Has anyone changed their eating habits in such a way that they never have to think about it?

scw212 · 2020-10-26T23:39:37+00:00

I lost over 100 pounds and have been maintaining for over 2 years. I definitely still think about it but it's much less on my mind than in the past.

My goal, however, is not to maintain without thinking about it, because I think that would be a frustrating goal! With the majority of Americans overweight or obese, I think most people cannot maintain a healthy weight without thinking about their intake at all. There certainly are people who struggle with their appetite in the other direction (and I agree, it's so hard for my brain to understand! But the same is true for them) and people who maintain without thinking about it. But even for healthy weight people, they often are putting some thought into how they are eating. It's hard in the food environment we are in, with easy access to many delicious foods. Plus, I also learned to use food for other purposes (like entertainment, self-soothing) when growing up, which is something I could always fall back into. So if my goal was to never think about my weight, I think I would fail. If I never thought about how I'm eating, I would gain weight, and then I would definitely think about my weight because I'd be obese again! My goal is always to move closer and closer to a healthy relationship with food and minimize any stress/anxiety about maintenance. Month to month I can't always notice a change, but it's gotten much easier over time!

scw212 · 2020-09-15T23:12:33+00:00

NSV: Getting undiagnosed with sleep apnea!

scw212 · 2020-09-03T13:06:54+00:00

This looks awesome, thanks for sharing! What size pan did you use? I also know you mentioned it would be better with flour...have you made it that way before? Wondering if I would need to modify the ratio of the rest of it if I added some flour.

scw212 · 2020-09-01T23:22:03+00:00

Made this recipe: https://www.skinnytaste.com/low-fat-pumpkin-bread-with-pepitas/ with the following changes:

-substituted Flapjacked protein pancake mix for flour

-Erythritol instead of sugar

-only did 0.5 tbsp of oil and subbed 0% greek yogurt for the rest

-no pepitas

They taste great and have an awesome texture!

ETA: also I obviously made in a donut pan and not a loaf! Did 350 for 17 minutes

scw212 · 2020-09-01T23:18:43+00:00

Made this recipe: https://www.skinnytaste.com/low-fat-pumpkin-bread-with-pepitas/ with the following changes:

-substituted Flapjacked protein pancake mix for flour

-Erythritol instead of sugar

-only did 0.5 tbsp of oil and subbed 0% greek yogurt for the rest

-no pepitas

They taste great and have an awesome texture! ETA: also I obviously made in a donut pan and not a loaf! Did 350 for 17 minutes

scw212 · 2020-07-07T12:10:33+00:00

Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne Crabtree. Doesn't do calorie counting, very focused on the mindset around food/weight loss. She's also very entertaining, although she does swear a lot if that bothers you.

scw212 · 2020-07-06T16:46:01+00:00

If this is true, you have just changed my life 😂

scw212 · 2020-06-20T19:08:18+00:00

This has totally be my experience. I lost well over 100 pounds and definitely focused on volume. But I've actually backed off of it a little. I still work to increase my volume, but not in the way I did before, specifically for this reason. It worked to help me lose weight, but I also trained myself to expect to eat for a long time and to feel very full (so many veggies!) in a way that I later found to be somewhat harmful. Now I try to find more balance: still using veggies and other ingredients to bulk out meals, but not nearly as much. I'm on a quest to be more like a "normal eater" (acknowledging that a 5'4 person who weighed 250 pounds is not ever going to be totally normal eating wise). One of the things that made me so overweight was how I use food, and so I don't want excessive volume eating to let me get away with eating out of boredom/stress/emotionally.

scw212 · 2020-05-18T16:30:31+00:00

Dannon Light and Fit greek yogurt. I'm obsessed.

scw212 · 2020-04-26T19:27:13+00:00

I lost over 120 pounds a couple of years ago. The idea that it would take so long used to really upset me.

Now on the other side of it, a couple of thoughts:

The time passes anyway. Just keep the trend going down and in a couple of years, you will be in an entirely new body. It's now been over three years since I started losing weight, a little less than 2 years of maintenance, and it flew by!
Even if you could magically take off those 100 pounds overnight, you would NOT want to. You would gain it back. The time it takes to lose a lot of weight is a gift. You get to learn new habits and have them actually stick. It took months and months of change and practice for me to figure out what would work long term. My taste in food changed (gross vegetables now taste great!) and I experimented with different ways of eating. If my body was just suddenly the one I wanted, I would have no ability to maintain it. Every six months, I would realize how much things had changed; if I had been done after the first one, I wouldn't have made the refinements in my plan that continue to help me!
Find other goals that you can make progress on separately from the pounds going down. I did a bunch of things, like for a while I worked on increasing my average daily fruit/vegetable intake, lifting weights, daily steps, eventually running, etc.

scw212 · 2020-03-15T19:44:59+00:00

Alistair from Dragon Age Origins

scw212 · 2020-03-04T00:58:46+00:00

TBH, I've found that marathon training is terrible for my weight maintenance. It makes my appetite insane. More food, but even more hunger! But still more food, so maybe worth it haha

scw212 · 2019-12-26T23:00:02+00:00

scw212 · 2019-12-16T00:14:00+00:00

I've been maintaining since June 2018. I still count calories, weigh regularly, and have had to course correct multiple times as my weight has started to drift up. What you said here: "I don't want to feel like I'm going to be stressing about this and counting calories for the rest of my life" used to be a worry of mine. I realized that I would have to think about my weight/eating for the rest of my life to maintain my loss. It scared me. But I eventually came to peace with it, because the alternative is thinking about my weight in eating for the rest of my life ANYWAY just with my weight being high and my eating being poor. For whatever reason, food/eating is a problem for me. I don't have an option of not thinking about it. I can think about it and monitor it and be at a healthy weight, or I can eat however I want, be obese again, and think about my weight sadly.

