think i finally hit rock bottom with my "f" it att

[one2bhealthy]

i had quit again and tried to listen to my hunger cues. and now i am at my very highest wt and feel like crap!! its hot and i feel bloated all the time. i am 49 5'3 and at 215 lbs not feeling good at all. sometimes i wish i could weigh so much that i could get the "surgery" but i thought i would try again. so i am back and will embrace everyones posts and advice. started out with soup for breakfast, going to work and not eating again till lunch! love this website and am grateful i can feel i can always come back to the most sensible way of eating (i think) i have ever read about. heres to have a great day.

[MerryKat]

Welcome Back!!

Take it slowly & just focus on getting from one meal to the next!

You can do this!!! Slowly, slowly.................

[oolala53]

I may be biased, but I think you are likely in a very good place in terms of readiness. You've really given up on the alternatives. That can go a long way. The good news is that you've chosen a kind, compassionate program to surrender to.

I am a bit curious, though. Did you avail yourself of any good resources to hold your hand through the "hunger" game? ARE there any really good places where there are successes who are available and that don't cost an arm and a leg? It can't just be testimonials; there have to be people to shepherd you through, I think. Actually, using habitcal could be useful, but it's so hard to know when you've achieved the behavior with "listening to my hunger." I've heard that the sites for intuitive eating are mostly filled with people who are "hungry" all day long and not ending up eating less.

But in any case, as someone who was not well-shepherded in that process at various times through over three decades, and who now thinks its disadvantages make it little competition for full-on dieting, I think No S is superior. Training wheels on week days, so you get some relief from overeating at its worst; eventually you can listen to your hunger on the weekends like a sonar operator on a submarine. I don't recommend that for quite awhile. Just eat three meals for a few months. Later, you can play with learning to eat your meals so you actually get hungry for the next one. Weekends will have a related trajectory, but it's not predictable.

I also am curious why you had soup for breakfast. I have rather unorthodox meals, but I wonder if you were trying to compensate for having "been bad"? If it was a legitimate reaction to just not feeling very hungry in the morning, it's a great compromise. But when we feel, "I don't deserve to eat because I've eaten too much recently already," it can set up subtle bargaining in the future. "I'll go ahead and eat a lot of this because I can just eat less later." There is an element of flexibility in successful eaters' behaviors, but it's a fine-edged sword.

It's probably better to err on the side of too much than too little for a few weeks. Sneak up on that bad boy, appetite. No S's to start is all you need. Once he trusts you, he won't notice you're giving him a little less and less over time. In fact, he may start the process for you!

And if nothing has budged in a few months, you will at least have a history of discipline to look back on if you need to get more austere.

[MerryKat]

We need a "Like" Button!!

I love your post Oolala!!

[one2bhealthy]

thanx so much for the great advice. lots for me to process. i agree we do need a like button. i am at the point, where i am trying to be positive ,but after so many failures it is hard for me to get into that mind set. hard to imagine i will ever get this wt off. but i try. oh i love soup maybe it wasnt enough though. dont really like "breakfast foods" i just had a light fiber rich english muffen with and egg and cheese and glass of milk. why am i still hungry. wanted to eat breakfast food today. thought it would be satisfying.

i am supposed to go get a bunch of tests done tomorrow and i have been put on thyroid med. they now need to test if it is working. well........... hope to have a good day. thanks again guys. oh i am also going through menapause. and i have weaned off of zoloft(a week with no zoloft. so i just feel like everything together is so overwhelming. just want to say eff it. but that is what got me to 215 lbs. just feel like i will always be looking for a new way to over come this, i am on the website overcoming overeating also.

need to go on there again.

[oolala53]

Try not to let yourself get too confused between No S and overcoming overeating. Don't they recommend letting yourself have free access to food all day long? I tried it for years! I could not determine what was enough at my meals and could not consistently wait until I was legitimately hungry to eat. No S forced me to wait, but also let me eat regularly.

There is so much hype out there about the naturally thin person. but worldwide, there aren't many of them. Most thin countries are poor. When populations get access to frequent food, the average weight goes up. The countries that have food and slim populations do not depend on free eating to keep them that way. They eat moderate meals, usually only one big one a day.

Remember to eat your meals slowly and then be done with it. Even if you feel you might still be "hungry," just try to gently let go of the desire to find that next food that will satisfy you because it's likely not real hunger that you're feeling. There is more than one signal to eat, and a lot of signals have nothing to do with real hunger or need for food. Get busy with something else and it's likely you'll realize later that you are fine without having eaten more. This is part of the training.

It takes months at least to really retrain the appetite. I know you'd like to have peace soon, but try to get your peace from faith for now. You are going to want to eat in between meals! It's too early to want something to keep you from desiring food. Desire is not what picks up the food and puts it in your mouth. It's okay to have desire but wait to eat. Just be sure to really enjoy that meal slowly. That will take practice, too. You are learning new eating skills! Try not to want it all over and done with fast. I know you want the weight off yesterday, but that has never worked. EVen if you woke up tomorrow at your goal weight, if you don't learn these skills, you would put it all back on. You THINK, oh, I'd be good, I'd be so grateful to be thin, but it just doesn't work that way. Prepare yourself for living at a lower weight by practicing the eating habits you'll need to stay there for as long as it takes.

