Thanks for positive vibes (and same offered back to anyone who needs it, for whatever reason). 💐
Just to be clear, I don’t have any problem with calorie counting in and of itself and discussion on this thread about calorie content/intake/daily total etc doesn’t bother me at all, so no one need feel like they can’t talk about it. It’s what this bootcamp entailed which is fair enough, no one made me sign up, and I was willing to try it because I could see the potential benefits in theory. But it only took two days for me to be sure that it just doesn’t work for me.
It’s simply not a productive thing for me to focus on, mentally. Which is why I have loved the low carb way of life for so many years, since way before I even knew MN was a thing and before I had found BIWI’s excellent bootcamps and the wealth of knowledge and support offered here. The rules of bootcamp aren’t rules, as far as I’m concerned. They’re just a set of quite strict but also very flexible guidelines. I realise that one could argue that in real terms calorie counts are nothing more than another set of guidelines, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t figure that way in my head.
I lost three stone in three months quite easily with low carbing at the start of my ‘journey’ (for want of a better term) and most importantly without the mental anguish that comes from an approach that to me is inexorably tied up with a a very tyrannical stance, far less about enjoyment and much more about deprivation and ‘rules’ regardless of whether or not the result sparks joy. That is never going to work for me again.
It’s also not something that’s of any value to me personally in terms of education. I know everything there is to know about calorie content and calories in/calories out. I actually calorie counted very happily and successfully for a long time when I was younger, at a time when the perfectionist side of me must have enjoyed seeing just how much I could ‘suffer’ (although the food was good, so I don’t mean in terms of meals etc) for my body and mind to look/feel the way I liked it to.
Another issue is the big grocery shop we’ve just done - 4 weeks worth. I absolutely don’t throw food away at the best of times except on the extremely rare occasion that something slips through the net and is too spoiled to use. Usually I buy with intent when I’m thinking of modifying my eating to low carb, and ensure that I don’t buy anything I won’t want to eat. So I can’t bear food waste anyway, and I would find it obscene to throw foods out now when some people are still finding it difficult to get everything they want or need. So that’s just not going to happen. Which means that sometimes in the next couple of weeks I will have to eat small amounts of things that aren’t strictly allowed, because our meals are planned and they were not all planned to allow a bootcamp option. I’ll adapt where I can, of course, but I have veg, and to a lesser extent, fruit and other things, that may need to factor in meals here and there, because we’re not going to buy a load more until we’ve eaten all of this.
On eating the low carb way or not, I’m never overweight because I simply didn’t realise that eating loads of cheese or drinking cream or basing all my meals on bacon was potentially going to cause some issues over time...It’s also never due to ‘carb creep’ - I know full well that bread, pasta, rice, a ‘little’ piece of cake here and there and chocolate whenever I feel like it is going to be problematic over time. Sometimes I just don’t care all that much, and for some months or even a year or two here and there I’ll jump off the wagon, eat and drink what I fancy and as much as I want of it, own it, and fully expect my weight to go up.
I also don’t find it difficult to moderate my intake of foods on bootcamp - yes I might have the odd day where I cheat a little in ways that really won’t matter (Sorry BIWI but at least it’s carefully considered, carefully evaluated and not talked about on the threads) or have way too much of one thing here and there, but I balance that out with quite a careful approach in general. It works for me mentally because it allows me to flex things according to my mood and my emotional/psychological and physiological needs and never takes me ‘back there.’ Similarly, I IF as a matter of course most of the time because I hardly ever eat breakfast whether low carbing or not, as I find it works much better for me to just have a few hours at the start of the day without food. So bootcamp as I do it is pretty self-regulatory in terms of calorie intake.
Anyway, not sure why I said all that. Possibly just to talk myself through it a bit.
Most importantly I think it goes without saying that there’s no need for you to feel bad, BIWI or responsible in any way for the effects of it on some of us - it will work perfectly fine for many people, and those of us who it doesn’t work for, well we already know what we can do instead. 🙂👍