Eating when you're hungry theory

Hi everyone! I know I haven't been posting, but I've been lurking and reading what everyone has to say about eating habits and diets. I'm just not sure about anything I've been reading. If I wait until I am hungry to eat, I will more than likely eat too fast and dump. If I eat 3 healthy, decent sized meals a day, I feel much more satisfied, and my weight doesn't go up. To me, healthy is a little bit of everything---good carbs, fats, proteins, veggie/fruit. We CANNOT diet. Diets fail. How long can you do beans and beef jerky? It's not balanced. At the beginning, when we were all at our thinnist, we could not sustain on what we were eating, so eventually we had to add more to our eating plans. When I was at my thinnest, I sustained on half a cup of cottage cheese and half a cup of yogurt all day. I feel that what we need is a plan we can stick to FOR LIFE. That is the only way we can benefit from our WLS. Take your vitamins. Eat 3 healthy, decent meals a day. Exercise. Drink your water. Every once in a while, eat a spoonful or 2 of dessert. When you want to reward yourself, go out and buy yourself a pair of earrings or something. Most important, enjoy life. Your family. Your kids. Your friends. Eat healthy. That's my philosophy and I'm sticking to it. What's yours? Joanie

I agree with you Joanie, I'm trying very hard to stick to the no eating in between meals. sometimes I actually do it! but the key is that i'm thinking about the no eating in between meals and i'm trying. i'm putting the thought into what i'm going to eat for each day. whew. I'm on vacation. I'm heading to NH to stay for a week with my mother while my sister the saint is away on a golfing vacation. she deserves it! Mom is doing fantastic after having the pace maker installed. what a difference. she is still 88 that is one thing that will not go away! and she is slower now too. but since the pace maker she has gotten some of her get up and go back. we have plans to go to lunch, visit a light house, do some shopping. one day i need to take her to her heart doctor so they can check the pace maker. it will be a nice week. i will also need another week at home to relax and rest from this vacation! but that is not going to happen! I have planned what I will have for snacks and the things that i will eat when we are at their home. i've also got a plan for what i will eat when we go out. so i'm thinking!

Have a very wonderful and relaxing time. See...thinking ahead is a good thing! Joanie

Hi Joanie, here's what intrigues me most about your post - I need to ask you to connect this very wonderful, healthy lifestyle to the way you were eating and living before you had your surgery. I don't recall where you came from so catch me up. What was your weight just prior to having surgery? How long had you been obese? What were your co-morbidities? Was there a psychological/emotional aspect to your eating pathology? These are important questions because this current post suggests that you have indeed embraced that which we all aspire to in terms of living a healthy life in all regards, physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual - it would seem that you have nailed it and, if this is true, I absolute applaud and commend you, and I hope to achieve what you've achieved as well. But I struggle, every day with my ghosts, my demons that have plagued me my entire life. There was a period of time, probably about a year and a half, post-surgery, that I was convinced that I had slayed the dragons. I was working out with a fever, and movement was a miracle for me every day. That's not so much true for me now, I've lost that edge, although I do very much still enjoy my mobility, something I simply did not have as a 370 lb. woman. So, I would ask that you connect your life today, the way you are eating and living, to the way you ate and lived pre-surgery and tell me this - have you really truly slayed your dragons? By the way, I visited your profile page, and your photos are just beautiful - you are a beautiful, slim, fit, healthy woman - you should be so very proud. Keep posting because we need you very much. Maureen

