You will notice the lack of photos again this week. This is, once again, due to the lack of weight loss. I am frustrated and irritated, but oddly motivated as the body shape changes I wrote about yesterday keep reminding me that this is a long road and obviously something is working somehow. I am kicking myself, however, for introducing the number 12 as clearly it wanted to stick around!! I'm glad, on the other hand, that the number has stayed at consistently 12 as that means I am fully in the 12 stones! Woohoo!
In an effort to make this a better week (I am desperate to lose 6 lbs in the next three weeks, I can't begin to tell you) I am trying to look at all the differences that made this a 'maintenance' week and not a 'loss' week. I have come to the conclusion that maybe I am not eating enough. I have worked so hard to stop binge eating, and to make consistently healthy choices over eating crap that it didn't occur to me that maybe a lack of calories was causing the problem. When I have tried to starve myself in the past (let's face it, who hasn't?) it never got me anywhere. Genuinely, my body will not lose weight if I don't eat properly - sometimes even I have to accept that my body is not a faulty machine and it really does try to do its job if I will just let it. This last week I avoided bingeing to the best of my ability and I did really well. I ate healthily and I have increased my amount of exercise exponentially.
After stepping off the scales this morning and ruminating on things to improve for next week while I was making my breakfast, it occurred to me that for the last half of last week I had not eaten my usual fruit with my breakfast, as I had run out and hadn't remembered to go to the nice fruit shop to buy more until yesterday. I also realised that in the first half of the week I skipped eating the pasta I had brought with my veggie-laden spag bol sauce as it is the gluten-free/dairy-free/taste-free rubbish that smells like porridge, looks like papier mache and tastes, genuinely, like cardboard. Throw in the no-binge rule and the dramatic increase in exercise, and was my body trying to tell me something? So, I myfitnesspal-ed an average day in the life of my meals whilst simultaneously using a calorie calculator to work out how many calories I should be eating on a day to day basis. The calorie counter has three options: Maintenance cals, fat loss cals, extreme fat loss cals. Guess what? My daily eating calories came in under the extreme fat loss calorie amount :-(. The whole point of changing to a healthy lifestyle wasn't just about losing weight it was about becoming healthier in general. Forcing my body into starvation mode isn't making a healthy choice. I threw on a massive bag of popcorn (my current usual binge of choice) to see what happened and guess what? That 500+calories took my calorie consumption up to the fat loss calorie amount. Guess which weeks I have consistently lost weight against all my perceived odds? The weeks that I was binge eating. Seems like my body was trying to tell me something.
This leaves me in somewhat of a predicament with 6lbs to lose in 21 days. I don't like the cycle of binge eating. I don't think it is healthy at all. I can't see realistically where I can add in around 500 calories to my usual meals without throwing in mindless fat or food and I have worked so hard to get to a point where I am not eating mindlessly. I don't know what to do. My initial thought was to strap on my snow gear and hike over to the shops to buy 21 bags of popcorn with the intent of bingeing on one entire bag per day (and trying to maintain the will power to not eat the whole frigging lot of them in one go) - I even know when I would eat them, I would eat the whole lot in the time between getting back from work and eating dinner. That time and just after eating dinner are my usual binge craving time periods. But that is just faulty thinking, surely? Surely it can't be a good idea to deliberately plan to binge on crap just to try to lose weight???!! Have I actually lost my mind?! I'm getting to the stage now where I don't even want to binge eat any more. Psychologically my brain seems to have re-engaged and is telling me to stop eating or just telling me it isn't interested when I see what is usually a food that I would sell my own grandmother to eat 20 packets of. Yesterday, I was out in a cafe and I ate a piece of cake and went back for a scone with butter. I got half way through the scone, and was plowing on despite being full. My brain, all of a sudden said 'why are you still eating that when you are full?? Just put it down, and eat a bit more in a little while if you get hungry again'. Isn't what my brain said the normal way of thinking, the way that people who are not 12 stone 12 and stuck in a bingey trap think? Shouldn't I be encouraging this??!! Maybe my eating is so disordered that I can't even make my own way out of it any more.
So, I'm stuck this week. I guess I will just have to think about it today and see what happens. I want to make a couple of other changes - going back to decaffeinated drinks, reminding myself that I am lactose intolerant on a regular basis, upping the toning exercises - in the hopes that this will make a difference. GAHHHHH!!!!!!!
All suggestions welcome.
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