It’s really stupid that guilt is a major part of the “eating experience” for many women. Every time, I tell a woman that I lose weight ‘though I’m eating three square meals and three snacks per day, with fat and carbs and everthing, including cake, greek yoghurt, and candy, they think I’m lying. Everybody thinks that losing weight means mortification. And that 1000 calories are a day’s ration for a grown woman. So everybody’s thinking when you’re just eating you’ll be getting fatter and fatter.
So here’s the choice: eat when you’re hungry and with pleasure – that would be leading to growing weight – or you take the advice of an aquaintane of mine, who’s counting calories with every bite, and when she reaches her calory count for the day, she stops. Even right after breakfast.
I still believe that food is good when you’re hungry, for pleasure and the soul, and that I can trust my feelings. Those feelings just have to get a chance of getting through almost forty years of habitually overeating.
To spend my life counting calories, or hysterically avoiding certain food groups would be perverse. To stuff myself because of every mood known to man would be too.
When your bathing suit doesn’t fit, throw it away and buy a new one. Bigger or smaller, who cares. I started losing weight after I threw all clothes away that didn’t fit anymore. (Apart from a cashmere turtleneck, three Tees, and hot red undies). I ordered “happy size” clothes by the dozens, after two years of hoping to lose the fat soon. Then I started using my brain again: if I lost weight immediately and lost about two pounds per month, I’d have to lose weight for about one year and a half. My beloved clothes from 1996, which I found real cool, would be outdated by then. I thought if ever I lose weight it’s worth new clothes.
And if not, at least I look good now.
P.S.: Thank you for your patience. When I started writing about dieting I didn’t know it would take so long. You know – I tried to keep this real short.
Hello, SF, and thanks a lot for your very detailed ‘confessions of an overeater’ which I’ve been too, for decades. Geneen Roth, South Beach, it’s all right. I can so relate!
This is also the time for me here in far northern CA to ‘Turn It All Around’ again, and your posts are inspiring! I only read back as far as last Tues or so, but it was plenty to stimluate my fingers…(I stumbled across you in the same BlogHer zone I had commented on…)
About 2 yrs ago, a high blood sugar count drove me to the South Beach Diet, which helped me, a real counch potato, lose 20 full lbs. and keep them off for a year.
Then folks started saying how good I looked, and boom, I got lazy and incautious and back it all came. Fast forward to another year, this one that ‘ends’ in a month or so (USA college academic semester calendar), and I was consciously ‘rewarding myself’ (by no such restrictions, of course)for having made it with some semblance of sanity after 30 years in public education to my first full retirement year.
And an extra ten lbs or so for a long rough winter, until disgust and a nasty late spring flu and my female doc’s urgings have reluctantly driven me back to at least a Phase Two South Beach type of diet….maybe we can do a sort of ‘check in’ to occasionally keep up our inspiration!?
While I’m married, childless by choice and older, I just wanted to note our food similarities and thank you for making it so plain and clear all the irrational crap we tell ourselves (and believe!)
If you’re diapers and music, I’m old cats and an ailing husband, but we’ll make it! I’ve been thinking about passing on the last vestiges of earlier sizes in the back of the attic, and now I will! 😉
Cheers, and good luck and fortitude, ~Kathi
ps Hop over and visit me at my silly or serious blogs:
http://mysisterwasastbernard.blogspot.com
http://ieresourcenetwork.blogspot.com
Hello, SF, and thanks a lot for your very detailed ‘confessions of an overeater’ which I’ve been too, for decades. Geneen Roth, South Beach, it’s all right. I can so relate!
This is also the time for me here in far northern CA to ‘Turn It All Around’ again, and your posts are inspiring! I only read back as far as last Tues or so, but it was plenty to stimluate my fingers…(I stumbled across you in the same BlogHer zone I had commented on…)
About 2 yrs ago, a high blood sugar count drove me to the South Beach Diet, which helped me, a real counch potato, lose 20 full lbs. and keep them off for a year.
Then folks started saying how good I looked, and boom, I got lazy and incautious and back it all came. Fast forward to another year, this one that ‘ends’ in a month or so (USA college academic semester calendar), and I was consciously ‘rewarding myself’ (by no such restrictions, of course)for having made it with some semblance of sanity after 30 years in public education to my first full retirement year.
And an extra ten lbs or so for a long rough winter, until disgust and a nasty late spring flu and my female doc’s urgings have reluctantly driven me back to at least a Phase Two South Beach type of diet….maybe we can do a sort of ‘check in’ to occasionally keep up our inspiration!?
While I’m married, childless by choice and older, I just wanted to note our food similarities and thank you for making it so plain and clear all the irrational crap we tell ourselves (and believe!)
If you’re diapers and music, I’m old cats and an ailing husband, but we’ll make it! I’ve been thinking about passing on the last vestiges of earlier sizes in the back of the attic, and now I will! 😉
Cheers, and good luck and fortitude, ~Kathi
ps Hop over and visit me at my silly or serious blogs:
http://mysisterwasastbernard.blogspot.com
http://ieresourcenetwork.blogspot.com