The FastDay Forum

[Debs]

@GMH, thank you for opening this thread, it has opened some food for thought (groan!).
Thank you for the link too Ssure, I shall read with interest. Interestingly, I am on day four of my seriously low carb experiment and eating a lot more fat. I have noticed that I am not ready to eat roadkill and my sugar/carb craving hasn't awoken. I am also eating a limited number of foods which distracts me from obsessing about what to eat.
I concede that it is easier for me to do than most as I work away from home three weeks a month and only have myself to think of, but as I said on another thread, indeed it may have been this one, that I have access to unlimited, free junk at the mess. Saying that though, having a plan, and sticking to it is working for me. I feel that having got this carb monster under control, at least temporarily, gives me a springboard to tackle the Xmas challenge. Just need to decide my goals!

@ADFnFuel I know it's a serious business but laughing at your fridge opening. Have this vision of peeping around the fridge door while crap food throws itself at you Now that's another thing. I just don't have that sort of food in the house...now I'm crossing over to my other passion, the mind and food. I have trained myself to think of things like crisps as equal to poking myself in the eye with a pointy stick I mean it's a whole days calories for no nutrients really. My snack food mini choc protein bars 100 cals, Weiss ice cream bars about 140. @Breadandwine interesting 're the nut snack. Are u changing ur name to nomorebreadandwine?

@Breadandwine just read your blog. Certainly this is not my experience. Hungry on fast days not hungry when I eat a decent meal. Way hungrier fast days than feed days.

Interesting discussion - again we find out how varied we are in our reactions with/to/around food, at the same time often finding someone who is similar to ourselves.

I guess for me the term "hunger monster"' (which I have used to describe what I experience at times), is not quite the correct one, it is more "the desire to eat" - a point which has come up in this discussion. Probably I do get this reaction more strongly after eating carbs, but I do still get it with fats and proteins - ie once I start eating I want to keep on eating, regardless of how full I may feel. So it is about doing all the sorts of things that have been suggested in this and other related discussions to stop myself. And one way is certainly to leave eating til as late as possible in the day. And have a cuppa or ten between meals.

I am another one who likes to eat while watching TV or reading. And I am fully aware that this is not a good thing to do. As has been said, it is a bad habit, but one that SEEMS pleasurable. (I have managed to stop buying food at the cinema - I take a bottle of water and, if it is a really long film, maybe some soft fruit.)

I am always hoping to find an easy strategy to stop me eating excess, but I guess I will have to accept that not over-eating is one of the things in life that will not be easy and that effort is required!!

good thread GMH. very interesting responses as i munch on cashew nuts and not even hungry. they were just there .

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In other IF forums, a book that is frequently recommended and praised on the topic of hunger/over-eating/the addictive desire to eat and how to control them is Gillian Riley's Ditching Diets (DD). Apparently, DD has a lot of practical advice about not only understanding what it is that you want to achieve, and motivation for it, but how to distinguish hunger from an addictive desire to eat etc.

I haven't read the book but the usual example is that if you're not hungry but always buy popcorn, a hot dog etc. at the cinema - you're eating because you're conditioned to eat in that context and are probably experiencing an addictive desire to eat. There's a nuanced distinction between the concept of food addiction, with which Riley doesn't seem to agree, and an addictive desire to eat.

Anyway, she argues that some people need to acquire new, healthy habits and stop reinforcing conditioned responses related to food, such as over-eating at the cinema. She constantly emphasises that what/when/how much we eat is our free choice - and sometimes our choices may lead us to over-eat or eat something that makes us feel wretched but it must always be our choice made with full awareness of the likely consequences. And with the knowledge that sometimes we choose to over-eat or collaborate with an addictive desire to eat - and that's fine.

ETA: I got lost in my own point. Where Riley's book possibly diverges from Dr. Phil is that she argues avoiding your trigger situation (e.g., eating at the cinema) or substituting another activity (e.g., treadmill rather than snacking while watching TV) can only take you so far. We have to learn to experience an addictive desire to eat in a familiar context and be comfortable enough not to act on it - in that way, we can gradually extinguish that conditioned response and create a new habit.

I've collected so many soundbites from the book that I really should purchase it at some point. I think Riley's website
Eating Less
has an archive of free newsletters to download and people seem to find those useful.

