Avoid junk food temptations! Keep junk food out of your house!

It’s one of the most common dieting tips. Stock your refrigerator and pantry with healthy foods; clear your shelves of junk food and sugar. Remove the temptation and you will choose to (or have to) eat healthy food instead. This makes perfect sense right?

I was terrified to bring junk food such as heavenly hash ice cream, two-bite brownies or a family-sized bag of Cadbury Mini-Eggs into my kitchen. Ice cream would be gone within 24 hours; my husband was lucky to get a scoop. I’d eat a small bowl or two before breakfast and any other time of day I could scoop some in a bowl and wolf it down before anyone noticed.

Yes, I need to avoid junk food temptations. Junk food was not welcome in my house.

The annual wrench in my dieting effort (aka Christmas baking) increased my dread for the holiday season. I love baking gingerbread cookies, shortbread cookies and chocolate treats for presents and hostess gifts. But, I could not handle the temptation, I would eat my way through Christmas; I was lucky if I managed to keep some shortbread for New Year’s dinner.

I was approaching the three month mark in my cognitive therapy journey when Christmas rolled around. We were hosting four events: my son’s baptism, Christmas dinner, New Year’s Eve dinner and a family dinner. I baked more cookies than in previous years.

By some sort of miracle, I had lots of cookies for all the events. To my shock, I wasn’t even interested in eating the Christmas baking. Here and there I’d have a gingerbread man or piece of shortbread. Even with all the events and handmade gifts for friends, the cookies almost lasted until February.

Then something weird happened. I was feeling anxious; the hunting and obsessing about food started again. What was going on? I had baked and stored dozens of cookies for almost a month and a half; I managed to navigate a dieting minefield with ease. The temptation was gone, so why was I feeling anxious?

“I felt a sense of loss when all the Christmas baking was gone. Somehow I was comforted by having something sweet in the house. My anxiety increased significantly.” I told my therapist. “I think I need to have something sweet in the house.”

My therapist and I discussed this discovery. For months, I repeated my mantra, “I can eat it if I really want it. I can have more, buy more and make more if I really want it.” It took time and many bowls of granola for my subconscious to actually believe it. But when there was nothing left, (no cookies, no nothing) I was back in diet land: avoid junk food temptation; keep junk food out of your house! Instead avoiding temptation, removing all junk food simply made me crave it even more.

We came up with a plan to experiment with “bad” (or restricted) foods. I did what every magazine article tells you to not do; I brought junk food back into the house. One “bad” food at a time, I brought ice cream, Oreos, brownies and mini cupcakes to see what would happen.

My anxiety level decreased; I was, in fact, comforted by having some sort of treat/sweet food in the house. I could easily ignore ice cream, chips and crackers. With super sweet stuff like Oreos, brownies and mini cupcakes, I experienced mixed results. Sometimes I would forget about the box of Oreos on my pantry shelf, other times I’d eat an entire row of cookies in one sitting.

I brought in new foods such as Nonnis’ biscotti, a tasty treat, but I didn’t covet this food like I do with Oreos.  Sweets without the dieting baggage are the perfect comfort for me. I rarely crave eating the light, crunchy cookies. And when I make the positive choice to eat a biscotti, I eat it slowly (intuitive eating style) so I can enjoy the flavor and texture.

So now I do the exact opposite of dieting convention: I always ensure that I have something sweet (like the biscotti) in my house, sharing shelf space with the healthy foods. I discovered that even if tempting foods are physically removed from my house, this physical hurdle did not quell the psychological temptation. I wanted what I couldn’t have; increasing anxiety and cravings.

Note: I’m not suggesting that you start bringing your restricted foods back into your house. I believe that you need to do what works for you. That may mean keeping the most tempting foods at the store. I had the benefit of making this discovery with help from my therapist and the cognitive behaviour therapy process.  

Next post: Do I bring Oreos and other foods with dieting baggage into my house?

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.

The problem with bad foods

Eat normally, snack horribly.

For years I’ve known that I eat proper meals (balanced meal of protein, bread and vegetables), but I snack horribly. After reviewing a weeks’ worth of my eating patterns, my therapist agreed that I ate well balanced, normal meals, three times a day (thanks Mom for implanting this into my DNA). However, I also experienced both objective and subjective eating.

In basic terms, objective eating is eating a large quantity of food (example: eating a box of granola) and subjective eating is when you perceive yourself as eating a large quantity of food (example: eating two bowls of granola). Both types of eating are accompanied by feelings of loss of control.

I know I’m not the only one with a list of good and bad foods. The problem with labelling food as "bad" is that is human nature to want the something you can’t have. So a perfectly natural reaction to a bad food is to want it even more, developing wicked cravings. Over the years, cravings for bad food increased and my ability to resist those temptations decreased.

I couldn’t win: resist bad foods and I’d crave it more. Giving in to bad foods and I’d have feelings of guilt and shame: guilt for eating a bad food and shame that I was not strong enough, or in control enough to resist. No matter what I was doing, resisting or giving in to a bad food, my anxiety level increased. Anxiety makes you hungry; making it even more difficult to resist and perpetuating an endless cycle.

Limiting myself to a small portion perpetuates the same problem (say no to more, you want more even more). Wanting more but denying more increased cravings resulting in more anxiety and hunger.

I now tell myself:

• I can eat it if I really want to.
• I can have/buy/make more if I really need it.

Over time, knowing this and practicing this helped to decrease my obsession and cravings. Looking back, I estimate that this process took approximately three months, six therapy sessions and countless assurances from my therapist that eating bad foods or any foods in certain quantities of food was not as bad as I thought (such as a eating a whole box of Kraft Dinner)for my cravings to decrease.

In practice, if I decided that I really needed more (let’s say another bowl of granola), I would try to delay or distract myself with some other type of activity before consuming another bowl of granola.

 

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.”