How do I lose weight & eat what ever I want?

Eat whatever you want. Eat whatever I want. Eat whatever I want?

How on earth will I ever take off this weight? I’ll always want to eat three bowls of granola for breakfast.

Then something happened in November. Instead of choosing granola for breakfast, I decided to have a bowl of Wheetabix. Wow - didn’t see that coming. Once I let go of what I could eat and couldn’t eat, the cravings for unhealthy foods declined.

“I’m ready to choose healthier foods,” I said to my therapist in January after two months of feeling liberated from the cravings, the confusion, and the struggle. “Great!” she answered enthusiastically. She must have known that I would eventually come to this conclusion.

I was surprised by her reply. I thought that in order to keep cravings and food obsession to a minimum that I would need to eat all the junk food in binge quantities that I desired. This, of course, would mean that I would always be overweight.

When I asked her how I actually lose weight, she said that many of her clients lose weight naturally since they eat smaller quantities and choose better foods. So from January until May, I started making healthier choices. But, from my clothes (and later confirmed when I actually weighed myself in March) I could tell that my weight was fluctuating, but not really go down (or up).

It took me eight months of thinking to figure it out.

Before therapy, I believed that in order to lose weight, I must be on a structured diet with strict rules and guidelines. I must count every calorie or point, meticulously plan every spoonful of food that went into my mouth and write everything down in order to control my eating. But I knew that this approach didn’t work (weight loss was never permanent) and is a big reason why food and weight is such an issue for me now.

I need to diet without a diet.

However, it’s not a diet. It’s a concept, a philosophy: eat healthy and if possible in smaller quantities. Vague, I know. Like something a doctor or a well-intended friend would say. It may not be a quick way to lose weight, but I think this is the only way to stay sane. And with 110 pounds to lose, I have to be in it for the long run.

MB, a like-minded blogger posted on her blog this morning her reasons for joining an online Slimmer this Summer challenge. One of the coordinating bloggers was curious as to why MB (as a no rule dieter) would choose to join a weight loss challenge with a set of rules. Her response sums up how I’m feeling right now about a structured diet.

After a few weeks of actively attempting to lose weight and reading MB’s posting, I realize that there are some rules that I’m following:

- No food journaling

- Flexible meal planning is helpful; meticulous meal planning is not

- Drink water as much as possible

- No food is considered off-limits, no quantity is too much

- Eat three balanced meals a day with reasonable portion sizes

- Eat three healthy snacks in between meals

- Eat every three hours

- Indulge in the occasional unhealthier food choice

- Choose the healthier food option as much as possible

- Choose smaller portions when possible

- Tackle cravings using the distract and delay technique

- Sign up for, train and complete 5K run

- Blog as much as possible

In any case, with or without Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, you have to do what works for you.

Eat whatever you want?

“Eat whatever you want. No foods are restricted and you can have as much as you want.”

My heart sank when my therapist said this to me. I assumed that at some point after therapy that I would be able to go back to Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig and lose my weight. After all, chapter 5 of the Beck Diet Solution is called, “Pick Two Reasonable Diets.” I figured face-to-face therapy would work the same way.

Immediately I considered amending my original plan (step 1: reprogram thinking; step 2: lose weight) to (step 1: lose weight; step 2: reprogram thinking). The only problem is that dieting had become an impossible task. Every minute of a dieting day is difficult and angst-ridden. I had been down this road before with intuitive eating and frankly the idea of no structure scared the hell out of me.

And then she added: “But, you must write down what you want to eat first.” Well, I thought. At least there is some sort of structure.

Here were my guidelines:

• Prepare a meal plan for the day.

• Include details such as portion size and number of helpings.

• No foods are off-limits as long as I write it down in the meal plan first.

• If I want to eat something that is not in the meal plan, I had to plan that food or additional helping into a future meal.

• Plan my meals the day before, or any time during the day.

I already found meal planning and journaling difficult, so my first week was challenging. Even though I could plan to eat whatever I wanted, I remained paralysed from making food choices. So, with the help of my therapist, we planned a few days of meals together. I allowed for reasonable portion sizes and planned for a good mix of healthy and not-as-healthy snacks and balanced meals.

As for following my own meal plan, it went fairly well. Sometimes I found that I wanted an additional helping of something (let’s say granola) that was not planned for. The need for more granola would grow, and become focused; the only way to satisfy this need was to give in and eat the additional helping of granola. That is when I learned that the need, the feeling I was experiencing was anxiety. Anxiety from 20 years of dieting telling me that granola is bad for me. That I shouldn’t be eating one bowl of granola, let alone two or three bowls.

I asked my therapist: “What do I do to handle the anxiety? How do I make it go away?”
 
She replied: “You have to learn to sit with it. It will pass.”