More on hunger

Yesterday when I got home from work I was hungry, and today before lunch I was hungry too. I immediately started sorting out what was going wrong, why SLD might not be working, what I needed to change…and then I realized…

Hunger is GOOD.

Starving, not so much, I admit that freely. But hunger? It is natural. It is NORMAL. Hunger means your body has run through the energy supply it had on tap and needs more fuel. Hunger is much more natural state than a constant sense of fullness. I remember reading once that if you wake up NOT hungry, then you overate the night before (how scientific that statement is, I don’t know, but it makes sense to me). I am much more used to waking up not hungry — I am, in short, much more used to constantly eating too much.

I’ve never been a binge eater but I’ve also never been one to limit my portion sizes or stop a runaway sweet tooth. The nascent feeling of hunger pangs would often send me into a mild panic to eat something which usually ended up being unhealthy by dent of being readily availalbe (junk food, candy, etc.).

Nowadays, though, I’m not panicking. I’m eating LESS because of SLD and that makes me genuinely hungry in a healthy way; and because of some issues I’ve been addressing in therapy, I’m not panicking as much about being hungry. It’s a two-punch solution for me, but it would hardly count at all if I were not doing my SLD doses regularly.

Not to sound hokey but yeah, it really IS like the dawn of a new day.

SLD + Willpower

Anyone who says you don’t need willpower to stay on the SLD regimen is not being honest. ANY change in behavior — ANY habit you are trying to make or break — takes willpower. Maybe not as much as you would need to get to the Olympics as a competitive athlete, but yeah, you need some.

This morning was an excerise in willpower, for me. As you might remember, yesterday evening I barely ate at all (well, two Guinness beers is KINDA sorta dinner…heh…). This morning I woke up starving. Not the panicked, emotionally-driven starving I’m used to, but the genuine hunger pangs of my body growling for food.

But I normally eat a very small breakfast (juices or fruit), have a cup of coffee, and then take my SLD dosage at about 11:30am. By 10am my coffee was not cutting it and my lunch was looking good, but I really did not want to blow out my schedule. So I didn’t.

It was not easy, even if it was not exactly the worst hour of my life. But I got to my SLD dose a bit early and then the hunger was gone. The rest of the day went really well; light rice and beans for lunch, and yeah, Welsh Rarebit for dinner (the British version of heart-attack on a plate: porter beer, heavy cream, and cheese mixed into a sauce to serve over toast) but not a huge serving. And no snacking after that.

Will power: ya gotta have it, sometimes.

Mondays are never happy

Uck! Late post…sorry…

Today was not exactly special in any way, apart from meeting up with friends this evening at Finnegan’s Wake Irish Pub, which is around the corner from where we live. Except possibly for this: I basically skipped dinner — grabbed a handful of tostado chips as I walked out the door — because the “meet up” was a last minute thing. Had two beers at the bar and left at 10pm, and just was not hungry.

In the past, I would have spent the whole evening thinking about food and planning my escape from the bar so I could go eat. Or I would have snuck out to the all-night burger joint across the street at some point. None of that happened, though, because (get this!) I just was not hungry.

Still trying to adapt to that fact, but sometimes, it is nice to wallow in it. Just because I can.

Weekend FAIL

On Friday I miscalculated and have paid the price all weekend. Normally this would not even register, but doing SLD makes me FULL and so my usual over-eating habits backfire in painful ways.

We went for our weekly dinner-out treat to Decent Pizza, a local “dive”, where I had a couple of beers and ordered a calzone. Their calzones are huge and a bell went off in my head saying, “no no no, saw that sucker in half and take part of it home!” But did I listen? No. I ate until I was stuffed, which is totally not unusual for me. I have in the past finished off those calzones with gusto.

But this time? OMG I was a hurting puppy. After my reduced food intake of the last couple of weeks? Oh yeah, I was miserable!

I woke up Saturday still very full. I had a small sub for lunch and two tacos for dinner but by the time we hit the club (around 10:30pm) I felt like a stuffed meatball. UGH.

