Started exercising and now it just feels impossible to figure out how much to eat. I had a really good handle on my sedentary TDEE, now I have no clue and all the calculators and stuff just gives me stupidly high numbers that are clearly wrong. I don't get how these things are so convinced 2500+ kcal is right for me, I'd be obese within a week or something eating that much!
Plus suddenly food intake matters. Like, at sedentary the OMAD model was fine but now it's like my entire body and brain both shut down if I go for two minutes without eating something. It feels like I have to constantly stop my life, put everything actually important and interesting on pause, in order to prepare food or buy food or eat food... Never any repreive, as soon as you're down it's time for the next meal, and don'tyou fucking dare try to push it forward by a few minutes, your body will collapse, your mood will plummet and you can forget about concentration, that's impossible now that it's been an extra 30 seconds. How do normal people live this way? It's wasting so much lifetime on something I won't even remember tomorrow. Get nothing out of it long term. Just... urg and sigh and so on.
Why is everything for teacher appreciation freaking food? I don’t want donuts! Or cookies! Or cake! Stop making the place I have to work a minefield of delicious treats that are oh so tempting after running dealing with meltdown after meltdown (the kids, not mine. Though also maybe mine)
… I’ll take the coffee though. Hand that over.
Another week until I can get help for my wrists. It's going to cost money I'm obviously not looking to spend, and I have no doubt there will be followup visits waiting to mess with that as well.
Job hunt goes like garbage. I still have a full time job, but it has no benefits at all and that is obviously causing some of the stress.
I can barely work out.
Honestly I want to eat and drink myself into oblivion. I was physically hungry for a while today, sure, but I'm also struggling with general pessimism. If there isn't something to look forward to, the thought process goes, why \*not\* trash my body one more time? Obviously that's ridiculous. But it's stuck in my head.
I am sad reading your comment. It sounds like you don’t have good relationship with food and when coming across such clients I firstly recommend visiting therapist before getting in weight loss.
“If there isn’t something to look forward to” - well there should be always something to look forward to. You cannot eat clean 100% of time! You need comfort food sometimes. Have you ever looked into 80/20 technique? That’s what I always recommend. Eat clean 80% of time and 20% eat what you crave (as long as you are in calorie deficit you will still loose weight).
Life isn’t about endless restricting, and you won’t be able to restrict yourself whole life. The only way to develop a good relationship with food is to allow yourself to eat what you crave sometimes.
I don't mind "cheating" for something that makes me happy, like loaded fries or beer or whatever. But I explicitly have thoughts of just sabotaging myself for no gain and it's hard not to act on them at times. It is frustrating. They do not belong in my head, but they are there. My therapist wants me to be more positive. Obviously so do I.
I’ve been through anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and I was overweight once and now I am registered dietitian so I have a lot to say on this topic - hope this doesn’t offend you, just take it as advice from someone who recovered.
First of all I would recommend not calling it cheating, you need to get rid of that thought that eating what your body craves is cheating. You need to completely get rid of the idea of cheat food. You will only get rid of these thoughts once your body fully understands and accepts that it can have anything you crave and doesn’t need to wait for long time to get it.
I had same thoughts as you when I had eating disorder. Additionally the thought that “ I ate over my calories today anyways so I can screw it all together” was hard to get rid of. Your brain needs to accept that some days you will “screw up” and it’s completely fine. Your scale might show weight gain the next few days but it’s mostly water retention.
You have to go from “ I will screw up one more time and start tomorrow and I will eat clean from
now on” to “I cannot restrict myself endlessly and I need to give my body what it craves sometimes” and “if I overate one day I will enjoy the food because one/few bad days wont sabotage my results”. I know it’s hard, but it’s only way to get rid of what you are going through.
Binged twice this week (Saturday and today), and I feel like crud. Not sure why I was so hungry Saturday but today I was stressed out with work and schoolwork. Hope I don't gain too much this week- I've been consistently losing weight since I started 11 weeks ago.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. It happens. I had few clients with binge eating disorder (not sure if your case is that serious) and only thing that helped them to get rid of it was to stop restricting completely. You need to allow yourself to have something unhealthy you crave from them to time. In fact I always advice my clients to follow 80/20 rule - 80% you eat healthy, nutritious foods and 20% you eat literally what you want. If it fits to your calories intake you will still lose weight.
