To think I’ve found the secret to losing weight and keeping it off!

[Mummybo88]

Posted in weight loss but don’t know if anyone read it, so posting here for traffic.

I feel really passionate about this and I’m hoping it might help some of you the way it helped me.

I’ve had problems when it comes to food since about the age of 12 or 13. Up until then I was very slim & very active. Anyway, by the age of 15, I found myself very overweight. This prompted a cycle of me trying to cut a million & one things from my diet, having some small successes but then falling off the wagon, giving into my bodies cravings and feeling like a failure. Cue the self loathing, subsequent binging and weight gain.

I went through years of this. I tried everything. At one point, I even lost 3 stone but, lo and behold, I eventually gained it back and then some.

Anyway, one day it dawned on me that what was destroying me was all the rules. I never listened to my body, I didn’t trust myself to listen to my body. Days when I went to bed hungry felt like a success. In all honesty, I had sort of lost the ability to listen to my body. I’d become a slave to this diet - binge cycle.

Anyway, I decided to try something which felt very, very daunting. I decided to forget all the rules and try to learn to listen to my body again. I was terrified that I’d find myself living off chocolate brownies but guess what, it didn’t happen!

My initial focus was to really start concentrating on stopping eating at the moment I started to feel full. This wasn’t as hard as I thought because I felt safe in the knowledge that if I felt hungry again, i would just eat something else. Overtime, my cravings for all these “forbidden foods” lessened because they were no longer forbidden. When I used to diet, I’d spend my days fantasising about all of the foods I wasn’t allowed but now the everything was allowed, I’d find myself craving porridge for breakfast or a banana for a snack.

I also vowed to get out of the habit of weighing myself everyday. Initially, I’d do once a week and now I’m probably once a month (or whenever I remember to!!). The thing is, my weight on the scales each morning was dictating how much I ate that day. That’s just ludicrous when you think about it.

The other thing I realised is that some days you’ll eat more than others. If you have a day where you are more hungry and you find yourself eating more, don’t beat yourself up about it! You’ll find yourself eating less another day and it’ll all balance out.

I broke the diet/ binge cycle and I’ve weighed in the region of 8stone 10 - 9stone for the past 4 years. Other than my two pregnancies and both times, i lost the weight following this way of eating.

I eat cake, sweets & chocolate, but I also eat fish, vegetables & fruit. There’s a reason why 95% of people who go on a diet regain the weight within a year.

This has really worked for me and I hope it can help some of you. It’s by no means an overnight fix. The weight won’t just disappear in a few weeks, but it will come off and stay off. I know everyone’s different and what works for one person may not be so good for someone else but this has really changed my life and I can now enjoy food in a way I never could before.

I hope this can be of help smile

My tip (having been very overweight in the past) is that we become accustomed to overeating, so "normal" eating feels like deprivation. In terms of content AND volume.

We don't need so much food. Volume of food that is. You eat small meals and a few snacks in the day and that should be adequate. If you think about the volume of food let alone the calories, it's no wonder it doesn't have anywhere to go and translates as fat storage.

Overeating can really creep up on you so your normal is someone else's (slim person's) one-off binge day. Even your making an effort to reduce amount of food is someone else's binge day, volume and content-wise.

I really do just eat less food. You won't starve. If you are very overweight you have a long way to go before you starve and clearly you have been overeating for a long time to get like that. I do say this as a previous 14 stoner myself before people say I'm judging. I'm not, it's fact. The weight gain didn't happen overnight and it didn't happen from one-off binges, more like every day binges.

Looking at what my overweight mum thinks is a normal amount of food, (and she can't understand why she's not slimmer) is probably three days worth of food to me now. Nobody needs that much food for one day. I go to visit her and she is literally pushing biscuits and cakes at me, this is standard snack for her not special because I'm visiting. I told her I'd have a biscuit or two but no thanks to the cake and she couldn't understand it. Not because she'd bought it in specially for me (she hadn't, it is always in) but because who doesn't want a big piece of cake (or two, or three) at 11.30am every day?

The trouble with discussing this is that it's become acceptable to bemoan your weight if you're not happy with it, but it's not acceptable to call a spade a spade over how it happens, which is overeating.

Thanks for sharing OP, you are so enthusiastic, ignore the miseries! I definitely agree that what leads most people to become overweight is disordered eating. Often stemming from a desire to be thinner in the first place. A good relationship with food will lead to healthier habits and probably a healthier weight.

