@peebles @lovemyparrot @sassy1
I'm sorry you are all finding things have suddenly got tough (and am hoping it doesn't happen to me
). 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.
I believe that, if you are suffering from the famine reaction, Amanda Salis suggests not dieting for rather longer than 2 weeks before trying again.
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.
There have been ups and downs during the year but as long as I keep returning to my 'magic' 147 pounds, then I feel justified in calling myself a maintainer! 
I have only myself to blame for this - too many 'treats'! 
However, it prompted some drastic action so I fasted on Monday, ate sensibly yesterday and those four extra pounds have now gone! I love this WOL! 
