On December 17th, 2010 I began this blog and I weighed 230 pounds. Boy was I a big guy and my poor horse had been hauling my fat ass all over the country. Today I am down 40 pounds and my blood pressure is that of an athlete, 115/75.
What you see above is evidence of the binges around the time of Easter, hence my favorite trailer trash confection, PEEPS! Now I did not eat this all at once, but over about three weeks, every couple of days or so, and after Bill would go to bed. I would drive over to Walgreen’s or McDonald’s and either eat a Big Mac or two boxes of peeps.
Confessions Suck! The entire time Bill was being completely faithful to our new choices, but I was adding a few bad food choices on a meal here or there. Plus, almost the entire time Bill and I have been following the low carb diet I have been eating one to two small bags of movie popcorn, no butter and a large diet coke.
Yet I still lost 40 pounds in the last five months and I am continuing to lose. I credit my success to a regular yoga practice, better food choices, bingeing, and learning to enjoy the feeling of hunger. The synergy of yoga and diet over the last 5 months is absolutely amazing and it created what I call my ‘Bag of Tricks’ (Bag of Tricks blog post part 2, tomorrow).
I have read almost every credible book written and tried every credible diet. I have taken multiple nutrition courses at the college level. I would have to say that no diet has ever given me permission to cheat as much as I have cheated on this diet and still lose 40 pounds.
I must have been eating close to 5000 calories a day or more prior to December 2010. So the occasional bad meal on top of about 1500 calories a day plus excercise (yoga, swimming biking) really did not change the over all outcome of the diet.
That is because, when I had a meal, where I made bad food choices. I did not let that meal or snack start the beginning of a spiral to seven years of bad food choices. I simply enjoyed the moment and my next meal was a correct choice. I attribute that to calories, even though I am not counting them.
A Big Mac has 540 calories and I would probably eat about 500 calories of PEEPS. Good thing PEEPS are so sugary, you can eat to many and after a box of 4 bunnies the second box is never as good.
So that would bring my calorie count to about 2000 on the days I was bad. Yet Bill hit a plateau and I was still loosing weight. I think eating 1500 calories or so a day for three or four days and then one day of 2000 and then back to 1500 calories for a few days before the big binge day, is the key. My metabolism probaly can’t figure out if I am starving it or fueling it. That was the beginning of my developing my “Bag of Tricks” to help me lose the weight and continue to lose wieght without feeling discouraged.
Feeling discouraged is worse than feeling hungry……….REPEAT THIS PHRASE….it is a key piece of information to the secret to losing weight.
When you are changing your daily eating habits, you are not joining a monastery, you are changing your day-to-day eating habits. That does not mean you can’t enjoy the occasional splurge several times a week, but you must have rules that you put in place to guide you willingly back to better food choices for the next bite that goes into your mouth.
If you are like the old me, one Snicker bar on the way home from work would set me off for weeks. Always waiting for the next Monday, while a growing sense of shame and FAT creeped into my soul and leaked out into my jeans. I was a pro at starting over.
I stopped starting over and started living……REPEAT!!!!
But I still have not talked about hiding food, hmmm……..the evidence is above and it is humiliating to look at. Hiding food, secret eating, am I alone?
I had never hidden food before, but Bill and I are making the same food choices and eating the same foods. So when I made a decision to (how can I minimize this????…hmmm..) I surely did not want him to know I was cheating, he would think so poorly of me. Plus he takes out the trash and would see the evidence. The thought occurred to me that this might be how people start a food disorder. Hence the confession and of course I have not done a Big Mac run or had a PEEP melt down since Easter. More importantly, I stopped hiding food. I can tell you those secret trips taught me more about my relationship with food than any thing I have ever read. We will come back to this but I would like some feedback about others secret eating and secret food stashing.
If you are brave enough to share your story about your unhealthy relationship with food…..I can tell you the 3000 followers of this blog would love to read about it, send me an email at wdsted@gmail.com and I will select one or more to blog about. I feel like I am only scratching the surface.
This is a part post!
Part 2: The Bag of Tricks and Before and after photos…
Part 3: Hunger Pains and the Yoga Connection
I think that’s really common! Think of Rulon on the Biggest Loser. He had cameras on him 24/7 and still broke the rules and ate chips late at night in his room. It’s not about the food then but about what you are trying to find, which is really freakin’ hard to fix!! Think yoga is awesome for that & maybe meditation would help a little. I use food as a drug but I just binge on unprocessed vegan food. Like apples or raw chocolate avocado pudding! I don’t even touch refined sugar (unless I am at some rare event that someone would bake a vegan gluten free something and I may have a little taste) or stuff like regular vegan chips (I will eat baked organic blue corn chips, but I don’t buy them!) because the food is SO addictive. Neal Barnard and others have written extensively about the “addictive” qualities of meat, cheese, dairy that is unprocessed. People are currently researching processed foods and there are findings that the food companies are doing the SAME thing the cigarette companies did. Putting “chemical/natural” flavorings, etc…making the food very addictive intentionally so you will eat more & buy again and not disclosing this information. So basically, it’s a drug. I think you can get over the bingeing and hiding food but it goes so so deep! I would ditch anything addictive and binge on dates or raw vegan cheezecakes that aren’t the healthiest food in the entire planet but actually do contain nutrients and have the fat and sugar. And of course work on the issues of why food is being used for “comfort”. But that’s hard! Most people overeat, drink after work, smoke, or do some other unhealthy activity. So it’s totally “American”. Good luck! But the hiding food thing, yes….I think is going in a very bad direction!
LOL after reading your blog I feel like I may just be a younger, shorter, female version of you. I found your blog because I wanted to see how my new experiment wth yoga had gone for others.instead I found much more. It makes me laugh hearing about your addictions to peeps and your take on the barrel racing world ( because Im right there with you). I think you look amazing and so much healthier. I hope to follow in your footsteps.. keep up the good work
Thanks! I feel so much better. I have been telling my daughters the secrets I have uncovered.