Today was much better; two oranges for breakfast, a bowl of sauteed green beans for a late lunch, and I’ve made chili for dinner (which is now cooking). But I have been in a state of “over-full” all weekend and that is just STUPID.

Old habits die hard. Mine are clearly not doing down without an old fashioned fire-fight of epic proportions. But the fact remains: on SLD, it FEELS right to eat less. Even if you try to stuff yourself, you will regret it.

On Being Flexible

I spoke in my page SLD Crash and Burn about the issue of planning. The first time I tried SLD, I did not really plan, I just kind of expected it to happen: some time around ten am I’ll take my SLD dose, no problem. That might LOOK like planning but it wasn’t; I did not plan for when I would have to stop drinking my coffee, or when it would be good to eat lunch, so when I did not finish my coffee until ten am, I was flummoxed. In other words, I was hoping SLD would shoe horn in without much effort on my part.

This time, I set out with a clear idea of a schedule: stop drinking coffee by 9:30am, take my SLD dose at 10:30am, be well and truly ready for lunch by noon.

Not working.

I’ve watched my habits as I try to force myself into this schedule, and the fact is, by 9:30am I am usually barely halfway through my coffee. I’m a sipper, not a gulper, so taking two hours to finish a cup is not unusual for me (this is something I never really knew about myself before!). Turns out I need to move everything UP an hour: done with coffee by 10:30am, SLD at 11:30am, lunch around 1:00. Since that is how everything has been falling out anyway, I think I can manage it. lol!

Average Days on SLD

Today was, on average, an average day on SLD. Kind of mucked up my breakfast by juicing a bunch of fruit and then leaving half of it sitting on the counter as I drove off to work, so I ended up chugging a SlimFast just to cover myself. SLD dose? Check. Veggie juice and small bowl of mush for lunch? Check. Big bowl of chocolate candy sitting one desk over yet left completely untouched? Check! I am feeling quite sated after I eat lunch these days so candy just has no allure. Imagine! Wow.

Also, it really is weird to adjust to feeling full WHILE I’M EATING. When not doing SLD, I just stuff it in until the bowl/plate/table is empty. That’s how I was taught to eat: until it was all GONE. If I had a “full” meter I did not know it. Today I drank my veggie juice for lunch really could have skipped the mush, but I like rice so I ate it anyway…it took me an hour finish it what was no more than a cup and a half of rice. I was FULL which is always something that floors me when I start SLD. Just feeling full is bizarre. That’s pretty sad to admit, but it is the truth.

Diet vs. Way of Life

No one who has tried to lose weight has missed this message: losing weight is about lifestyle changes.

Yeah, got the memo, thanks.

Which is the famous reason diets fail: they are short term solutions to a long term problem. Or you could say they treat the symptom, not the disease. Whatever you want to say, the fact is that (except in extreme cases) being overweight is a condition borne out of an unhealthy lifestyle.

What is most often missed is not the fact that the lifestyle needs to be changed (FIND me a dieter who doesn’t know that, I dare you), but that the changes need to be habits the person can live with FOREVER. Got that? FOREVER. So if lo-carb works for you, great; just know you will be lo-carb until you die. Ditto Weight Watchers. Doesn’t matter the “change”, it has to be doable for the individual.

Bodies are amazingly adaptable. Honest. You can fine tune them but really, they put up with a hell of a lot. The issue isn’t about your body, it is about your MIND.

Or, my mind, rather — and I’m mental so hey! Fun for the whole family.

I’ve tried every diet, or at least versions of them. But what it boils down to is doing something I can live with. I’m not just talking about taste or calorie count, but how well it fits into my lifestyle. I’m not much of a cook, so any diet that relies on every meal being whipped up from scratch in the kitchen using three pans and fourteen ingredients is doomed to failure. I’m also a creature of habit, so I tend to eat repetitively; I know, not ideal, but there it is. That is who I am.

I also LOVE vegetables and fruits, and can (and have) lived without meat for years. I also love cheese.

