(June 27, 2020 at 11:17 am)TaraJo Wrote: I was tired of being fat. Rule 1 to weight loss: you REALLY need to get used to being hungry. Even if you get cheap foods, if you consume less calories than you burn, you WILL lose weight.
I had (am having?) a covid scare so I haven't exactly been able to get out very much. How do I handle it? I eat less. It's 10:13 on Saturday morning, I had a small cup of soup for dinner last night and I haven't eaten yet today.
The hardest part is to avoid boredom eating, stress eating and when you do eat, stop eating when you aren't hungry, not when you're full. It's frustrating not being completely satisfied after you eat, but I am quite satisfied with having lost almost 150 lbs since 2017.
One of the most important things to weight loss, the key mindset I had to get over to get started, was simply this: believe you CAN do it. There are a lot of "fat activist" voices in left spaces that will say things like "You'll just hurt yourself trying to lose weight" or "You're just going to gain it back" or some other defeatist talk. You need to shut that out and tell your self that you can, you will, you need to lose weight. I didn't tell myself "I want to lose this weight." I told myself "I WILL lose this weight!" The right mindset goes a long way; and the wrong mindset will get you stuck in a rut you might never get out of.
The mindset is an essential component. My mother was obese. No matter what the diet, she lost no weight. She would report in exactly what she had for breakfast, lunch and dinner and tot that up she would have been in the starvation category. Yet still lost no weight.
It turns out that the time between meals was not being counted. Add in a bite of this and a taste of that all day long and boy it was no wonder that no weight was lost at all.
She was functionally blind to all of that daily grazing. They weren't meals so they didn't count.
The scary part is that my father and my three siblings and I were equally blind to it. Looking back, I find myself wondering "How did we miss that?" and the answer is that we didn't miss it at all. It was simply normalised. Family dynamics are a bugger. We were all enablers.
Eventually, we did take action but it was far too late. The only thing that changed her behaviour was diabetes and two massive heart attacks.
Time for an emergency quad bypass. And a combo pacemaker/defib device
After months of rehab, on her release from hospital, the med team told her out straight. "We have bought you ten more years". So what did she do? She travelled the world and became a speaker at symposiums for fellow sufferers and basically stuffed as much living into those ten years as humanly possible and never went back to old habits. I cannot but admire that.
But that is what it took for a behavioural change.
