Utterly Disgusted...

Diet and Nutrition
1

…with myself! I must have the worst self control ever. Food seems to be like a drug to me. Like somone trying to stop smoking, they say to themselves everyday, “Ok, today is the day that I’m going to quit,” but by the end of the day they’ve smoked half a pack. I’m that way with food it seems like. I know that eating the wrong thing or too much of it will make me fat. I know that eating the wrong thing will cause me health problems down the line. I know that if I don’t get control of it then I’ll find myself spiraling out of control. But it never seems to fail that I always do exactly opposite of what I know to do.

For instance, I’ll tell myself at the beginning of the day, “Ok, I’m going to eat healthy today at lunch,” but what happens at lunch? I eat a pizza buffet of a cheeseburger.

HOW DO I GAIN CONTROL!!! How do I do what I know to do? Why can’t I tell myself no and stay away from the bad foods?

HELP!!!

2

Food is addictive. Before you indulge yourself next time, try to remind yourself how destructive you have been thus far and how it takes this very moment to stop your bad habit and then continue this each time you have a craving to gorge. Self discipline is the hardest of all things to practice.

3

I’ve been there. It’s taken me three months to really hone my diet in, and I’ve been keeping tight tabs on it for the past two weeks.

It’s HARD, that’s true. But like anything else worthwhile, if you put the time and effort in, IT WILL PAY OFF.

Try keeping a food log, of every single thing you eat, every day, for a couple weeks. Figure out the nutritional breakdown – protein, fat, carbs, calories, etc. Then go from there – can you cut out, say, regular soda? Can you replace regular pasta with whole wheat?
Can you increase protein?

The best way (in my opinion) is to make a totally clean break after a couple weeks of cleaning up your diet: drop the crappy foods, the processed sh’t, everything. You’re addicted to the garbage you eat, so you’re going to crave it. Food is fuel, and nothing more … Drink lots of water. Eat clean, and eat big. Try the T-Dawg diet (which I love) – search for ‘T-Dawg diet’ and it’ll pop right up. You won’t feel great for a couple weeks (from cravings, etc), but it’ll become habit, and soon you won’t imagine eating any different.

4

Well,
Though not the best route, you could always treat yourself. You know, eat clean all week and have that tasty meal on the weekend. But I tell ya, if you can eat clean all week and do it for at least a month, you’d be surprised in the difference you feel in yourself. Best thing I can tellya is to just find that one thing that makes you capable of stickin to your program.

5

Howwould you expect others to help you with your self control issues.
If your health means so little to you, do you have anyone or anything else that you could focus on?
At the end of the day, maybe you should just go talk to someone. These are usually deep seated issues and actually have less to do with food than other emotional issues.
I wish you luck. It’s tough, but not impossible. Don’t focus on perfection, just do your best to put yourself in the best position you can to succeed.
When you falter, jump right back up and start again, and again, and again…

Or give up and try and set a record. The balls in your court

6

The only thing that keeps me from binging on huge burritos or fast food is to have good, clean, healthy food ready to eat at all times.

For example, if I don’t pack a clean lunch, I will get a huge plate of chinese food from the food court instead of getting a sandwich or something.

I believe it was Dr. Berardi had a tip a while back about a Sunday Ritual. Basically, prepare every meal you will be eating for the whole week. This way you can just grab your meals from the fridge and eat them, and not even think about hitting the pizza buffet for lunch.

This is not easy. I am still working on it myself.

Keep thinking about your ultimate goals and stay strong.

Good luck- for both of us

Jeff

7

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. I guess I just needed a little encouragement.

Thanks

8

I’ll give you one tip real quick:

Find a “silver bullet” food. That is, find something that is healthy AND you love to eat. For me this is canned chicken. Call me weird but I freaking love canned chicken. No carbs, 25grams of protein and 2.5 grams of fat. I used to pound down 4 of them in a day before my taste buds adjusted to healthier food.