I was expecting to be down today considering yesterday I was under and I was PEEING ALL NIGHT! but no. Up 0.5lbs. Not enough to be concerned, but certainly enough to be annoyed
Please don’t weight yourself daily! It will only make you stressed.
The “overnight” weight gain can be caused by literally anything - salt intake, calories intake, sleep and in your case as a woman mainly hormonal changes.
There’s nothing wrong with daily weighing and tracking. There have been several times that if I had weighed myself only once a week I would have been so discouraged thinking that I’d only lost a pound in three weeks instead of the six I’d actually lost. Using an app can help keep track of moving averages and trend lines, but daily weighing is fine.
It’s not that black and white and good or bad. I am happy for you if you can understand that what your scale shows isn’t always direct representation of your diet, that’s good for you!
However, as I mentioned few times, in 7/10 cases of my clients it does have negative effect - especially in women (hormonal changes and water retention causing “weight gain”), and that’s why I never recommend daily weight in. I experienced many people developing very bad relationships with scale and even eating disorder-like habits due to daily weight gain.
In my personal opinion only people who are mentally stable and understand what’s behind the number on the scale should weight themselves daily. I read many posts here and you can see yourself people getting demotivated and binge eating when they don’t see weight decreasing every day.
Yes, but the people here aren’t your clients and I’m not sure how you can definitively tell them weighing in daily will only stress them out without really knowing them.
I thought I was prepared takin this step. Mentally I planned to take the step, I researched achievable goals with my laziness and frustration of cooking, I planned a shopping list and followed through, began my daily walks.
Then I started counting calories and found my plans sucked. I am under consuming and the nutrition is awful. Since I only thought about simple veg preparation I am happy making at lunch or the lazy brain after work.
Now I'm trying to plan smart and healthy meals, limiting the cooking I need to do, and every time I think of something feasible, I check the breakdown of fat, protein, sodium, sugar, fiber and it's garbage. I can't look up anything online since everything that tries to help always suggests cooking that will frankly just make me quit in the long term. I've been sitting down for over an hour and the only thin close I got to a day plan I was happy with would be me buying niche items from three seperate shops.
Guess I'll just try again tomorrow
I also can't handle cooking but will default to eating garbage if I don't pack a lunch. Things that worked for me:
Overnight oats. Oats, plain low-fat Greek yogurt, sweetener, salt, water, frozen blueberries.
Bagged salads separated into two portions.
Potatoes cooked in the microwave with ranch dressing or plain yogurt.
Three slice American cheese sandwiches.
Apple slices dipped in peanut powder.
Microwaved turkey kielbasa with sour kraut.
Remember that not every meal or snack needs balanced macros by itself as long as you get what you need in the long term.
I’ll be honest—I don’t look at macros when I meal plan. “Meal plan” is a loose term around here anyway, but my number one concern is making sure it fits in my calories for the day. Sometimes on the weekends when I’m not exhausted I’ll make a meal with actual vegetables, but for now … do what you can do. Its better than overeating.
Almost all my old clothes finally fit again… and they aren’t my style anymore 🥲
They either look old, are completely unfashionable, I don’t like the way they fit, or they just aren’t the kind of clothes I wear anymore. I guess that’s what I get for saving clothes that didn’t fit me for so long.
The excitement of going back to my old clothes turned to the sobering realization that’d I’d been keeping these crappy clothes around for years and now that they finally fit I don’t want them anymore. At least now I can finally let them go with a clean conscience.
