Just One More Diet

Yesterday was really hard but I'm just getting started. 7:30 - Coffee with cream and stevia Some vague hunger pangs all morning 10:00 - Break time for everyone else but if I want to break the pavlovian response to eating at certain times just because it's that time. No, I'm NOT gonna eat! 11:15 - Mild headache and not-mild hunger have started. The experts say that the headache means have some salt and the hunger can be resolved with water or bone broth. I have no bone broth, so I'll just sip on bullion, which has lots of salt anyway. 11:30 - I have a cup of bullion broth sitting on my desk next to me in case I get lonely. 1:30 - I've been sipping on the bullion every time the stomach grumbles or the mouth starts to water. Now my jaw hurts. Maybe I'm clenching? 2:30 - Still doing well, I just had a little energy burst that made me want to move so I walked around the building. Now I'm bobbing in my chair a little. I love not getting the afternoon...

After several unintended several-hour fasts last week (“ate small breakfast, just not hungry for lunch, not skipping dinner”) and an unplanned fast yesterday (“ate a big breakfast, not hungry for lunch, how long can I go before eating dinner, ah not very long at all”) I’ve decided to try fasting on purpose today. Yesterday I ended up eating dinner earlier than normal 'cause the hunger pangs were just too much. Big tip, and a tool I’ve used in the past is that sleep beats hunger. I slept from about 1:00 to 4:30, ate, watched videos, then slept again at 9 or so and woke up this morning at 5:30 feeling refreshed and ready to try this thing. So, my last meal was last night at 4:30pm and about 6:30am I had my morning coffee of 1/2c espresso + 1/4c heavy whipping cream and one of those teenytiny-scoops of stevia powder but I haven’t eaten anything else. At 6:30am that was 14 hours down. My plan is to ignore hunger pangs, drink water, and have dinner at 7pm as my breakfast, bring...

Remember a few weeks ago what happened when I tried to restrict my fat and calories?  Just the thought of restricting lead me straight to a binge. I decided to stop even thinking of restricting and just eat what I felt like eating within the confines of 20g of net carbs which wasn't in and of itself making me feel like binging. Sheesh, do I put an e in binging, bingeing, or do I leave the e out? The dictionary doesn't like either way. Maybe one thing I should do is clarify that the first step in Binge Eating Disorder therapy is learning to trust food. Trust that you have enough food, trust that you can have food whenever you want, trust that there is no scarcity of food, trust that you don't have to horde food either in your pantry or in your body. I have found great success in the last year when I could just remember that first step. When I was having some emotional difficulties last year and early this year it was impossible to remember the first step and so I couldn...

I was trying to explain to my husband the other day about an unexpected benefit I noticed of doing keto. Over the last four weeks I have had a definite reduction in my urge to binge. It's not that I feel like having a binge and I can talk myself out of it or that I have to exert effort to control it some other way. It's just that it doesn't come up. If I'm hungry I eat. Partway through a meal, even if I'm distracted by TV or conversation or whatever, it occurs to me to check if I'm satiated. If the answer is yes I stop eating, if the answer is no I keep eating. I'm not constantly thinking "I have to keep myself from having a binge" or "I have to remember to be mindful when I am eating". My therapist said that the first step to recovering from binge eating disorder was learning to recognize my body's satiety signals. If I noticed I was full I could take that opportunity to stop but even when I was full I still wanted to keep eating. ...

Amazingly, at less than 20 net carbs a day, it hasn't been difficult to do keto. I've been doing it sort of lazy, eating lots of fats, moderate protein, and only a little bit of veg and none of the carby stuff. I tracked for a week or so and then I noticed my calories were way higher than I wanted them from all the fat, and things went pear shaped for a day or two. When I tried to count calories and reduce my intake I suddenly had a binge episode, and then I had another the next day. I learned a lot in BED therapy and the first thing you learn is that restricting triggers binges. So, I slammed the brakes on tracking for a week but continuing with high fat and protein and almost no carbs and I didn't have a binge the whole week. For the last week now I've been slowly going back to tracking but I'm just making sure I don't go over in net carbs and under in protein. I'm leaving the fat alone and eating whatever I want. I see the calories numbers but I try not...

In late-May I started feeling like I was pulling out of a depression I've been in since a friend of mine passed away in January. It wasn't so much that she had died, which was awful of course and I'll miss her very much. My emotional upset was more personal than that, more self-centered of me. She had always been the fat woman I looked at as my saving grace. I always thought, "If she can be that fat and still alive, then there's hope for me." I think I said this already but it bears repeating. So late-May I was pulling out of the depression, I felt more cheerful, less weighed down, wanting to go out more, maybe even see some friends. I could feel this episode was coming to an end and I was ready to take more constructive action with the panic and fear that had overwhelmed me when Randy died. Instead of just sitting on the couch every night, maybe now I could find the strength to focus my efforts on pulling myself back from that cliff Randy fell off. As I a...

I'm having a lot of trouble organizing my thoughts on this subject and I really want to say all this stuff before I move on with other subjects so I'll just post what I have written down even though it's not finished and move on. I wanted to get all sciencey and cite sources but I'm just not that into it right now. I'm tired of all the USDA RDA bullshit and it feels like no matter what the science says there's just too much money in sugar and keeping people fat to get anything changed. I'm a relatively intelligent person but I also, possibly stupidly, believe in conspiracy theories. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only person involved in JKF's death. I believe that the tobacco companies add extra-addictive chemicals to their products to keep their customer base growing. And I believe the food companies know exactly what they were doing when they added high fructose corn syrup and all sorts of other sugary substances to their products, and ...