What ELSE in your life is important to you that you can take action on? Enjoy your meals, but develop more interest in the rest of your life.

[elegantportions]

oolala, I think this gem deserves a place in the NoS Glossary sticky (but I don't know how to put it there):

Enjoy your meals, but develop more interest in the rest of your life.

You are definitely a great addition to the NoS community! Thanks for your many words of wisdom.

[oolala53]

I am still working on my own advice.

[one2bhealthy]

still struggling . and yes there are other things in my life i need to work on. yes you are right about the overcoming overeating. all i can to is keep trying or i am gonna end up with some very serious health problems. going to see a doctor on july 25th for my test results. i really do appreciate the great words of encouragement i get on here it really keeps me from just giving up all together.

[reinhard]

Welcome back!

"Hunger" is a great deceiver... very useful in the semi-starvation situations our ancestors faced, rather the opposite in our age of superabundance.

Perhaps relevant snippet from the No S Diet book:

Isn’t It Better to Eat When I’m Hungry?

You often hear formulas like “Eat only when you’re hungry†and “Eat what you want, not what you should†touted as liberating, antidiet weight-loss wisdom. But despite their appeal to nature and their warm-and-fuzzy feel, these formulas are no more effective than “Don’t eat too much.†In fact, they’re worse. They are not merely impossible advice, they are bad advice. And they are profoundly unnatural.

I have two cats. The concept of should is utterly alien to them. But if I give them too much food, they happily eat it and get fat. They want too much. So do I. Superabundance is not a natural problem, so we don’t have good instincts to deal with it. Why would we? No animal (until us, now, perhaps) ever died because there was too much food. Plenty died because there was too little. That all too common scenario is the reason the feeling of hunger evolved—to avoid starvation. So it’s not going to be a very reliable guide to moderating intake; that’s just not its job.

Eating whenever you’re hungry is not only unnatural, it’s uncivilized. Human beings in traditional societies didn’t eat when they were hungry; food was too scarce and precious and hard to prepare for that. Our ancestors were hungry a lot. When times were good, they ate at regular, discrete, social meals, with real gratitude. When times were not so good, they experienced something that makes our “hunger†look like a joke.

Furthermore, if you’re a so-called emotional eater, you may not get an honest answer to, “Am I really hungry?†Depression is going to attempt to pass itself off as hunger. So will stress. So will countless other emotions. And they’ll be quite convincing.

It’s harder to deceive yourself when the question is, “Is it mealtime?†or “Is this a brownie and is it 4 a.m. Monday morning?†Self-deception is a powerful force, and you can’t afford to be naive about it. No snacks blocks this kind of self-deception. It simply doesn’t matter when you’re hungry; you’re not allowed to eat. Real or imagined hunger is not a valid excuse. And soon enough, if you’re firm, you’ll stop even trying to make emotional excuses; any real hunger you have will start to coincide with mealtimes.

Although dieting may not have done much good for the problem of obesity, I don’t think it’s quite fair to say that it caused it. There is nothing new about rules governing the way people eat. What is new is that formerly the rules were externally imposed: by scarcity, by social structures, by tradition. When these external forces passed away, it was only to be expected that people would seek new rules. But most of those new rules were poorly thought out; they didn’t resemble or even take into account the old rules that had served so well for thousands of generations.

I’m not saying we have no “nature†to work with in regard to eating, simply that it’s not enough to rely on. Eating discrete meals is satisfying and natural; but without either social pressure, natural scarcity, rules, or habit, that natural satisfaction by itself isn’t going to be enough to make you do it. It’s just a foundation. You can and should work with it (as the No S Diet does), but don’t expect it to do the work for you.

The sad thing about snacking to manage hunger is that it doesn’t even work. “Research shows that after snacking, people are inclined to eat just as much at meals as they do when they don’t snack,†says David Levitsky.17We don’t, outside of a lab, compensate for snack calories at mealtime—at all. By snacking, we just eat more. And no matter how efficient our metabolisms, we aren’t going to be able to turn those extra calories into negative calories.

So don’t eat when you’re hungry. Don’t eat when you’re depressed. Don’t eat when you’ve seen a good number on the scale and you think you can afford a few extra calories. Eat when it’s time to eat, just like thin people did for thousands of years.

This doesn’t mean you’ll be starving all the time. Limit your intake to meals and your appetite will gradually learn that that’s the time to get hungry.

Engels, Reinhard; Kallen, Ben (2008-03-04). The No S Diet: The Strikingly Simple Weight-Loss Strategy That Has Dieters Raving--and DroppingPounds (pp. 50-53). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.


Reinhard

[DaveMc]

Perhaps relevant snippet from the No S Diet book:

Hey, that sounds like a terrific book!

(I've bought it several times, now: the extra copies are to hand out to people I think might benefit from it. I was also thinking of leaving some on the subway, just to generally benefit humankind, but I've never got around to it, so far. I wanted to try some kind of book-tracking thing, but the sites I've seen so far have all seemed pretty cumbersome and/or not free ... Has anyone had any experience with book-tracking, where you "release" a book into the wild and people can log in somewhere to report where it ended up?)