Weight Loss Tuesday: Find Your Own Rhythm
Jun 16, 2009 Weight Loss
The Rules
- Eat a big breakfast, or you’ll binge later in the day
- Save your calories for one big meal
- Eat 6-8 small meals spaced evenly throughout the day
- Eat three medium-sized meals with no snacking in between
- Eat a meal first thing when you wake up
- Don’t eat anything past 7pm
I have seen each of the above in advice columns, on TV, and in books talking about losing weight. Each one is presented as though it is the one-size-fits-all key to getting the weight off. Even though every person is different. Even though each day is different. I’ve tried all of them at one point or another. They didn’t work for me.
I tried eating a big breakfast every morning, even though I’m rarely very hungry early. It seemed to prime my stomach for wanting more food all day.
Saving my calories for one big meal made me spend the rest of the day thinking about food, whether I was hungry or not. And eating an entire day’s food at once made me feel terrible, bloated and heavy.
Eating 6-8 small, evenly-spaced meals left me constantly wanting more, never experiencing the nice, satisfied feeling I get from a big meal.
Eating three medium meals a day left me hungry in between.
Eating a big meal when I first woke up wasted a bunch of calories at a time when I didn’t even really want them.
Not eating past 7pm meant that I couldn’t eat dinner with my husband ever, and I had to ignore huge hunger pangs for as many as six waking hours.
Listening to my body
The thing is, any of those rules would probably work for me occasionally. But not long-term. They don’t take into account the varying schedules I keep. Some days I’m up for 18 hours and need to space my meals out more. Some days I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off and I don’t even think about food. Some days – today was one of them – I wake up knowing that I’m going to need a little extra food, and if I deny myself that, chances are good that I will give up by mid-afternoon and pig out.
But most days, I’d say 90%, I do best eating very little for breakfast, like around 100 calories or less. Two Morningstar Farms Breakfast Links (80 calories), a slice of light wheat toast with 1/2 tablespoon of peanut butter (88 calories), half of a frozen Lenders bagel with 1/4 ounce of cream cheese (100 calories), these are the kinds of tiny breakfasts that I have most days. I’m just not that hungry in the morning. I usually don’t even think about food again until about 11am. This goes against pretty much every bit of eating advice I’ve ever come across. Even my beloved My Food Diary admonishes me almost daily with a little frowny face for eating less than a 200 calorie breakfast.
I usually have a small lunch and a snack or two in the afternoon, arriving at dinner time with more than half of my calories still up for grabs. And it’s a good thing, because when the kids get home from school, that’s when I start thinking about food. I’m getting snacks and dessert for them, making dinner, and my resolve starts to crumble. Just being around food makes me want food. (It’s no wonder that I started gaining serious weight when I worked in a food-filled hotel lounge all day, left alone with steam tables of food and platters of cheeses and desserts for hours at a time.)
But that’s OK, because I usually have enough calories left to indulge a little, to have some of what the kids are having, to go to the ice cream truck with them, to share their snacks. Or to just have a big plate of food for dinner and satisfy that need I have to fill my stomach a little past the point of being full.
Do what works for you
That rhythm, starting the day without much food and ending it with lots, works for me. It satisfies me, at least as much as I can be satisfied eating only 1,200 calories per day. Some days, I swear to God, it even seems easy. One day last week, I had one single Morningstar Breakfast Link around 9am, and didn’t even think about food until noon, when I had a banana that held me over until we all got home at 4:30. I was able to cruise through the rest of the afternoon and evening eating almost constantly, happy as a clam.
But with almost 17 pounds gone in three months, people tell me that I’m doing it wrong, that this method can’t possibly work. When I protest and tell them “But it is working, right now!” they shake their heads and say it won’t last forever. Well, what does? If my body needs something different in the future, I’ll adjust. But why in the world should I change what I’m doing just because the “experts” tell me to, if what I’m doing is getting good results? I feel good. I’m happy. And while dieting can get tiresome (I’d like to be able to spread something on something else without weighing both things!), it just hasn’t been that hard. In fact it’s been so easy most days I’m kicking myself for not doing this sooner.
