you’ve got the option not to satisfy your desire, or at least not to satisfy it quite so often.

If you eat every time you feel upset, then every time you feel upset you’ll want to eat something. If you buy a chocolate bar every time you pay for petrol when you fill your car, you will inevitably desire your treat every time you’re there. You either reinforce this memory [pathway] by overeating once again, or you start to let it go by leaving it unsatisfied. If you leave the addictive desire unsatisfied, you get to be in control of your overeating, and it fades because you are no longer feeding and reinforcing it.

When, in the past, you avoided temptation and any feeling of desire, you never learned how to work through this trance state, so you are going to be controlled by it when it’s there. Far more powerful is to develop the skill of talking yourself through it, by turning around to face it and deal with it. At first, though, even when you do face it, you may still fight it and struggle with it, simply because you hate it and really you just wish it would go away. This actually makes things worse because the more you fight something like this the more it is going to fight back. You stop fighting your addictive desire by accepting it, so that, without any opposition, it simply flows through you. You let yourself relax, breathe into the feeling and allow your addictive desire to eat be there. You choose. The way you choose is either to satisfy your addictive desire or to accept it by being willing to feel it by leaving it unsatisfied. Fundamentally, those are the choices that are open to you and by far the best way to think about them. Of course you aren’t going to stop eating entirely, so one of the challenges you face is in knowing the difference between an addictive desire and a genuine need to eat.

You take control of your overeating by allowing yourself to feel your unsatisfied addictive desire - but don’t expect to do that every time. Sometimes you might not even notice the desire, and sometimes you might not be willing to accept it. This is a process, and you will be on a learning curve. Stay with it and you will get where you want to go, but don’t ever expect your eating to be perfect from now on.

Let go of black-and-white, all-or-none thinking, thinking instead in terms of shades of grey or percentages. Aim for 80 per cent, or whatever seems to work for you. If that’s too high, aim for 50 per cent and keep looking for ways to improve on that. What percentage of success did you have with your eating today? Acknowledge one thing you did or didn’t eat that you are pleased about.

It makes such a big difference to let go of any assumptions about your excess, addictive eating. You simply don’t know if you will, in the future, eat considerably more food than you need. And the wonderful thing is, you don’t need to know. To start with, this can seem frightening because it’s likely you’ll lack confidence in this method. You’ll understandably want to feel comforted by a guarantee of success. But it’s recognizing real freedom of choice whenever you experience your addictive desire that is so liberating because it eliminates any sense of deprivation. If you let yourself know that certain food or quantities of food will always be available to you - tomorrow, next week, whenever - it will be much, much easier to pass on them today.

As I posted on Monday's fasting today thread, I have realized I have been drinking too much beer on normal days. I declare that I am limiting my beer (alcohol) intake to one per day (normal days only, of course), except for special occasions (such as parties or happy hour), which I don't do very much, so... I have fizzy water (preferably with lemon and a splash of Angostura) on light days, so I can do that on normal days to sub for "extra" beer.

[Tracieknits]

Wow - thanks so much for sharing that, @Sassy1! I think I need to go get that book, and re-read the Dr. Salis book as well.


Good job, Ferretgirl! I am reducing my alcohol to not more than 2x/week, four drinks total. Of course I'm a lightweight so that's enough for two evenings of buzz

[carieoates]

I'm aiming for about 250 cals before main meal tonight
Apple
Breakfast bar
Small cheese and ham salad.
No cake at work today. Thank god. It's great but not great.

Thanks @Sassy1 for that excerpt. Interesting reading and I like the idea of choice being the focus of eating. I 'choose' not to eat sweats and chips and I feel better for it.
Yesterday was a successful TDEE day, had my tofu fried rice then some chicken pot pie. Could have done without the two pieces, though, as I wasn't really hungry. I like not feeling hungry but I just have to learn how to consistently wait until I'm actually hungry before eating. It is early yet and I will have to wait and see how this day goes. I'm looking forward to a walk to the library to pick up a book I ordered through inter-library loan. Can't remember what it is about , someone recommended it to me months ago. Have a good day everyone, make good choices

Thanks so much @sassy1 for such helpful info. I am trying my best to remind myself that it is all about "choice". Trouble is, I succeed on fast days but not necessarily on the other days.....which is why I am doing 4:3 this week!

It was very good of you to take the time & trouble to share such insightful stuff.