Ive just had a look at http://eatingless.com/. Looks like full of good advise. thanks @Ssure

Now I'm noticing that maybe it's not a hunger monster invading people but possibly a binge monster? Juliana that eating cashews cos they are there gave me a chuckle, hmm what's good to eat? I do wonder if it's not pleasure eating rather than hunger eating that happens after eating a meal?

I think Gillian Riley recommends a Times and Plans approach to eating. In a lot of forums, this seems to throw people because Riley also argues that restriction and deprivation are what can trigger some people to rebel at some point and eat All the Things.

However, the best explanation that I've seen of Times and Plans is that
Times = when to eat
Plans = what you eat and when you stop.

The Times aren't tightly fixed if that doesn't suit you. They can be, "When I meet my friend this evening", "After I arrive home from work", "In about 3 hours". However, unless you know that you didn't eat enough at your last meal or in your day, then be aware of any strong drives to eat significantly before those Times as there's a reasonable possibility that it's an addictive desire to eat rather than an authentic drive. It's important to pay attention to any justifications that we think during that time. They may be weaselly, but perhaps not. Maybe your schedule has altered and you have a compelling reason to eat earlier than you intended. In such circumstances, you generate a new Plan for what and how much you'll eat, and establish your snack/meal's stopping point before you start. And when you're that meal/snack is finished, you might use an awareness of how much you ate to firm up the next Time you plan to eat.

The Plans aren't rigid plans that you planned a week or a month previously (unless that suits you and nothing ever happens to perturb your life). Your Plan can gel together in the final few seconds before you start eating, and you can choose to modify your Plan until the last second. It's a wholly flexible 'Plan' but the essence of it is that before you place the first morsel of food in your mouth, you already know what you are going to eat, and how much you intend to eat and these have already determined what signals the end of your eating. In Chimp Paradox terms, you don't let the decision as to when you're done lie in the hands of your Chimp because it probably makes different choices than The Human. In Gillian Riley terms, you don't want to allow your addictive desire to determine the stopping point, because it will always want more than you need/to over-eat.

I'm lacking the inspiration for a good example at present other than to say DH and I frequently get stuck on public transport while commuting home - sometimes for several hours. Trains break down, there's a tree on the line - we can be stranded on a train or at an out of the way station and know that our food Time and Plan for the evening is blown. This happens often enough that we carry bits and pieces of acceptable food/drink in our bags. So, if our original Time was: "Sometime in the hour after I return home from work" that's not going to happen. After being rained on, waiting without shelter for a Bus Replacement Service that never comes, we might decide our new Time is to have a snack in the next 5 minutes; the Plan for dinner is gone but the new Plan is to eat half of the granola bar with some water and then stop.

FWIW, at meal time I've found that it's very important to not open the refrigerator or pantry doors until I've made a conscious decision about what the main parts of the intended meal will be. This way when I do open those doors, I see that most items won't fit that menu and will be quickly dismissed.

@ADFnFuel, it sounds like you are running your own version of a Plan (in Gillian Riley terms) - you know what it is you intend to eat and because you've predetermined your choices, you leave little wiggle room for Chimps/addictive desires to eat to jump in and plead/demand more food or less appropriate choices.

My DH refers to foods jumping out at him, in the supermarket, or in delicatessens/lunch places - which is one of the reasons he brings a packed lunch to work every day rather than handle the choices/temptation.

I know food jumps out at him from the fridge because it's not unusual for me to go there, with my Plan, only to find that part of that Plan is missing.

Is higher protein the answer in increasing satiety?

e.g this research (links i got from a hungrygirl.com facebook post today)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23107521

which says

The required daily intake is 0·8-1·2 g/kg BW, implying sustaining the original absolute protein intake and carbohydrate and fat restriction during an energy-restricted diet. The intake of 1·2 g/kg BW is beneficial to body composition and improves blood pressure. A too low absolute protein content of the diet contributes to the risk of BW regain. The success of the so-called 'low carb' diet that is usually high in protein can be attributed to the relatively high-protein content per se and not to the relatively lower carbohydrate content. Metabolic syndrome parameters restore, mainly due to BW loss.
or earlier study
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/1/1.full

which says

Weigle et al's results clearly showed that protein is more satiating than is fat, and previous studies have shown that protein is more satiating than is carbohydrate (4). Moreover, diets with a fat content fixed at 30% of calories produce more weight loss when high in protein (25% of energy) than when normal in protein (12% of energy): 9.4 compared with 5.9 kg after 6 mo; after 1 y, evidence was found to suggest that the high-protein diet, independent of the loss of total body fat, resulted in a significant loss of visceral fat (5).