So I’ve gone back to what I know and love: juicing, salads, and low-intake of refined flour and sugar. In the mornings I juice or make a smoothie; I also juice veggies and take that too work as lunch. Sometimes I’ll take a bit of rice to eat as well, or once in a while forgo the juice for a bowl of soup, but that’s it for variety. Dinner is now centered around salad, with a sandwich or pasta/rice side dish to fill it out.

Overall this isn’t rocket science. But I’ve spent the last year drinking beer, eating ramen noodles and junk food. So this is a sea change, yes; but it is also one I can handle long term. I still get the rich and unhealthy things I love — cheese, pasta, chocolate — but mostly my diet is fresh fruits and veggies.

I can live with that.

Yeah, baby!

Ooo! I made a kiss-ass smoothie this morning! It was an everything-but-the-sink concoction but it is awesome. Days like this I’m glad I got the Braun blender, because that sucker has an engine like a small car. The dates were hacked up with no problems.

Here:

3 oranges, juiced (about 2/3 a cup of juice)
1 cup grapes
4 hunks of pineapple (I use canned unsweetened)
5 dried, pitted dates (soak in warm water to soften up)
1 T. rolled oats
1 c. ice
1/8 t. guar gum (thickening agent, totally optional)

Blend!

Reasonable Hunger

Yesterday evening I came home from work hungry, which I thought was surprising because that has not happened since I started taking my SLD doses regularly. Not like being hungry is unfamiliar or anything, so I did not think too much about it. Went for a one-hour walk and then came home, fixed Husband and myself some salad (we are crazily addicted to Asian Ginseng Dressing) and made my trade mark rice-and-lentils mush. I make good mush.

Had about two cups of that, plus some steamed broccli florets. Obviously, I was HUNGRY.

Thing is, as I think about it today, I realized two things:
1. I had barely eaten at all most of the day, other than fresh vegetable juice at lunch. By the time I got home from work, I had probably ingested all of 500 calories and was only mildly hungry. Really.
2. I ate the mush and then STOPPED. I did not clean out the pot as I have been known to do. In fact, there was enough left over for me to put it aside for lunch today — in fact too much, I threw a little bit out. Which is NOT something I normally do.

Conclusion: I was experiencing a healthy hunger that was abated when I ate a decent meal, and felt no panicked urges to stuff my face or spend the entire night grazing through the kitchen. I did not start craving sugary snacks either.

This is how Shangrila Diet changes your life, right there.

Today has been normal. Took my SLD dose on schedule, I ate my leftover mush and enjoyed my veggie juice — although I note I will need to buy more carrots next grocery trip, I’ll be out before Friday. I’m feeling full right now, sipping coffee, and that’s all good.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what, actually, I am eating these days.

Going easy on myself

The easiest thing in the world for me is to be hard on myself.

Every dieter understands this. It is EASY to get mad at our hunger, at our “failures” to stick with a plan, at our inability to lose weight. You get it. I know you do. So I’ve decided to take it easy.

First off, I’m taking one day off a week from this blog, either Saturday or Sunday as the mood strikes. Writing is easy for me but sometimes it is good to lay off the pressure cooker mentality of it.

Secondly, I need to remember that not adhering to the schedule precisely does not mean “EPIC FAIL.” That is part of what undid me last time (amongst all the trauma-drama of life): everytime I did not dose at exactly the time I had planned, I just wrote off the day. MISTAKE! Even later is better than never; and just having a schedule helps remind me to try and stick with it.

As for food and all that, Sunday was a banner day. I kept my food portions small (basically, HALF of what I normally eat!) and generally well balanced (more salad) and I did not get hungry. I had a few handfuls of popcorn while watching a movie with MiKE, but I did not have any complusion to stuff my face with it. Now that is my definition of an SLD Success Moment!

Today is smooth sailing — a little late on my SLD dose, but I drank it during my weekly therapy appointment so all good. Juiced some fruit for breakfast, and just drank my veggie juice for lunch. I’ve got a slimfast here if I get pecky from something later, but that bowl of holiday candy over there on the corner of my boss’ desk? Untouched, unwanted, and not needed. WHOA! *is very pleased*