The bottom line is, try to find at least one food that is healthy and delicious and start replacing the pizza and ice cream with that. Soon you will have two or three meals that you love. The bottom line is that your tastebuds have been conditioned to like shitty food for so long, you are just going to have to wean yourself of that. It’s not going to be easy but think of the results you will get!

9

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=508772

10

Another thing to try- clean up one meal at a time. Don’t make it all or nothing, decide ‘This week I will eat a healthy breakfast/lunch/dinner’ and stick to it. Then slowly expand the healthy meals until they are the majority.

The fat/salt and fat/sugar combinations are really addictive and you can either go cold turkey or wean yourself off them, depends on which one works for you.

Either way, so you stuff up lunch? Doesn’t mean that you should give up on eating a healthy dinner.

11

Let me see if I can help out.

One behavior that may help is to alter your expectations of the process. What I mean is this:

Instead of waking up and saying “Ok, today is the day that I’m going to quit,” try thinking “Today is going to totally suck because I’m going to go the whole day without smoking. I’m going to be stressed, irritable, and generally in a pissy mood, so I better do whatever I can to set up an environment where I can get through this.”

The above statement is made with this realization in mind: any time you make decisions that forfeit immediate gratification for long term gain (growth, health, well being, prosperity, etc), it’s gonna suck short term. Don’t expect anything different, because if you do, you’ll be fooling yourself. On a 1-10 scale of suckiness, gear up for a 10. Hopefully the reality will be a 7 instead, but plan for a 10.

Along with the above tactic, have a conversation like this with yourself: "HogLover (sorry, I don’t know your real name), every day for the past 7 years, you’ve done “xyz” and it’s obviously not taking me where I need to go. Therefore, I need to do something-anything- different, if I expect a different result.

Also remember day one is the hardest. Followed by day two. And so on and so forth. Make a committment to yourself to have ONE PERFECT DAY. Why not do this, and then write back and let us know how it went?

Hope that helps you out…

[quote]HogLover wrote:
…with myself! I must have the worst self control ever. Food seems to be like a drug to me. Like somone trying to stop smoking, they say to themselves everyday, “Ok, today is the day that I’m going to quit,” but by the end of the day they’ve smoked half a pack. I’m that way with food it seems like. I know that eating the wrong thing or too much of it will make me fat. I know that eating the wrong thing will cause me health problems down the line. I know that if I don’t get control of it then I’ll find myself spiraling out of control. But it never seems to fail that I always do exactly opposite of what I know to do.

For instance, I’ll tell myself at the beginning of the day, “Ok, I’m going to eat healthy today at lunch,” but what happens at lunch? I eat a pizza buffet of a cheeseburger.

HOW DO I GAIN CONTROL!!! How do I do what I know to do? Why can’t I tell myself no and stay away from the bad foods?

HELP!!![/quote]

12

This is hard for me because my wife does not like a lot of things that are healthy like yogurt and fish; and she will get angry that I am doing something for myself and not considering everyone else. It’s hard to argue that my getting in shape is for everyone else :slight_smile: I used one of the nutrition plans like from Men’s Health and it had menus and grocery lists and suddenly my grocery bill increased about 35% over the course of two weeks, and she got torqued over that until I demonstrated that I was no longer spending $10-15 on [unhealthy!] lunch, even so having her slowly come over to this way of thinking has taken six months and is still reshaping into a better diet for everyone in my house.

So at the end of that monologue I would suggest something similar to the ‘Sunday’ recommendation and plan, plan, plan everything. Go to the store with a list of items, checked for quality, and get nothing else. Replace the junk food and snack-y items with dried fruits and additional vegetables and healthier items. It’s not easy even without outside influences, but being disciplined is part of being man.

13

all the above is good advice.

keep a food log

set a one week goal of eating clean

Give yourself one cheat meal a week

keep a picture of yourself as motivation to look at whenever you feel the need to eat bad food

Keep your goal written down and visable to look at also during the hard times

make healthy food that you like and make it tasty. Healthy food can taste every bit as good as junk food

tell EVERYONE your plan so that you feel you need to follow through so they know you’re not talking crap

The best motivation is results. If you stick to it and see results, you’ll never want to go back to the unhealthy lifestyle again.