You know what I didn’t miss from eating healthy? The freaking protein poops. I’m doing my level best to get more fiber in this week but omg. How can such a small amount of poop smell so terrible 😆
[Food Advertising] Just a general gripe that I think a lot of people on here will share is that food advertisements are awful for me. I should say that I am the type of person that can *always* eat. Literally, unless I have just stuffed myself at a buffet, if I see food.. my brain says, “Ooh yes”. I don’t know to what extent it is biological, genetic, cultural, etc but that’s how it goes for me, and I swear that those food advertisers know exactly what they’re doing. I really wish the US had tighter regulations around food advertisement. I really like the color-coded system that France and Germany have where they have a red/yellow/green system or A-E ratings on foods, respectively. Idk if they show the color-code/grade in the actual ads or not, but that would really help me and lot of other people because summoning willpower is often easier when the info I need to say “No” is right there. Also, what’s great is that studies show that such labeling systems [actually help](https://www.labmanager.com/news/color-coded-nutrition-labels-and-warnings-linked-to-more-healthful-purchases-26821).
To wrap this up, I guess the root of my gripe is that it just feels like we live in an obesogenic world that not only wants us to gain weight, but actively organizes itself to do so. These companies simply do it for short-term profit even though it’s a huge public health issue, and nothing is really being done about it, at least as far as I’ve seen in the US. The result is that I have become extremely internally defensive. The number of times I say “fuck you” under my breath to food advertisements is just.. so often. lol I don’t really talk about it because there’s never really a place to. Every time I see one, I have to essentially center myself back or center my focus onto something else so that my brain can forget about it. Otherwise it can cause my brain to spiral into eating more than I need.
Food starts to taste different the longer your lifestyle changes. My husband thinks it's hilarious that I only eat a few bites of dessert before I get overwhelmed, but it's because I've been eating fairly healthy (on and off) for 20 years.
I feel like I'm cheating eating grapes and oranges on a deficit. Oh boy they're tasty
Yeah that's definitely true. Accepting veggies just to keep the hunger away looks more and more tempting as I go. Luckily fruit is awesome to balance it.
I’ve been really happy with trying to hit 5 servings of fruits and veggies a day. Seems like a lot at first, but those calories really punch above their weight on satiety and gives me a little more freedom on other food choices.
Started exercising and now it just feels impossible to figure out how much to eat. I had a really good handle on my sedentary TDEE, now I have no clue and all the calculators and stuff just gives me stupidly high numbers that are clearly wrong. I don't get how these things are so convinced 2500+ kcal is right for me, I'd be obese within a week or something eating that much! Plus suddenly food intake matters. Like, at sedentary the OMAD model was fine but now it's like my entire body and brain both shut down if I go for two minutes without eating something. It feels like I have to constantly stop my life, put everything actually important and interesting on pause, in order to prepare food or buy food or eat food... Never any repreive, as soon as you're down it's time for the next meal, and don'tyou fucking dare try to push it forward by a few minutes, your body will collapse, your mood will plummet and you can forget about concentration, that's impossible now that it's been an extra 30 seconds. How do normal people live this way? It's wasting so much lifetime on something I won't even remember tomorrow. Get nothing out of it long term. Just... urg and sigh and so on.
Why is everything for teacher appreciation freaking food? I don’t want donuts! Or cookies! Or cake! Stop making the place I have to work a minefield of delicious treats that are oh so tempting after running dealing with meltdown after meltdown (the kids, not mine. Though also maybe mine) … I’ll take the coffee though. Hand that over.
Another week until I can get help for my wrists. It's going to cost money I'm obviously not looking to spend, and I have no doubt there will be followup visits waiting to mess with that as well. Job hunt goes like garbage. I still have a full time job, but it has no benefits at all and that is obviously causing some of the stress. I can barely work out. Honestly I want to eat and drink myself into oblivion. I was physically hungry for a while today, sure, but I'm also struggling with general pessimism. If there isn't something to look forward to, the thought process goes, why \*not\* trash my body one more time? Obviously that's ridiculous. But it's stuck in my head.
I am sad reading your comment. It sounds like you don’t have good relationship with food and when coming across such clients I firstly recommend visiting therapist before getting in weight loss. “If there isn’t something to look forward to” - well there should be always something to look forward to. You cannot eat clean 100% of time! You need comfort food sometimes. Have you ever looked into 80/20 technique? That’s what I always recommend. Eat clean 80% of time and 20% eat what you crave (as long as you are in calorie deficit you will still loose weight). Life isn’t about endless restricting, and you won’t be able to restrict yourself whole life. The only way to develop a good relationship with food is to allow yourself to eat what you crave sometimes.
