The MakeMeThinner Support Forum

[nickieluv]

Well, I didn't post yesterday - I'm still here, still hanging in - but not doing well.

Wednesday I was 100% on program. Water, meals, the works. Then yesterday I was on my way to being just as good - and temptation was thrown in my path - or more accurately, the means to temptation was, and I curved my path to meet it.

My piano students mostly cancelled on Tuesday because of the holiday, but I did have one. His parents weren't home when he left to come over (he rides his bike) so he didn't have a check. Now, these people ALWAYS pay with a check. He showed up at my door yesterday after Little League practice with CASH. What does cash mean to me? Junk food.

Well, as of that moment I was off program. I spent the next hour and a half thinking of where I wanted to spend that money, and then feeling like a junkie, I strapped my baby in the car and went to Taco Bell AND McDonalds for my fix. Feeling bad about it the whole time, but moving forward anyway with my evil plan.

I'm going to counseling. This is just not normal diet-aversion behavior. It's not like I'm grabbing junk in the house that's easily available and derailing my progress. I'm searching it out and dreaming of it.

I heard a something on talk-radio today on the way home from work. The guy was talking about poverty, but it applies to me too, I think. He said that if you throw a poor man a ton of money, within a year or two he'll be poor again because he is BEHAVIORALLY PROGRAMMED to be poor. He doesn't know any other way, and he will unconsciously seek out that state of being because it is comfortable and familiar and safe for him.

That really got to me. I'm behaviorally programmed to be fat. Everything in my life from early childhood on has set me up to be fat - all my behaviors regarding food. I was able to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it. Food was most definitely a reward for good grades, birthdays, special occasions. Food was part of how my Dad and I bonded - he managed a grocery store and would always bring home some treat every night for us to share in front of the television. My favorite thing to do was read, not get out and play actively - and whenever I read, I had a bag of chips or cookies or something by my side and I ate mindlessly, often the entire package.

So with all this, how can I think it's as simple as trying this or that diet, setting up non-food rewards for weight lost, just quickly making a change? If I woke up thin tomorrow, I'd still have all these behaviors and habits, and within a year I'd be huge again.

I know part of the point of Medifast is to train yourself to eat smaller meals more frequently, and view food as fuel rather than indulgence - but I keep thinking "when I finish this diet I can eat normally again." Which is true - but what I think is normal is most definitely NOT normal. I don't even know how to begin to eat and think and act like a thin person. What are the behaviors that characterize thinness? I don't even have any thin relatives or friends that I can talk to and ask.

So please - and I'm going to post this on another board, too, not just my journal, to get some discussion going - does anyone out there have an answer? What are normal food behaviors? What changes do I really need to make so that I don't regain this weight, once I lose it? Because I WILL lose it - I just need a lot more help and a lot more guidance than I thought at first. It's not as easy as just sticking to Medifast - I need to deal with a whole bunch of things, I think.

I've talked about my other emotional issues before, keeping me from losing weight, so I won't go back into them now. I guess I just wanted to check in and say that I recognize I need professional help to stop these self-sabotaging and really, eventually if I don't fix them, self-destroying behaviors. I think I must have a lot of self-hatred just under the surface, and a LOT of fear, and while this forum is great, a licensed therapist it ain't - although there may be some on this board, I'm sure.

Has anyone else undergone counseling during their weight-loss journey, even for issues unrelated to weight (as I'm sure mine are too, at heart)? Has it helped your life? I remain generally skeptical of counseling, but I need to do something or I will keep breaking down and wrecking my body.

At some point I think this became rambling. Sorry. I'll go now.

[alpha femme]

i do therapy. i highly reccommend it, but you need to reaize that it is only as effective as you let it be. all addictions serve a dual purpose. therapy allows us to work on healing with an understanding of the root of the problem.

when you feel like you have no control over your behavior, that is a clear indicator that you should talk to someone. good luck. stay strong.

[VTGirlie]

I think you may find the counseling very helpful for some of the frustrations you mentioned!

I think most of us on this site have tried one thing or another until something clicks. I truly believe that the reason there are so many "successful" weight loss programs out there is that no two people are alike, and what works for one person may not work for another. Not only our bodies and metabolisms, but also our social and family cultures, our tastes, and our emotional programming.

For me this program works because it is taking the hard "thought" work out of what I can eat. I feel too successful on the program to blow it, and after a few days on plan I was able (mind you, for the first time in my life!) to actually say no to foods that I love! Not only that, but I have quit enabling other people who I love to have unhealthy eating habits.

It may be that this plan isn't the right one for you. Or maybe it isn't the right time in your life. For many people it takes a serious wake-up call to get serious about their bodies and health. For me, it was watching my children become overweight.

Obviously, the more importance and significance we attach to food, the harder it is to remove the things that aren't good for us from our diets. For some people, removing chocolate chip cookies is tantamount to erasing the best memories of their grandma from their mind. In this, counseling can definitely help create a boundary between the emotion and the food. As for being ready to lose the weight, only you can decide when it is your time and what is right for you.

There is a book I have been reading called "intuitive eating", which is not really workable in many ways with the MF program, but it is sort of "post-weight loss" training manual for me- learning not to overwhelm myself about what is or isn't allowed and how to enjoy the things I like in moderation without binging.

I hope this has been helpful. I know how hard it can be- I think for many of us food is just as serious an addiciton as alcohol and smoking is for others.

Believe in yourself, and know that when you are ready you'll be able to do this!