14

Sorry Dude, but your wife doesn’t seem very supportive of you. If you wanna do this, you’ll need all the support you can get, family, friends, wife etc…

Wasn’t there an article on Blood Sucking Vampires…??? Something to that effect.

No offence intended. But you gotta surround yourself with positive people.

15

Good advice, Charles! I never know how to advise anybody with emotional eating issues. Guess there’s a reason you’re a professional.

16

Thanks JS: Actually I’m as lazy as anyone else…this is just the stuff that works for me personally. I do believe success is not primarily a matter of genetics (i.e., your general disposition) but rather your habits.

[quote]jsbrook wrote:
Good advice, Charles! I never know how to advise anybody with emotional eating issues. Guess there’s a reason you’re a professional.[/quote]

17

Thanks Charles for your input (and everyone else). I’ll be sure to take all these suggestions to heart and try to implement a few of them.

[quote]Charles Staley wrote:
Let me see if I can help out.

One behavior that may help is to alter your expectations of the process. What I mean is this:

Instead of waking up and saying “Ok, today is the day that I’m going to quit,” try thinking “Today is going to totally suck because I’m going to go the whole day without smoking. I’m going to be stressed, irritable, and generally in a pissy mood, so I better do whatever I can to set up an environment where I can get through this.”

The above statement is made with this realization in mind: any time you make decisions that forfeit immediate gratification for long term gain (growth, health, well being, prosperity, etc), it’s gonna suck short term. Don’t expect anything different, because if you do, you’ll be fooling yourself. On a 1-10 scale of suckiness, gear up for a 10. Hopefully the reality will be a 7 instead, but plan for a 10.

Along with the above tactic, have a conversation like this with yourself: "HogLover (sorry, I don’t know your real name), every day for the past 7 years, you’ve done “xyz” and it’s obviously not taking me where I need to go. Therefore, I need to do something-anything- different, if I expect a different result.

Also remember day one is the hardest. Followed by day two. And so on and so forth. Make a committment to yourself to have ONE PERFECT DAY. Why not do this, and then write back and let us know how it went?

Hope that helps you out…

[/quote]

18

[quote]lostinthought wrote:
keep a food log
…
Keep your goal written down and visable to look at also during the hard times
…
tell EVERYONE your plan so that you feel you need to follow through so they know you’re not talking crap[/quote]

Yesterday you posted saying you wanted help. Maybe today went better with all the good advice you got, maybe it didn’t. Lets make sure tomorow is better. lostinthought had some good idea’s. Telling everyone what your goals are, is a huge motivator. Well, make us the EVERYONE. Tomorow, take a piece of paper and a pen with you everywhere you go. If it goes in your mouth, write it down. Post it tomorow night. Don’t forget, or say you’ll do it the next day, TOMOROW NIGHT. Then, Thursday, do the same thing. Impress us with what you ate, and show us that you really are serious about your self control. It’s not going to be easy, but show us exactly what your doing, we wont let you cheat, and we’ll help you make the improvements you need.

19

Yesterday I ate:

Lunch (got up too late for breakfast)

-2 Salmon steaks (indiv. wrapped from SAMS)
-brocolli
-diet soda or water

Dinner

-3 egg omellet (w/ cheese, turkey, spinach)
-Two slices whole wheat toast butter spread and strawberry preserves
-Diet soda and water

Snack

-1/2 to 3/4 cup fat free cottage cheese
-fistful of pecans
-1/4 of a chocolate chip cookie
-Water

20

Today I had:

Breakfast (6 a.m.)

  • 2 pancakes
  • Butter and syrup
  • 3 slices bacon
  • Diet Soda

Lunch

  • 6 inch Tuna sub on Honey Oat bread
  • Baked Sour Cream and Onion Lays
  • Diet Soda