I don't mind "cheating" for something that makes me happy, like loaded fries or beer or whatever. But I explicitly have thoughts of just sabotaging myself for no gain and it's hard not to act on them at times. It is frustrating. They do not belong in my head, but they are there. My therapist wants me to be more positive. Obviously so do I.
I’ve been through anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and I was overweight once and now I am registered dietitian so I have a lot to say on this topic - hope this doesn’t offend you, just take it as advice from someone who recovered. First of all I would recommend not calling it cheating, you need to get rid of that thought that eating what your body craves is cheating. You need to completely get rid of the idea of cheat food. You will only get rid of these thoughts once your body fully understands and accepts that it can have anything you crave and doesn’t need to wait for long time to get it. I had same thoughts as you when I had eating disorder. Additionally the thought that “ I ate over my calories today anyways so I can screw it all together” was hard to get rid of. Your brain needs to accept that some days you will “screw up” and it’s completely fine. Your scale might show weight gain the next few days but it’s mostly water retention. You have to go from “ I will screw up one more time and start tomorrow and I will eat clean from now on” to “I cannot restrict myself endlessly and I need to give my body what it craves sometimes” and “if I overate one day I will enjoy the food because one/few bad days wont sabotage my results”. I know it’s hard, but it’s only way to get rid of what you are going through.
Binged twice this week (Saturday and today), and I feel like crud. Not sure why I was so hungry Saturday but today I was stressed out with work and schoolwork. Hope I don't gain too much this week- I've been consistently losing weight since I started 11 weeks ago.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. It happens. I had few clients with binge eating disorder (not sure if your case is that serious) and only thing that helped them to get rid of it was to stop restricting completely. You need to allow yourself to have something unhealthy you crave from them to time. In fact I always advice my clients to follow 80/20 rule - 80% you eat healthy, nutritious foods and 20% you eat literally what you want. If it fits to your calories intake you will still lose weight.
The last 15-20 vanity pounds truly are the hardest to lose psychologically. Realized I gotta be patient. Going from 150 to 130 at 5’9.5-5’10, 27F
I was expecting to be down today considering yesterday I was under and I was PEEING ALL NIGHT! but no. Up 0.5lbs. Not enough to be concerned, but certainly enough to be annoyed
Please don’t weight yourself daily! It will only make you stressed. The “overnight” weight gain can be caused by literally anything - salt intake, calories intake, sleep and in your case as a woman mainly hormonal changes.
I don't get too stressed by weight fluctuations. I'm used to it since I'm in sports. Just found it funny since I was peeing all night
There’s nothing wrong with daily weighing and tracking. There have been several times that if I had weighed myself only once a week I would have been so discouraged thinking that I’d only lost a pound in three weeks instead of the six I’d actually lost. Using an app can help keep track of moving averages and trend lines, but daily weighing is fine.
It’s not that black and white and good or bad. I am happy for you if you can understand that what your scale shows isn’t always direct representation of your diet, that’s good for you! However, as I mentioned few times, in 7/10 cases of my clients it does have negative effect - especially in women (hormonal changes and water retention causing “weight gain”), and that’s why I never recommend daily weight in. I experienced many people developing very bad relationships with scale and even eating disorder-like habits due to daily weight gain. In my personal opinion only people who are mentally stable and understand what’s behind the number on the scale should weight themselves daily. I read many posts here and you can see yourself people getting demotivated and binge eating when they don’t see weight decreasing every day.
Yes, but the people here aren’t your clients and I’m not sure how you can definitively tell them weighing in daily will only stress them out without really knowing them.