My point in telling you this is not that you should start eating like me, it’s that you should find your own body’s rhythm, what works for you. Experiment with eating more or less, at different times of the day. Pay attention to when those cravings hit you, and try to adjust your eating habits so that you can give in to them a little. And don’t try to shoehorn yourself into something that worked for someone else if it’s torture for you. You won’t be able to keep it up for long, and then you’ll just hate yourself for failing.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
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Tags: dieting, diets, Eating, My Food Diary, Weight Loss
When Is A Popsicle More Than Just A Popsicle?
Jun 28, 2008 What's Going On
No, I’m not talking about anything Freudian. For my husband and me, the Popsicles that I bought yesterday have become a source of contention.
My husband and I used to fight about one thing only: money. We’d have skirmishes here and there about other things, but if I were to list our top ten biggest fights, fights about money would be at least eight of the ten. But recently, for the past four months or so, we’ve been having huge fights about what the kids are eating.
I’ve had issues with my weight since I was about 18 or 19. For years it was just the same 20 pounds or so, but since I was trying to get jobs as an actress, that 20 pounds might as well have been 200. Then I had kids, and I just ballooned up. I’ve taken some off in the past year, but still have a ways to go. And I’ve been trying to pay close attention to why I eat too much. If I only ate when I was hungry, I think I could eat pretty much anything and be an OK weight. But I eat whether I’m hungry or not, and continue eating way past the point of being full. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember. When I was a kid it was OK because I was running around all the time. But in my late teens, it all started to catch up with me.
After much introspection and observation, I realized that I was mostly eating out of fear: fear that the food wouldn’t be there tomorrow. When I was little, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house. She would buy me any foods I wanted, and I lived on a diet of Jeno’s mini pizzas, ice cream, sugary cereals, and peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread (or so I’m told). I ate as much as I could, as often as I could, because I knew that when I went back to my parents house, it was going to be all carob and tofu and brown bread. It probably wasn’t as bleak as all that, but that’s how I saw it as a kid. I was insanely jealous of friends whose houses were packed with junk foods.
So, I would feast, in anticipation of the famine. And years later, when our house was filled with a bigger variety of foods, and I had control over what I was able to eat, I was still eating as though the “good stuff” was going to be taken away. And as I got older, and wasn’t on sports teams any more, and got a car, and money for eating out, the pounds starting coming on.
I don’t want my kids to grow up with the same food issues that I have, but we’re sending them down the same path. I try to give them as much leeway as I can with what they eat, without totally going against what my husband wants them to eat. But as they get older, it’s becoming more of a problem. I can see them attacking food and eating and eating and eating, and not even paying attention to whether or not they’re full. My son craves white bread and pasta and chocolate all the time. I think he should get it all the time. Eventually, he’ll get sick of it. But The Ass (that’s how I’m going to refer to him from now on, since that’s what I usually call him at home) thinks that’s horrible, that I’m encouraging bad eating behaviors.
It’s not like I think eating white bread and pasta and chocolate all the time are good for Jake, but I also know that the more we try to get him to eat other foods, the more he’s going to want what he wants. My husband is a raging liberal, but in this case I think he’s using a very conservative kind of logic: do what you think is right, based on your principals, not what you think will get results. Just think teen pregnancy and condoms vs. abstinence, and you’ll get what I mean.
Fiona always wants ices and Fla-Vor-Ice pops and ice cream. So when she wanted Popsicles at the store yesterday, I picked out a big box of sugar-free, lo-cal ones. Personally, I believe in giving kids the real stuff, but I figured these would make The Ass happy and she wouldn’t have to beg and plead for them.
So today, she asked her Daddy for two, and he said no! And I was like “Really? The low-cal, sugar free Popsicles? She can’t have two?” And he said no, because that would be gluttony. Because she perceives it as a dessert, a treat, something to beg for and cherish. So letting her have two would send the wrong message.
I give up. The girl who loves broccoli and yogurt and baby carrots and fruit of all kinds can’t have two Popsicles, because that would be gluttony. But Jake the pasta boy had Oreos and chocolate chips, and that was OK. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
Tags: carob, Eating, Food, gluttony, Kids, popsicles, tofu, Weight, wonder bread
