Bad habits revelation

I've just had a bit of an epiphany whilst writing a comment on Mary's latest blog. Not a life changing ephiphany or a great revelation of how to move forward and achieve super powers and save the world from all its ills...more like an..."oh my gosh what were you thinking" kind of epiphany. An "oh my gosh I'm glad I got over that quickly" kind of epiphany.

I don't know why I thought it was a good idea, but through the months of May, June and into early July (When it became physically unsustainable and I started bingeing on everything in sight instead) I live in a cycle of starving myself through the week and bingeing at the weekend. A typical week day looked like this;

I would show you a typical weekend too, except that I didn't log the weekends. It was too shameful. But it was ok, because my calorie intake was so low throughout the week that bingeing brought my overall weekly calories into line with my BMR...I didn't need to eat all my calories every day, weight loss is (still is now) about total accumulative calorie deficit, not a single day. You don't have a bad day and wake up ten stone heavier, after all.

But obviously I was taking this to the extreme, and for some God forsaken reason I thought this was ok.

What you see there is not exactly the entire truth, however. I would regularly just not eat lunch, and we'd have very low calorie dinners, but what you don't see is that because I didn't want to post it up for the world to see is the massive bag of crisps and bar of chocolate I ate before dinner because I was physically too weak to stand and cook it otherwise. Even on the days when I had lunch it didn't matter because that lunch consisted of a bowl of noodles..or a repeat of breakfast.

To make myself feel better about all this, I've included kitties

Being on MFP people did sniff me out a bit...an acquaintence messaged me saying she was concerned, looking at my diary...my first reaction was to make it private, I was appalled. I didn't know her, how dare she comment on my diary...I was loosing the weight, what did it matter? I was sick of yo-yoing up and down and after weighing in heavier than ever with the dietician I'd taken these drastic steps to cut it out, and it was working (technically). I wrote her a lovely reply telling her not to worry, I'd been out and about a lot (lies, I'd been sat on my arse at home wallowing in self pity and doing not an awful lot of anything much) and just had been much too busy to write up my diary, but I assured her that I was in fact eating more than 700 calories a day (more like 1400 if you add in the shit, still not much though is it considering my goal was another 1000 on top of that) and thanks for her concern, yes indeed I do love bran flakes they are delicious.

I knew it wasn't healthy as such and having been on MFP for 9 months when I started eating that way I knew what it was I was doing wrong and why it was that it was wrong...but I'd also read alot about how seriously obese people such as myself could get away with being on a very low calorie diet and still loose consistently without doing damage to themselves because of the sheer ammount of fat they have stored away.

What I failed to remind myself was that after my weekend binges I wasn't on a very low calorie diet, I was on a middling number of calories diet, and those diets had all been supervised by professionals and did not consist of bran flakes, packet noodles, crisps, chocolate, and a ton or so of pasta on an evening with a weekend of pizza and roasts and all sorts.

What I'm eating now after having floundered my way through Summer not particularly thinking about what I should be eating for the sake of weight loss or health is a whole different kettle of fish. I mean, I actually get my five a day through the week...not so much through the weekend but I'm working on that! I never skip a meal, and feel like shit if I skip my mid afternoon piece of fruit. Not only am I loosing the weight, but I'm loosing more than I did on my stupid stupid starve-binge diet and I don't feel deprived. I no longer have a ban on bread in the house...we have loaves of wholemeal (yes, wholemeal) bread in and I don't feel the need to eat the whole damn thing in one sitting as toast because I'm fulfilling my bodies requirements by eating healthy, wholesome food.

In a way I should have known I was setting myself up to fail. You hear it all the time, womens stories about how they yo-yo'ed and starved themselves but put the weight back on. I have to be honest I took them for fools who couldn't control themselves or took it too far or lost the weight then didn't have the brains to adjust their diets to keep the weight off. Heh. Look who's talking, right?

But it wasn't till just now that I realised what an idiot I was being. I used to be of the "a calorie is a calorie" school of thought and "yeah right like eating every two hours is going to make a blind bit of difference" and "why bother with fruit and veg when all I want to do is be skinny, I'll sort that out when I get there". Actually, it really has made all the difference to be eating this way. I'm not going to pretend that having spoken about it I don't really really want a nice big packet of munchy salty crisps, but it's not the same feeling as before; it's more of a "hmmm, yeah, that'd be nice to indulge in" as opposed to "holy shit I will keel over and die if I do not feast upon this right now".

So yeah. I hold my hand up and say that despite the fact that I knew much better I was one of those people who tried to starve the weight off, and starve enough to allow for mega silly meals at the weekend. But at least I'm much better now. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think it's the WW that's done it for me. I don't fret about spending calories on extra salad or having an apple if I feel peckish...that said when I've lost enough as to be finding it difficult to loose and my weight is being stationary I will probably look back into the counting the calories. I'll just have a healtheir insight into how food works for me when I do.

I will now end this rant with more kitties, because they make me feel better (even if they are secretly mocking me :o )