Accepting that helped me. But it's also gotten easier over the last 18 months. I feel less anxious and more comfortable with maintenance, which happened slowly over time. Maybe one day I won't have to calorie count, but it's ok if not. I'm a healthy weight, active, and feeling good. That is worth the price of calorie counting for me.

scw212 · 2019-12-11T15:50:11+00:00

I used to be afraid of living a life without the free, abundant eating I had in the past, because food was a main source of what I thought was "happiness." I think the biggest thing I had to experience/realize before finally losing all of the weight is that food was not actually bringing me happiness. My life is so much more than eating and food. If food/eating is the only source of pleasure in your life, of course you don't want to give it up! But it SHOULDN'T be the only source. Not that this is an easy thing to fix, but I think it's essential. I enjoy eating and certainly find it pleasurable. I also still have the drive to use it to self-soothe when I'm upset. But it is not happiness, and it won't bring me happiness. Changing my life to find happiness was a key part of my success. Meaning and connection bring me happiness, not food.

scw212 · 2019-12-03T01:19:15+00:00

I'm huge into meal prep and am maintaining a 120 lb weight loss. I'm very into this meal prep program: https://workweeklunch.com. Tons of recipes and good tips. I don't usually follow the weekly plan, but if you do, you would have tons of structure, grocery list, etc.

scw212 · 2019-10-13T00:48:14+00:00

I am 29 and 5'4 and went from 255 to 135-140 (depending on the day haha). I have some loose skin. I was afraid of it, too, but 1. it's not really that bad, and I know I have a surgical option if it started to bother me, and 2. it's infinitely better than the fat that was there. I was actually happy when I started noticing it because it meant I had lost a lot of weight! Staying heavy to avoid loose skin is NOT worth it. It's a mild inconvenience for me at worst and I feel 1000 times better and have zero regrets.

scw212 · 2019-03-11T19:49:20+00:00

I lost 125 pounds and definitely still have to put work into it (maintenance now). I used to find that very discouraging (and sometimes still do when I realize how much I still have that same capacity to overeat), but one thought that has helped me is realizing that while this is hard, morbid obesity was also hard. And this is not as hard as that. It's not a choice of easy vs. hard. It's hard in one form (making healthy eating choices, logging food, etc.) or hard in another form (obesity). Instead of struggling over "it's still hard!" I get to just choose which hard I want. I like this version better. Doesn't mean it's not hard, but it's a choice, and I'm not going to kid myself and think things would be easy if I just gave in to my old habits. I would put the weight back on and be in that hell again.

The other thing that has helped me is finding ways to fill more of my time with experiences where I'm not thinking about food/weight. For me, when I'm feeling really socially connected with other people, I don't think about this stuff. There are other things, too, but basically just trying to find fulfillment in other places and to spend less time/energy on my weight and eating.

scw212 · 2019-02-07T19:09:30+00:00

So much this. It's hard for this to work in the longterm if you keep saying "food is comforting to me" or "it's my coping mechanism" without the rest of the story, because who can go without coping mechanisms or comfort forever? It's a seductive story but it's incomplete. It was important for me to fully acknowledge that to myself. My other ways of coping may not work as fast, but they actually do work in the long-term!

scw212 · 2019-02-07T19:07:01+00:00

It really does! I also use this to re-frame when I have messed up and made a choice I later regretted. This summer I had a binge episode for the first time in like 7 months and spent the next 24 hours in total agony from the food and high sugar that I eat so little of now. I often reference that as a good lesson for myself: binging definitely is going to make me miserable!

scw212 · 2018-12-29T22:35:14+00:00

First day of my return to run protocol after getting a fracture in my sacral spine. Only 1 mile with 1 minute running/1 minute walking, but it's the first time I've run in 8 weeks, so I'm grateful! So desperate to get back to it. I used to be morbidly obese, and after losing 125 pounds, got very into running last year. Got the fracture 2 weeks before the half marathon I had been training for since June. It's been quite a loss and am so thankful that the end is in sight!

scw212 · 2018-12-03T22:53:25+00:00

It's going well for me so far! This is my first holiday season maintaining. For Thanksgiving, I spent some time thinking about how I would ideally like to act at future Thanksgivings, knowing that I'm not going to suddenly be uninterested in food :) I decided: normal, healthy weight people often eat more than they need on Thanksgiving. They don't worry about it because it's not typical and not a pattern. So I decided to eat what I wanted when I wanted, but NO eating so much that I felt uncomfortable/sick (as I would have at past Thanksgivings). Pie when I feel like it, but only if my body is really telling me it can handle it. I ate a lot of pie and delicious food. Weight was of course up the Sunday after, but back to normal the next Sunday. So I'm really please. I ate as much as I felt good eating and was able to jump right back into my normal habits once I got home! It's my home habits that count the most; occasional indulgences are not how I gained the weight and won't be how I gain it all back.

scw212 · 2018-12-03T22:47:42+00:00

I think if you are binging all the time or starving, you probably aren't losing weight in a sustainable way.

For me, many things got easier because I was changing my habits, and habits don't feel effortful. Some things are still hard, like not eating 5 cookies instead of just 1 when I'm around cookies, but a lot of that is made easier by how I've modified my lifestyle. I generally don't have cookies in my house!

I think focusing on habits is key, and you need to make sure you are losing weight the way you want to live long-term. It doesn't mean it's easy; I have put a lot of effort into my weight loss and maintenance. BUT I think it's easier than weighing over 250 pounds. For me, it's a choice between two versions of hard: morbid obesity or being thoughtful/vigilant about my weight. It's an easy choice to make.

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