Has anyone ever worked out why their demon was being fat?

[bluetrampolines]

I know how to diet. I know how to exercise. I have every aspect of my life nailed. Almost. Apart from being fat.

Why is this my demon? Can anyone help?

Fat makes you fat is the biggest misconception there is. Most people find that so hard to compute because they have been brainwashed with bad nutritional advice.

A plate of pork belly and veg will satiate your body for up to 8 hours because of the fat (lets say there are 800 calories)

A pizza, also about 800 calories, will have you hungry and searching for more glucose in just a few hours.

Fat makes you full. Stops you snacking. Is good for your immune and brain health.

We have gone so wrong on our messages about fat.

trancepants what’s a banana and oat omelette? It sounds goods...

i did work it out op...

basically after 40 yrs of yoyo dieting i quit dieting.
I just decided that i would eat what i wanted, when i wanted it but i would only eat when i was hungry and stop when i was no longer hungry ( which is different to stopping when full)
i removed from my head all the connotations of 'good and bad' foods...food is just food....and over 9 months or so i lost 4 stone and have kept it off for 11 yrs now

I do that slim thing when i say ' oh i eat whatever i like and stay this size' which is true but what i dont do that i think fat people do is..i dont eat unless i am hungry and then i eat what my fat friends call ' tiny' portions. they are not tiny , they are enough for me not to feel hungry ergo they are the amount my body needs

i recognised that emotions drove my eating, so i replaced eating with something else..

bored = went for a walk, rang a friend, cleaned house.
sad = went for a run, walked dog, rang a friend, went to cinema, took a bath
happy = went for a run, had celebratory bath, bought new book and read it
cross = went for a run

you can see the pattern.
it was not the running that caused the weight loss, it was the fact i was eating less , the running helped a bit.

you need to replace food as your 'soother' and find other activites that you use to self soothe.

when we have a young baby we teach them to self soothe back to sleep for example, we dont give them a nice sugery donut when they wake up a bit miserable cus no one is there ...

trancepants what’s a banana and oat omelette? It sounds goods...

It's just banana and eggs blended up together then I stir some porridge oats into it before cooking it. I usually do two small bananas, 3 large eggs and a small handful of oats between me and 5yo DS, with me eating a larger portion. It's absolutely lush with in season raspberries and blueberries but at this time of year I tend to serve it up with grapes or apple/pear slices. You could eat it without the oats but I like the texture they give it.

I think nowadays a lot of people are under huge stresses and strains and like a pp said

stress has been found to cause weight gain.

And most people can not just go for a run or ring a friend to calm down. They have children or work or it’s late at night so they end up just internalising things.

Add to the stresses a bout of insomnia or a lack of sleep in general and it doesn’t matter how little you eat you put weight on.

Healthy eating and exercise might keep you trim but if it doesn’t comes with 8 hours sleep and a stress free life. All your hard work would be for nothing.

Slim person with an overweight husband.

He eats emotionally. For him, having food in his mouth is the same as happiness, and if there is food in front of him, he’ll eat it.

When he eats, he eats really fast, and being full means nothing to him. I finish my dinner a good 10 minutes after him. Two hours after breakfast, he’s hungry again, no matter what we’ve eaten. And every event, whether birthday party or coming in from work or drinking a cup of tea = a reason to eat.

The other day we were out and he went to pick up food to eat in the car for lunch (classy). He bought sushi, two portions of dumplings and another dish. And ate all of it. I would have bought half of that, plus I didn’t even eat all of mine.

He’ll eat things he doesn’t even like. He has no interest in sweet stuff but if it’s in front of him, he’ll eat it.

TBH it drives me crazy sometimes because he’s so desperate to lose weight but he can’t stop eating and has no idea about portion size.

My own diet is nothing special. I stop eating when I’m full. I eat slowly. If I’m bored/tired/sad, I will sometimes reach for the chocolate but I will more often read or take a nap or just power through. That’s literally it.

Someone above said ‘slim people exist on a sandwich and a bag of crisps.’ It’s just not true and a lie that people with disordered eating habits tell themselves to make slim people sound like WE’RE the ones with the problem.

If you can break your emotional connection to food, I believe it helps massively.

Thisis If you're dh wants to change , get the Paul Mackenna "I Can Make You Thin' videos, apps book etc. That really addresses and helps the emotional aspect to eating.

Like you I eat slowly and only when I'm hungry, as I said upthread, it's the main idea of PM's and it really works.

I’ve kind of ditched the demons. I’m lucky in that have no medical issues that effect weight and turning* point fir me was having a Fitbit so I started to understand food needs in terms of activity levels. Hormones are a bit fucked at moment which isn’t helpful but could b3 worse.

Also getting off the yo-yo either in or off a diet has helped hugely for me, my mindset responds better to what I think of as energy balance. Have learned that one day where I eat more than I burn is fine, or even a week, I can just compensate another day or week. That’s what I struggled to comprehend before.

I do sometimes fall back to old habits and binge eat but they’re much less frequent and I just accept it for what it is is and move on. Have taken up activity for health and make that a social thing as easier to stick to. All good so far, am down about 7 stone. I’ve come to terms with the fact i’ll Always have to work at it but that’s fine.

ppeat he's not a native speaker so not sure how well it would work for him.

I've done all sorts of diets, Inc Cambridge. That really mucked up my eating.
I've had a lot of emotional trauma in my past so I know that's why I eat. I get this feeling of satisfying my mouth. I eat past the point of being full because I'm enjoying the taste of something. I get to the end of the day feeling bloated and horrible, say to myself tomorrow will be different but it never is
Food is my crutch, my comfort and my hug to myself. But I know it's not healthy for me.