[DogMa]

Very well said, both of you. I think we're all here for some different reasons. I, too, always chose reading and more sedentary activities when I was growing up, but I rarely ate when I read. For me, the weight was caused by two things: a sedentary lifestyle, which I'm addressing; and emotional eating. Medifast has definitely helped with the latter, in that I've been learning to deal with my emotions rather than just eating my way through them.

My experience last weekend proved to me that it really IS working. In a very emotionally upsetting situation, when I normally would have turned to food - and lots of it - instead I dealt with my feelings by talking to my best friend and writing a letter expressing my feelings. And crying, lots of crying. But you know what? In the end, I felt BETTER instead of feeling like crap because of a binge.

It sounds like counseling is definitely in order, because the fast-food impulse seems more like a compulsion. It certainly couldn't hurt.

Good luck to you.

[MyFriendTT]

Hi. I'm 38 and have tried everything known to mankind for my emotional eating issues over the course of the last 20 years. Seriously, I've been in tons of therapy and done hypnotherapy, subliminal tapes, 12-step, new age programs, gone to numerous healers. You name it. Nothing worked for me.

I finally found something that has been working for me for the past 3 years. It is called the Solution (www dot thepathway dot org). It is a program that makes you feel your feelings and contain them, rather than going to your "external solution" of eating, shopping, smoking, drinking, whatever. The idea behind the Solution is that you do work to change your brain to favor balance instead of automatically using whatever you usually obsess about.

It is not an easy program since you have to go back to your past to heal issues from childhood. However, I can honestly say that all the hard work I have done with this program has been 100% worth it! I couldn't stay on a diet for longer than 3 or 4 days before. And these days, food is just food, not a friend to comfort me or a way to rebel.

And, all my old issues are GONE, especially resentment I had about my family. When I'm upset or stressed, I use my new skills and get myself back in balance. In the old days, I could end up binging for a week or more. And now, if I get off track, its usually no longer than once every 2 months or so, and I get back on top of things within a day.

It has changed my life. And its not like some bad mult-level marketing crap. I don't normally recommend programs to people, but your post really called to me...

I don't know if this is something you are looking for, or if you just wanted to vent. But, if you are interested, you can check out the website or feel free to PM me if you want to know more.

Take care,
TT

[Karli]

Hi nickieluv,

Are you still hanging around a little ? I have been thinking about you and wanting to know how you are doing. Have you looked into a therapist at all ? I do think it could be a good thing, and I really liked TT's suggestion. Just remember, no matter what, you have the final say in what happens.

Anyway, it would be great to hear from you, even if you just need to vent. Don't want you floating off into outter space without us .


Karli


ps- I have been meaning to ask you to consider taking down your "before" pictures from around your house. Have you done this already ?

[nickieluv]

Well, I'm still around. I posted a bit in my journal today, but I'm sort of reiterating things here because of the way this thread has gone - you have all been so helpful!!!

TT - I looked into that website. I liked what I saw, but it scared me too. I enrolled in the 5-day free e-course and it's explaining a lot more of what the program is about. It is definitely something I'm going to keep on hand to look into later on.

I haven't found a counselor yet - being out of work at the moment, I have to go through my husband's EAP and he's taken a few days off and so hasn't been able to get the number for me to call. It's been nice having him home, but I would like to get started with that. Although I'm kind of afraid of what I might find. You think that if something awful happened, you'd remember it, but part of me wonders if something bad happened to me and I just blocked it all out and this eating is a way to hide from it. So that's what I'm afraid of. Maybe I'm better off not knowing, in a way. But, I'm not going to let fear stop me. It might slow me down - but I'm determined that once I find a counselor, I'm going to bare all and try very hard to see what's going on inside my head.

Karli - funny you should mention about the pictures. I decided to take them all down, and my lists. I kept them, just elsewhere so I'm not confronted by them every moment, but I know where to find them. It just struck me this morning that having them around was enabling me to beat myself up on a regular basis. They were reinforcing my bad feelings about myself. So I have no pictures up right now.

I am leaving Medifast for now. I don't know if I'll be back on the program, but I will be back to check in every once in a while. I don't have a real "diet" plan. I'm going to try to eat only things I would agree to feed my daughter and feel good about feeding her. I'm going to try to have healthy snacks, and cut down my portions at mealtimes. I'm going to try to do some exercising. And I'm going to try not to weigh myself all the time, and use a loss as an excuse to stuff myself.

I'm going to post the remainder of my supplements on the swap boards, if anyone wants to check that out. Everyone here has given me really good information. I really wanted to be ready for this, and I thought I was, but I'm not. It's not right for me now. I think I have other things to work on than my weight. I need to focus on lifelong changes I can maintain - and I just can't see myself buying supplements for the rest of my life.

Oh, I don't know if any of the things I'm going to try to do are going to succeed. And I don't even know when I'm going to start trying them. I want to lose weight, but I guess not badly enough at the moment. What I really want is to have control over my behaviors with food, and to beat my food/sugar addiction. Maybe weight loss will follow while I'm conquering some other demons.

Well, thank you all for listening/reading and posting such great advice. I will stay in touch.

[DogMa]

Good luck to you, nickieluv. It really does sound like you're not in the right place for this, and it won't work until you're ready. I hope you find someone good to help you. (And if he's still off work, ask him to just call human resources - or maybe you could call - to get the number. You wouldn't need to give a name or anything.)