How do you overcome screw-ups?

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leafy_greens
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How do you overcome screw-ups?

Post by leafy_greens » Wed Dec 01, 2010 8:27 pm

Let's look at how messing up ruins the 3 meal structure. I typically eat a late breakfast around 9 am and then fall off No S by grazing until lunch. If I eat too much for breakfast, I don't want to eat lunch. But if I try to not eat until dinner, to make up for the fact that I've eaten 2 meals before lunch, I become ravenous. It's hard enough to go 6 hours between meals - darn near impossible for me - much less more than that. I'm like a baby. If I become remotely empty, not even hungry, I will lunge for the food, then ruin my next meal. I find it very hard to get back on track after this. Perhaps I take a screw up harder than most, but it ruins my whole day and then I hate myself. Messing up at breakfast means the whole day is a wreck. I can't just let it go and then get back on track for dinner.

I blame part of my views on the diet/resolution mentality - having to "start fresh" on a Monday or it's no use, etc. How do I get out of this? How do you get out of this? You really have to stop viewing messing up as "messing up." I tend to dwell on it rather than move on. I'd like to hear other opinions on the matter.

kccc
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Post by kccc » Wed Dec 01, 2010 8:37 pm

It helps me to eat very regular meals, but sometimes I'll shift a meal by an hour or so if I'm not hungry at mealtime. So, you might have a later lunch.

The other strategy I use is to sit down with something light at mealtime, eat it veerrrryy slowly, and firmly tell myself "This is your lunch." That means I can't use the "well, I didn't eat lunch" excuse later. (Plus, the small amount of food helps hold me until the next meal. Greek yogurt and fruit work well.)

And you CAN do both together if necessary.

Getting back on track asap is a good skill to have. Every time you slip up, you get an opportunity to practice. :)

wosnes
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Re: How do you overcome screw-ups?

Post by wosnes » Wed Dec 01, 2010 9:41 pm

leafy_greens wrote: I can't just let it go and then get back on track for dinner.
Yes, you CAN.
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do. Not that the nature of the thing itself has changed but our power to do it is increased." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You are what you eat -- so don't be Fast, Easy, Cheap or Fake."

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oliviamanda
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Post by oliviamanda » Wed Dec 01, 2010 10:33 pm

I am reminded of a conversation that I had with a co-worker today. She is overweight and admits she needs to lose weight, but there is no way she is going to do it until after the holidays. Meanwhile, she just made tons of Christmas cookies and cannot stop eating them.

Although I have found it difficult to always stick to No S, yes there have been periods where I have had more red days than I would like... but I remember back to when I discovered this "diet"... I knew it made sense and I knew that I could follow it better than any other regime... I started then and there. I did not wait. I was serious about losing weight, and I started immediately. You control what you put in your mouth and when. Take control. If you mess up, try to determine why, and then learn from your mistakes like eating a full breakfast instead of grazing through the morning.
Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.--- Mark Twain

Nicest of the Damned
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Post by Nicest of the Damned » Wed Dec 01, 2010 11:41 pm

Have you tried making it harder to get to the food other than at mealtimes?

Don't hang out in the kitchen, and don't keep food in other locations. When the impulse to eat hits, if you don't have food right at hand, you get a few seconds to think, "do I really want to do this?".

Close up and put away any food packages (including cereal boxes) before you start eating. Again, the point here is to make it just a little bit less convenient for you to get food when you know you shouldn't have it.

Is there some specific food or type of food that you graze on between breakfast and lunch? Have you tried not having that kind of food around?

What are you doing between breakfast and lunch, other than grazing? If the answer is "nothing", that might be your problem right there. Find something to do. Take a walk or go to the gym. Go shopping. Do some chores. Do some work. Pray or meditate. You want something that will keep you occupied, keep your mind off food, and make it harder for you to graze.

wosnes
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Post by wosnes » Thu Dec 02, 2010 1:20 am

One simple rule might do it: you must sit at a table to eat. No exceptions.
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do. Not that the nature of the thing itself has changed but our power to do it is increased." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You are what you eat -- so don't be Fast, Easy, Cheap or Fake."

Sienna
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Post by Sienna » Thu Dec 02, 2010 2:45 am

I think there are 2 separate issues: 1) figuring out how/why you are screwing up in the morning 2) figuring out how to get back on track if/when a screw up occurs.

Since it sounds like all of your messups are basically the same thing (grazing between breakfast and lunch), addressing that issue may largely resolve the second issue. So reflect on *why* you are grazing. Perhaps as an intermediate step, you could add in a single planned snack between breakfast and lunch. When you get more comfortable with the rest of the NoS habits, you could cut it out.