I am quite slim ( size 10) but I have to work like a demon to keep the same weight these days. It has become a struggle

The videos, Cds, DVDs might work though Thisis

PostNot Many congratulations on the 7st. loss

"has no idea about portion size."

Can you now show him your portions and say he needs a bit more than that because he's a man, but not what he's eating.
I can understand someone in a family of big eaters not realising that their portions are big, but I don't understand it in this situation.

Post

How did you kinda ditch the demons?
7 stone. You are so laid back about it.

I needed to have my gallbladder out and had to lose weight to be referred so I think it sort of became non optional because at th3 time I was in so much pain. Have had huge support from the lose 100lb thread which helped lots (still does) and have come to realise talking to friends of normal weight that for most it doesn’t just happen, they work at it. Sounds a bit silly but that was quite an eye opener. And I was pissed off with being able to control everything but my weight and 50 started to loom on horizon.

Also read someone saying it’s hard to be obese and hard to lose weight, choose your hard, that struck a chord. Do think it important to find something that tunes into your particular mindset. I used to work in research so having data sets to work within (Fitbit data and Nutracheck) keyed into mine so that helped,

I feel so much better overall I’m just not prepared to go back. I know the odds are not in my favour but if you read things like My Fitness Pal forum there are people on there who haven’t regained so I intend to do the same. Biggest lesson I learned was KOKO, keep on keeping on. I also focused on how I would maintain all trough the process and had plenty of weeks where I aimed for maintenance which I viewed as practice.

It is hard work but at a certain point you start to believe you can do it it and it’s that you have to hold onto and certainly in my case, an acceptance that I’ll have to be vigilant all my life but that’s just how it is and though a pain in the arse, it’s loads better than being 7 stone heavier and i’m In a better situation than DH who has been type 1 most of his life through no fault of his own. I’m still about half a stone heavier than top of BMI but have decided to stick here for now. Will have rethink when hopefully my hormones settle down a bit after gynae procedure I had in the summer.

I’d seen my Mum fail to get a grip on her weight and it caused no end of problems which was very grim to watch and I could see me going down that route and I wasn’t prepared to inflict that on my children if there was something I could do about it, they’d been through enough. It hasn’t been easy but on reflection it hasn’t been as hard as I thought. Getting off the diet club band waggon has helped me hugely.

Have also found endorphins from exercise (which I thought I hated) make me feel as good as food sometimes and that helps. So a mixed bag but I think something in my mindset suddenly switched and I thought what the fuck have I been doing to myself, it stops here. That’s quite long and bitty but hope there’s something there that might strike a chord.

Thanks post.

Yes it does resonate with me. A lot. I'm fed up of being fed up. I think it is finally time.

Don’t try to change it all overnight and don’t over think it, just start tonight. It will inevitably be trial and error, but you can change things around as you go if something doesn’t work.

How much of your headspace is filled up with fat thoughts these days?

gwen Why don’t you understand? I’m not his keeper and I don’t dictate what he can and can’t eat. I’m also not with him 24 hours a day. We usually cook enough to freeze some and he’ll end up eating another portion. Plus we eat a lot of Korean food which isn’t really portion based so much as eating lots of small dishes, so it’s not like you have your whole meal on one plate.

Ref. the reasons why so many people are obese now. I reckon it's all the high sugar fizzy drinks, and sadly the "diet"drinks, and foods, don't help because the chemical sweeteners have turned out to be more fattening than sugar!

Also too many people are over dosing on coffee and alcohol every day. We are continually faced with fattening food, food, food, on the telly, in cafes, adverts, on line and the supermarkets. The manufacturers WANT us to eat it!!!!!!! Think how much money they'd lose if everyone lost weight!!!!!!!

Post... Wow, really articulate post, and basically how I faced down my fat demons too. I will never go back, while I am not slim I am a healthy weight.. How could I have wasted 40odd yrs being fat and obsessed with food.
And to the poster who said food was her crutch.... I so understand but you need to replace food with something else. Even if it is just once a day that you go for a walk or have a lovely bath instead of eating that biscuit... Slowly form new habits.

I am slim. I have a few rules that I mostly abide by that keep me this way, it's all about getting into or out of habits.

1. Don't eat after 6:30pm , your body gets used to this.
2. Half plate is veg and plates are not massive.
3. No meat, no cows milk.
4. Half hour walk each day.

Done, I am 5'6 and weigh 9stone, I weigh myself every few months and if I go up I cut out sweets and chocolate for a couple of weeks. That's it.

Jelly bean

Yes. I felt the same about posts post too. Do you mind me asking what your new crutch is?

Just bobbing in to say that it was theredjellybean who completely inspired me on a different thread to get my life in order, weight-wise.
(not stalking you though, honest ).

I've done it in a different way - joined Slimming World in January and am 3 stone lighter so far (with 3 to go). It's coming off very slowly and steadily but I'm not thinking of it as a diet and I've done what JellyBean recommended in the other thread too - replacing food as a treat with other things. So I buy myself Suduko books and do those in the evening, or even those colouring in books which I love and a very distracting. I treat myself with afternoon naps/watching a favourite film in the afternoon/buying a book - rather than eating chocolate.

My mindset is changing - it's not instant or always foolproof - I put a few lbs on over the summer when my routine went out of the window - but I'm back on track now and find it really comforting/weird to know that I can do this, after 40+ years of seeing food as the answer to everything, when it really isn't.