I am a lot bigger than my sister and was as a child despite eating the same things as her and bring far more active.

I think the key there is you were two individual people, eating the same things.

Therefore (assuming you ate them in the same amounts), you were probably over eating for your individual body.

If I ate the same things/amount that some other slim people eat, I too would be overweight.

This is essentially what Susie Orbach recommended in Fat is a Feminist Issue, published in 1978.

I think it is really hard to learn how to listen to your body, esp when we are surrounded by sugary crap, which tastes delicious, but which messes up our bodies by making us crave more sugary crap!

This is what would worry me most about the method. I'm fine if I stick to good food, but if I eat something like bread, I want more. If I eat chocolate, I get a taste for it and want more... So I would still have to deprive myself of certain foods.

I think the key there is you were two individual people, eating the same things.

Agree totally with this. My DSs are only a year apart, similar height but I would say DS2s natural frame is larger. However, they eat pretty much the same thing and DS1 has always been a healthy weight and DS is now overweight. he does more exercise too.

I have a younger brother who is very overweight and a sister who’s either on carbs or off carbs but manages to keep her weight within the healthy range, however it does go up and down a fair bit. Anyway, she’s helping my very overweight brother to lose weight. He’s cutting this out and that out. She has so much knowledge about the nutrirional value of certain foods etc and he thinks she is basically some sort of weight loss guru. I’ve tried to tell him a bit about this but he lost a stone in January with her help so he’s completely sucked in. I wish I could help him but he’s caught in that cycle and doesn’t want to hear it. I know this isn’t what everyone wants to hear but I really believe in it. I’m not surprised there have been books written on this. I tried everything and this has worked for me for 4 years.

I was a thin child and adult up until my late 30s, I had a fairly early menopause (early/mid 40s) so I think the calories I required dropped quickly rather than me massively eating more than I used to, I was eating much the same but my body no longer needed it.

I find this difficult. I like eating and eating and eating, beyond full. I enjoy sitting down and eating a huge family/multi bag of crisps. I have thought about it, but I still cant work out why I like it.
I seem to crave salty things.
I cant seem to easily listen to my body, early on, to find that 'only just full' sensation.

I also like everything that's bad for you. I would probably live off wine, crisps, chocolate with nuts, mashed potato, brie, curries, in huge quantities, if I could.

People are staggered by how much food I do eat. I'm surprised I'm not bigger than I am.

TieGrr - that's another of my tips. Don't buy that stuff in (bread/chocolate) and then expect not to eat it. If you've bought it, there's an expectation you're going to eat it. I do eat my favourites but just not every day or even every week so when I do buy chocolate, it's a conscious decision and I enjoy it. But it's not food.

My mum cannot for example fill her car up with petrol without buying two or three chocolate bars to have in the car there and then. She's eaten them before her car is back on the road again. 500 calories in, a third of the days calorie allowance (she is small and not very mobile) just like that. If she'd made a decision not to buy the chocolate and ONLY pay for petrol beforehand that would have been better, but she doesn't make decisions like that, she just sees it and buys it and eats it. (but she's not happy with it).

A lot of it is making conscious decisions for yourself in advance. Knowing you will not buy that stuff from the garage. Knowing you will not turn down the cakes aisle at the supermarket. Making a decision that you are not going to buy that stuff in the first place (unless you have decided it's a special day or occasion so you are buying it consciously). Once your hand touches the packet in the shop, that's it. Don't touch the packet!

Hair, I'd got into the habit of always buying muffins, cakes or doughnuts for the boys supper. I'm not saying I will never buy them again, but I've not bought in anything specific for the last two weeks and they've been just as happy with a slice of toast with jam or a couple of biscuits.

As I said, they have gotten out of the habit of grabbing a packet of crisps after dinner to take up to their room. I've been making lower calorie meals and proper breakfasts of egg or beans and bagels or porridge rather than them just tipping a pile of cereal in a bowl and adding a pint of milk to it. Nothing drastict, nothing faddy, just a bit of effort. Made calzone pizzas the other day using wraps and they went down a storm. It would have been easier to chuck in ready made pizzas at double the calories but no-one feels they are missing out.