As to the second issue, I suggest deciding on a plan and writing it down to give you a roadmap of what to do if. So that you don't have to think about it in the moment.

One thought is to delay lunch so that you don't become ravenous by dinner, even if you've already had 2 meals. You've messed up, it happens, resolve to do better and move on to the next meal instead of trying to "fix" it.

I know the ravenous feeling. Some nights I get home late from class and don't get dinner ready until 10ish. Since I often eat lunch earlier or not at all, sometimes I feel like I could eat a horse. One strategy I've found to keep myself from going overboard is to plate my dinner, eat a small portion of it (usually just a few bites), and then leave it alone for about 5-10 minutes. I generally use the time to feed the cats, check the mail, run the garbage out or some other small thing. What this does for me is take the edge off my hunger right away, but then lets my stomach start to fill and send signals to my brain before I've downed more food than I really want. BUT I can still have everything on one plate. It accomplishes the same thing as just slowing down, but it's easier for me personally to do because it's not as subjective as fast vs. slow.
Finally a diet that I can make a lifestyle!

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Hoeka
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Post by Hoeka » Thu Dec 02, 2010 3:29 am

The replacement activities mentioned earlier are all good coping mechanisms.

What about brushing your teeth when you feel a snack attack coming on? I've found that I don't want to spoil that nice fresh feeling and taste in my mouth. Try it, see if it works for you.

sidney202
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Post by sidney202 » Thu Dec 02, 2010 3:30 am

Sienna wrote:
One strategy I've found to keep myself from going overboard is to plate my dinner, eat a small portion of it (usually just a few bites), and then leave it alone for about 5-10 minutes. I generally use the time to feed the cats, check the mail, run the garbage out or some other small thing. What this does for me is take the edge off my hunger right away, but then lets my stomach start to fill and send signals to my brain before I've downed more food than I really want. .
What a great idea, Sienna!

leafy_greens
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Re: How do you overcome screw-ups?

Post by leafy_greens » Mon Dec 06, 2010 6:40 pm

wosnes wrote:
leafy_greens wrote: I can't just let it go and then get back on track for dinner.
Yes, you CAN.
Ugh, darn you! 8)

It probably is boredom. Knowing why is one thing, but figuring out how to forgive yourself is another.

Nicest of the Damned
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Post by Nicest of the Damned » Thu Dec 09, 2010 4:25 pm

You know what parents are told to do if a baby reaches for something he or she shouldn't have, right? Punishing a baby doesn't work. What you're supposed to do, according to experts on child development, is make it hard for the baby to get to something he or she shouldn't touch (aka babyproofing), and, when the baby does do something he or she shouldn't, to distract him or her.

You could do something like these techniques to keep yourself away from snacks. Keep the snacks in an inconvenient location, and don't hang out in the kitchen. Don't keep the box or bag of food on the table when you eat. When you find yourself wanting to snack, distract yourself by doing something else instead. Don't try to punish yourself for messing up- that's what you're doing now, and how is that working out for you?

Your punishing yourself at dinner may be feeding a vicious cycle. If you eat too much at breakfast, you make yourself eat less at dinner. What effect do you think that's going to have the next morning? You're going to be hungrier at breakfast time than you would have been if you had eaten more at dinner. The cycle feeds on itself, with a side effect of making you feel bad about yourself. The way to break it is to eat more, not less, at dinner, so you're less hungry at breakfast time.

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Over43
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Re: How do you overcome screw-ups?

Post by Over43 » Sun Dec 12, 2010 9:33 pm

leafy_greens wrote:
wosnes wrote:
leafy_greens wrote: I can't just let it go and then get back on track for dinner.
Yes, you CAN.
Ugh, darn you! 8)

It probably is boredom. Knowing why is one thing, but figuring out how to forgive yourself is another.
Boredom is a big reason I eat, and generally do better during the school week/school year than I do on the weekends and during summer break.
Bacon is the gateway meat. - Anthony Bourdain
You pale in comparison to Fox Mulder. - The Smoking Man

I made myself be hungry, then I would get hungrier. - Frank Zane Mr. Olympia '77, '78, '79

oolala53
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Post by oolala53 » Wed Dec 15, 2010 7:55 pm

Permit me, if you will, leafy, but you have written about this issue in different ways before. It really is going to be somewhat a matter of deciding that this is important enough for you to go through some times of toughing things out. But sometimes, having the right motivation can help. Down deep, you want to do this, but in your moments of temptation, the present urges outweigh the long-term desire. This is actually natural. There is a perfectly good biological basis for it. This doesn't mean it should be an excuse, but knowing about it can give one the impetus to muster the effort to thwart it. I'll talk about that in a bit.