I don't have access to the full text of JR's first link but it looks more like a review than a trial to me (and not even a Systematic Review or Meta-Analysis) so I tend to think that this is, as always, an interesting suggestion to be interpreted in the light of your own experience and observations of your own reactions.

On another forum, there are a fair number of people who follow a Nutritional Ketosis WOE and they've all 'had' to reduce their protein intake substantially. They claim that they are satiated by the amount of fat that they eat (75-90% of their intake) but that eating 'too much protein' causes an insulin spike for them and triggers over-eating in the same way that carbs do for others. (I have no opinion on this, I'm just summarising their reports as an indicator that it feels like a YMMV area.)

Just as a note on the importance of establishing an appropriate protein amount for yourself in the context of how you normally eat - Adel Moussa of Suppversity has an interesting discussion of a study that looked at high protein intake in the context of low GI meals.
http://suppversity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/ ... s-and.html

Adel also gives one of the most level-headed and appropriately nuanced discussion of protein sources in the context of high dietary acid load that I've read: High Dietary Acid Load Doubles Risk of Type II Diabetes in Lean Individuals! Causative or Corollary? Plus: Are Grains, not Meats the Main Offenders in the Modern Diet?
http://suppversity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/ ... sk-of.html

Another thing I have found that fasting has helped with, is the disruption of plans. Before 5:2 if plans for a meal were disrupted then there was almost a panic to get food, any food to fill the gap, no matter how unhealthy or bad for me it was (I am gluten intolerant and really need to go wheat free again, but sandwiches are a standby for nearly everyone and are everywhere). The thing is it was a real panic, missing a lunch date because there was a car accident blocking the road meant that when we got to town I would be heading to the nearest bakery because I couldn't go hungry for X amount of hours. Now I just shrug and accept the longer gap, in some ways I think to myself, goody another 16:8.

The excessive eating I do now is all emotional eating, my taste buds wanting a treat or eating carbs for breakfast, its no longer real hunger, it would take 3 days of nil or minimal foods for real hunger to kick in now.
Passing up the little cakes in French patisseries was very, very hard and I did succumb once a day with coffee on my holiday, now that was definitely my taste buds taking over, but when you go past a patisserie window and they are all just laid out like a jewelers display case, who can resist?

Breadandwine interesting 're the nut snack. Are u changing ur name to nomorebreadandwine?

Haha! No chance of that, @GMH! A little of what does you good and all that!

But, looking back at what I used to have, portion wise, I'm eating much more moderately. I went down from 100g of bread every lunchtime to 70g, and now I'm reducing that. I used to have 80g of rice with a curry, now 50g is more usual.

I came to the 50g amount recently by running short of rice - 37g was all I had and I found even that was sufficient, so 50g is more than enough!

]Now I just shrug and accept the longer gap, in some ways I think to myself, goody another 16:8.

@Julieathome I can completely relate to that! Prior to this WOL I would be climbing the walls if I didn't have a meal on time. Now I'm almost zen-like in my approach to food. If my wife said before dinner, "Oh, I don't feel hungry, let's not eat tonight," (unlikely), I'd simply accept that and wait until the next day.

@GMH, thank you for opening this thread, it has opened some food for thought (groan!).
Thank you for the link too Ssure, I shall read with interest. Interestingly, I am on day four of my seriously low carb experiment and eating a lot more fat. I have noticed that I am not ready to eat roadkill and my sugar/carb craving hasn't awoken. I am also eating a limited number of foods which distracts me from obsessing about what to eat.
I concede that it is easier for me to do than most as I work away from home three weeks a month and only have myself to think of, but as I said on another thread, indeed it may have been this one, that I have access to unlimited, free junk at the mess. Saying that though, having a plan, and sticking to it is working for me. I feel that having got this carb monster under control, at least temporarily, gives me a springboard to tackle the Xmas challenge. Just need to decide my goals!

As you know, Debs, I too did the seriously low carb/high fat thing last week - I was at home, on my own during the days, with a kitchen full of my husband's lunchbox "treats" (pastries, cakes, cereal bars etc) and he was eating a meal each evening - I think it 's just a question of having your head in the right place - so no excuses people - if you want something bad enough, you can do what it takes!