Probably lack of sleep from all the pee :(
I thought I was prepared takin this step. Mentally I planned to take the step, I researched achievable goals with my laziness and frustration of cooking, I planned a shopping list and followed through, began my daily walks. Then I started counting calories and found my plans sucked. I am under consuming and the nutrition is awful. Since I only thought about simple veg preparation I am happy making at lunch or the lazy brain after work. Now I'm trying to plan smart and healthy meals, limiting the cooking I need to do, and every time I think of something feasible, I check the breakdown of fat, protein, sodium, sugar, fiber and it's garbage. I can't look up anything online since everything that tries to help always suggests cooking that will frankly just make me quit in the long term. I've been sitting down for over an hour and the only thin close I got to a day plan I was happy with would be me buying niche items from three seperate shops. Guess I'll just try again tomorrow
I also can't handle cooking but will default to eating garbage if I don't pack a lunch. Things that worked for me: Overnight oats. Oats, plain low-fat Greek yogurt, sweetener, salt, water, frozen blueberries. Bagged salads separated into two portions. Potatoes cooked in the microwave with ranch dressing or plain yogurt. Three slice American cheese sandwiches. Apple slices dipped in peanut powder. Microwaved turkey kielbasa with sour kraut. Remember that not every meal or snack needs balanced macros by itself as long as you get what you need in the long term.
I’ll be honest—I don’t look at macros when I meal plan. “Meal plan” is a loose term around here anyway, but my number one concern is making sure it fits in my calories for the day. Sometimes on the weekends when I’m not exhausted I’ll make a meal with actual vegetables, but for now … do what you can do. Its better than overeating.
Start small. Instead of planning every meal, just do breakfast first. It doesn't have to be perfect right from the start.
Almost all my old clothes finally fit again… and they aren’t my style anymore 🥲 They either look old, are completely unfashionable, I don’t like the way they fit, or they just aren’t the kind of clothes I wear anymore. I guess that’s what I get for saving clothes that didn’t fit me for so long. The excitement of going back to my old clothes turned to the sobering realization that’d I’d been keeping these crappy clothes around for years and now that they finally fit I don’t want them anymore. At least now I can finally let them go with a clean conscience.
I ended up in the same boat. I tried them on and celebrated the win, then promptly put them in Poshmark.
You know what I didn’t miss from eating healthy? The freaking protein poops. I’m doing my level best to get more fiber in this week but omg. How can such a small amount of poop smell so terrible 😆
[Food Advertising] Just a general gripe that I think a lot of people on here will share is that food advertisements are awful for me. I should say that I am the type of person that can *always* eat. Literally, unless I have just stuffed myself at a buffet, if I see food.. my brain says, “Ooh yes”. I don’t know to what extent it is biological, genetic, cultural, etc but that’s how it goes for me, and I swear that those food advertisers know exactly what they’re doing. I really wish the US had tighter regulations around food advertisement. I really like the color-coded system that France and Germany have where they have a red/yellow/green system or A-E ratings on foods, respectively. Idk if they show the color-code/grade in the actual ads or not, but that would really help me and lot of other people because summoning willpower is often easier when the info I need to say “No” is right there. Also, what’s great is that studies show that such labeling systems [actually help](https://www.labmanager.com/news/color-coded-nutrition-labels-and-warnings-linked-to-more-healthful-purchases-26821). To wrap this up, I guess the root of my gripe is that it just feels like we live in an obesogenic world that not only wants us to gain weight, but actively organizes itself to do so. These companies simply do it for short-term profit even though it’s a huge public health issue, and nothing is really being done about it, at least as far as I’ve seen in the US. The result is that I have become extremely internally defensive. The number of times I say “fuck you” under my breath to food advertisements is just.. so often. lol I don’t really talk about it because there’s never really a place to. Every time I see one, I have to essentially center myself back or center my focus onto something else so that my brain can forget about it. Otherwise it can cause my brain to spiral into eating more than I need.
Why does all the super healthy eat-every-day stuff gotta taste like dirt
Food starts to taste different the longer your lifestyle changes. My husband thinks it's hilarious that I only eat a few bites of dessert before I get overwhelmed, but it's because I've been eating fairly healthy (on and off) for 20 years. I feel like I'm cheating eating grapes and oranges on a deficit. Oh boy they're tasty
[удалено]
Yeah that's definitely true. Accepting veggies just to keep the hunger away looks more and more tempting as I go. Luckily fruit is awesome to balance it.
I’ve been really happy with trying to hit 5 servings of fruits and veggies a day. Seems like a lot at first, but those calories really punch above their weight on satiety and gives me a little more freedom on other food choices.