One idea that might help to know is that reports of successful losers on the National Weight Loss Registry (is that what it's called?), show that learning to stop a slide off one's plan right away was considered to be the turning point for many maintainers. It can be easy to get on a roll, but sooner or later, most losers hit a point at which it's not particularly easy to stick with their restrictions, whatever they are, and they eat too much. They say they just stop right as they realize it, and just wait until the next appropriate time to eat. Many were not successful at this many times before they got determined enough to stick with it. Even two or three times of doing this can reinforce a sense of control. As one of the other posters said, Yes, you can. Hard to hear, but actually, when you do it, it's exhilirating! And it starts creating new memories of new habits, which is what this is all about. Just knowing that this is what long-term maintainers said was so important has made a difference for me many times. I realized when I read it that I had only lasted in previous times as long as it was easy. But that's not dependable. And if I wait for it to be easy, it may never happen. Now that I'm writing this, I have to remember it for this weekend!

You may be thinking that you haven't even been on a roll yet, but it can be the same decision to just stick to say, a 3-hour time frame of not eating in the morning between your 9 a.m. breakfast and a noon lunch. While you are working up to compliance, you might allow yourself a mid-afternoon tea break with a snack before dinner a couple of hours later.

You'll notice that much of the time you want to eat, you are not actually empty-stomach hungry. The urges to eat when we are not hungry are very similar to the thoughts of obsessive compulsives in that there is a specific brain pattern that reinforces the strength of the urges, and there is a strong, false sense that something terrible will happen if the urges are not obeyed. When OC-ers acknowledge that the urge they experience to wash their hands or whatever is not actually an emergency and they then turn their attention over and over to another activity, it was found that their brain patterns changed and they experienced a great decrease in the intensity and frequency of the urging thoughts over a period of weeks. The same brain change happens with food impulses. Participating in the urg-ent behavior reinforces and strengthens the cycle, in fact more so the more they eat; resisting it greatly decreases it, but not usually before the urges get stronger! (That's when people usually give in; then the cycly gets reinforced again, and they think it is impossible to end.) And they reduce in cycles. It is not a linear change and certainly not a big drop off for most people. I'm sure that you see this matches your own experience, and dovetails with what Reinhard tells us about habit change, though he doesn't use all the chemical foundations. It FEELS as if you can't do anything because your brain is sending very powerful messages to other parts of your body and your mind. But they are false emergencies, and mostly represent habit. Plain old habit! Not immorality, slovenliness, emotional weakness, or the like, though the urges are often paired with certain emotions, and not always negative ones.

The bottom line is that if you don't do something to thwart these habits, they will likely continue. Only rarely do people find that life affords them the circumstances that turn around overeating. I know the cold fear last year that I would spend the last 20 good years of my life on this planet caught up in this really helped me get some momentum. I'm 17 lbs. down and feeling optimistic about further changes next year.

I hope this combination of advice from everyone will help. Others have made very good suggestions about behaviors; I've tried to give you the reasonable motivation to adhere to those behaviors.

It is worth the effort! it will become easier! The greater your adherence to moderation, the easier it will be sooner, but do expect it to take more than a few weeks to feel relatively solid, and possibly longer to feel that you might be able to leave it all behind.

And if all this still isn't enough, don't despair. You are going to find the key. Don't every give up the thought that you can overcome overeating.
Count plates, not calories. 11 years "during"
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1/12-26.8 3/13-24.9 +/- 8-lb. 3 yrs
9/17 22.8 (flux) 3/18 22.2
2 yrs flux 6/20 22
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Too solid flesh
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Post by Too solid flesh » Thu Dec 16, 2010 5:46 pm

Great post, oolala53. Thank you.
Be kind, for everybody you meet is fighting a hard battle.

funfuture
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Post by funfuture » Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:39 am

fantastic post. :)

Who Me?
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Post by Who Me? » Tue Aug 30, 2011 7:49 pm

Interesting!

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NoSnacker
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Post by NoSnacker » Tue Aug 30, 2011 9:53 pm

Who Me? wrote:Interesting!
Not sure why you are commenting on old posts there are a few of us that are trying to keep tabs on the current users, not old stuff?

Every time you do comment, it pushes current ones to the bottom?
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Post by Who Me? » Tue Aug 30, 2011 11:28 pm

Because many wise people have shared valuable observations.

I'm sorry this annoys you.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

kccc
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Post by kccc » Thu Sep 01, 2011 12:21 pm

Doesn't annoy ME at ALL.

It's actually pretty neat to see conversations I'd forgotten about. (I admit that I especially like seeing "what I said then" and remembering both "how much I really do know" and "how much I've learned since then.")

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