I also think it's harder to do what the OP is all about when you are doing it for more than just yourself. When you are feeding a family, you can't possibly cater to what each individual person's body is saying. All you can do is serve up a meal with an appropriate calorie content and remind them that they don't have to clear their plate if they aren't hungry.

I think it is important to remember that a lot of snack foods are that perfect combination of fat and sugar, which makes you crave them. Which is how people end up eating choc bars and cake every day. Once you are in the grip of that, the dignals from your body about the nutrition it actually needs are difficult to read, because all that crap food messes up your body.

Not sure why the OP is getting so much flack

Glad that worked for you, OP, it really is that simple. It's just realising it, doing it and keeping doing it that's hard.

The trouble with discussing this is that it's become acceptable to bemoan your weight if you're not happy with it, but it's not acceptable to call a spade a spade over how it happens, which is overeating

This^

Instead we are taking the easy way out and refusing to accept that bigger often means less healthy - and if you look at the stats on children’s increasing weight and the earlier onset of diabetes type 2 - it IS less healthy. We deny that vanity sizing is a thing and this way I can remain a size 12 for most of my adult life while being a stone heavier twenty years on... I think it’s a function of living in an affluent society where food is freely available and marketed to us as luxury rather than necessity.

There is a theory that overeating may be caused by nutritional deficiencies, even malnutrition. So you eat two bags of crisps and the various systems in your body ask "Where are the vitamins? Where are the minerals? Where is the protein? We need more!" so you stick a cheese pizza in the oven, etc.

Nurturing your body with all the things it needs may mean you crave less of the other stuff.

(Disclaimer, I am 3 stone overweight. I'm great on theories, not so much on the practical...)

I eat healthily and am fat. My favourite food in the world is spinach. It is calories in versus calories out that makes us fat. Some foods are easier to eat too many calories of. But you can be slim and eat a lot of chocolate - my best friend does. Or fat and eat healthily.

Or fat and eat healthily

Doesn’t that of itself imply that a person is eating too much ‘healthy’ food ... so actually, not really eating healthily at all?

This is all true. I have PCOS so put on weight very easily and take it off slowly. I've been on and off diets for years- successfully and then gain it when something goes a bit wrong. For me - the key to weight loss and to keeping it off and not becoming obsessed with it- smaller portions, less sugar, eating when I'm hungry and not restricting anything and never weighing myself. And a bit of exercise regularly. Now I have a healthy relationship with food. Even things like Slimming World- that do work- make me obsessed with eating and weight and it's not healthy pyschologically. It's like a cult round here.

Christ the cunty responses to this

Congrats OP, it sounds like an excellent life change and it may well inspire others.

If I listen to whether or not I am hungry I gain weight at about a pound a week.

There is, after all, no particular reason for your internal calorie counting mechanism to be exactly accurate.

So I am stuck in either living everyday feeling a bit hungry, or forgetting about it for a year then depriving myself for 6 months....I suppose I could also try the 5:2 business and have two really hungry days a week, but I find I seriously over compensate the day after fasting...

Why the rude responses?
Totally agree Op
I maintain my weight by eating ‘normally’
Sometimes I eat a lot , other times not much.
The word diet is a recipe for disaster ( excuse the pun). The more you deny yourself, the more you want it.
People put on weight because they eat too much and don’t do enough exercise.
I exercise daily and I think this helps to maintain my weight

Somebody's weight down't actually tell you anything about their current eating patterns...it tells you the integrated history of their eating.

Plenty of really fat people eating really healthily out there...plenty of thin people eating to crap.

But people do so like to judge....

I also think it's hard to normalise when the people around you are overweight. I'm currently a size 14 at 5'9 and I have around 2 stone to lose. I'd be happy at about a size 12. Even when I was a teenager and weighed 8 and a bit stone, I was still a 10. I was only 9' stone 3 when I got married in my late 20s. I'd like to get down to about 10 and a half which I think would be fine in my 50s.

Most of the people I work with think I am thin because they are all overweight and are size 20 and over.

My DH deals a lot with the elderly. He says that the older the age group the less people overweight there are. Some of this is undoubtedly down to older people losing their appetite, but is also down to the benefits of a slim body to achieve longevity.

Morphemes o agree that there’s plenty of thin people eating crap. But I don’t believe that fat people only eat healthily. They either also eat a lot of crap on top of the healthy food, or they overeat, which isn’t healthy either.