I have had a turbulent time with food over the last few years, finally lost my timber through dieting and essentially cutting out sweets and treats entirely. This is fine but I always planned at Chrimble I’d endulge properly – Mince Pies, Quality Street, Hot Chocolate, the works. But since I had a solitary Mince Pie on 1st December, I have gone in to defence mode and am already back to rice cakes and soup. Any of you experience this?
8 comments
Not me
Fuck that. I’m eating so much this December that they’ll have to airlift my dead body out through a hole in the roof
You need to strike some balance and allow yourself to cut loose. It’s nice to have a psychological release and not have to feel restricted. Unless you are happy to diet through christmas, fairplay if you are…but even the strictest of dieters will no doubt be eating til they feel sick. I’ve lost 6 stone so far, providing I hit my target by xmas day (I’m on track to) I will be relaxing for the day. I have every cheat meal planned out exactly lol.
I only have issues eating on Christmas, if I am the one doing the prep and cooking. But that is the same for me with any food I make.
Yes. Eating disorders are a challenge at the best of times, but when the entire country is in “fuck it, pour Baileys on your cornflakes and have an entire box of Ferrero Rocher for lunch” mode it is *hard*.
If I had advice I wouldn’t be suffering myself. So all I can offer you is solidarity.
I’ve been lucky enough not to have to diet in my adult life… until now. Not really sure how I’m going to handle Christmas. On one hand, I don’t want to restrict myself too much. On the other hand, my diet is going quite well at the moment, I’m happy enough with the weight I’ve lost, and I don’t want to have to do even more work to make those same gains again in a month. Momentum is also a pretty big factor for me, and I know it’ll be harder to get back to dieting if I’m out of it for too long.
I think the problem people have with this sort of thing these days is that when losing weight, they categorise foods into good/bad (they may call this healthy/unhealthy etc.) and what they generally mean is ‘nice tasting food that is calorically dense’. I have seen people making a fuss and refusing to be social because they are ‘on a diet’ or ‘being good’.
In order to shed weight, they may avoid all ‘bad foods’ fill up on ‘good foods’ or perhaps they will track calories. As they do this, they become locked into a pattern of either being on a diet or eating with no restraint. Either they are excessively rigid or they go slightly off piste and stuff themselves (because they are all or nothing) or feel guilt.
The real solution is understanding portion sizing and rough energy density of common foods. This can take a long time to get used to (especially if your bodies hunger signals are broken and aren’t helping) but it is the best long term way; you get to know food types and how much of any combination of them are roughly appropriate.
You can interpret this directly into calories by using 4 per gram of *dry* carbohydrate and protein and 9 per gram of fat… you just need to eyeball sizes of various foods and get an idea of water levels contained e.g. cooked chicken breast is about 60% the weight of raw and raw lean breast is about 25% protein and 1-2% fat by weight. An average one might be about 200g which would thus be about 220kcal. This is unnecessary however; just understanding food types and portion sizes is enough.
You don’t have to go into that level of detail, or weigh things etc. You just have to get to the stage where you intuitively can eyeball food and know roughly what a day’s worth is. Eventually, your hunger signals will get fixed and tell you without thinking.
You have to understand that a properly functioning body seeks homeostasis. People who manage their weight without ever thinking about it are able to do so because all the minor variation in their food intake is smoothed out by their body producing more heat and making them feel more energetic or more lethargic and more or less hungry.
I should add that luckily, weight management has never really been a problem for me and although I am don’t walk around shredded and chiselled all year long, I have in the past made weight for boxing or simply decided to get in shape for summer. During these periods though – I didn’t become a social hermit… so if I went somewhere and was offered cake or mince pies etc. I’d just eat a small portion without really thinking about it too much and without it really effecting anything at all in my plans. Unless you are making weight for a very important event in the next week (which I wouldn’t include my local amateur boxing as important enough) you have no business to be antisocial with food.
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So tl;Dr
If you practice the very basics of nutrition and follow good habits and not just mindless adherence to a plan based on numbers, you will instinctively start to alter your intake based on foods you eat. That is, you have a couple of mince pies and eat slightly less later on. Or you simply have a few mince pies and take the extra calories that day but the other six days of the week you eat your normal bodily requirement and thus have only consumed a negligible amount of extra energy
Looking at your post history, I would recommend seeing a specialist. It looks like there’s some disordered eating going on that a specialist would be best placed to address.
I say this with as much care and compassion as possible too, I have Anorexia and Bulimia.
Your “defence mode” is going to take some time to deal with and it sounds like there are some real habits there, especially if your diet focuses on just a few foods and you’re still maintaining a deficit at a weight that’s almost underweight for your height.
To answer your question, I absolutely struggle at Christmas. With my eating disorders I can feel a lot of guilt and just negative emotions on the whole surrounding food.