At my top weight, I was 220, then gained 20 to qualify for my insurance paying for the surgery. I never felt I had any true food addictions, however, I could never tell if I was full. Since I do like to eat, I would just keep on eating. Four years before my surgery, my marriage of 20 years broke up, I got a new job, moved to another state, took my daughter, and basically left with the clothes on my back. I struggled. I ate cheaply but not well. I come from a family of big eaters and big dieters. I am just so tired of the diet thing. I just want to eat healthy. I eat low fat, low sugar, high protein. I eat carbs. Sometimes not the good ones, either. For lunch today, I had fat free bologna and mustard on multi grain weigh****chers bread. I had a 100 calorie bag of veggie chips. Then I had a 100 calorie Hostess cinnamon streusel coffee cake. In a half hour or so, I'll have my coffee...black with sweet n low. For me, this is a typical lunch. Sometimes in the afternoon before I go home I have a south beach high protein bar. 140 calories and 10 grams of protein. By the time I get home, and get dinner ready, it's 6:30 or 7. I like my veggies and salad. My weakness, as I said, is olives. Yes, they are low in calories, but I have to really watch my intake because of the sodium content. The beauty of it for me now is that I know when I am full. I never knew what that felt like before. Now, with the help of this surgery, I do. I stop when I'm full. Some days I definately eat more than others. No, I have not entirely slayed my dragons. They are still alive and always will be. I have to watch....everything. But...as they say in rehab....one day at a time. The war is not yet won. But I am taking it one battle at a time. Love ya! Joanie

Hiya Joanie, I hear where you are comming from and you are absolutely right. THe way you eat is healthiest. Everyone is different though. For me it would be SOOOO hard for me to eat in the morning because it just sets off my appetite to voratious levels. Like I mentioned...we are all so different. For me if I skip breakfast (have my decaf of course) I am not as hungry around lunch time. Or if I am its real hunger and not cravings (which I have right after I eat breakfast up to lunch) strange but true. When lunch rolls around I'm not ravenous...just hungry and I'll have soup or my beans (I just happen to LOVE refried beans but don't live off them all the time and find them very filling) and beef jerkey, for me, is a much better treat when I am hungry then grabbing potato chips. Yeah I could grab carrots but I'll be honest... I dont WANT carrots and if I ate them... it would go insane thinking...Im not sastifeid I want something else and unfortunately ... thats my demon to conqure. So I like beef jerky, or maybe some sugar free peanut butter in lieu of beef jerky. Something protein in nature is more filling to me than veggies. Veggies I can eat when I'm (not) hungry to get in my vitamins( food wise) I take chewable vitamins every day, along with iron. When I gain and start to feel out of control, i go back to the very basics...whether you want to call that a diet or not is a personal choice. I just call it going back to the basics to be safe. For me that just means starting off small (small amounts of food) I usually do that for about 3 days as a starting point then gradually add food. It shrinks my stomach and gets my body use to not eating so much sugar. Its a 3 day cold turkey thing of sorts and those 1st three days is so hard, but afterwords its not so bad and its what works for me...maybe not everyone. To gradually stop is something I just cant get the hang of. I was 338 before weight loss surgery. I had a year (now 3) to understand how my addictions roll... its not that i will be eating beans and beef jerky forever 'smile' although I do like them... its just what i was choosing to eat in the start (my first 3 days really) and its worked for me. I dropped 7 pounds in my first week. I also eat low fat cheese and protein bars once in awhile and natural (sugar free) peanut butter, and veggies. They also make low sugar apple juice now! I have about half a cup of that. I also eat soups. I know though, beans and beef jerky will always be in my life because I like them. and they are ok. although beef jerky has alot of salt and you have to be careful. refried beans has fat so I switch between normal whole beans and refried. ANYWAY... I guess my long winded point is that I wasn't meaning to say to live off beans and beef jerky, I was just listing my food that I was personally choosing. No one can eat that stuff forever, didn't mean it to sound that way. Nah, I also had soup (healthy choice italian wedding) and also chicken tortillla etc... different flavors. My choice is to cut out bread and sugar. For me if I eat evey 12 grain holy art though healthy bread...its still bread and ignites this mean nasty voratious hunger demon inside of me that screams MORE BREAD! anyway...I vowed recently just to stay away from all bread and sugar... sugar being cakes; candy; sweet treats; bready things; pastry; doughnuts. i will have some fruit but not much because that also sets off my hunger. I also found that when I cut out all bread and sugar from my diet my complection is soooo much better as well. I have to just be careful I take my multi vitamins and check my blood levels. Usually my diet is pretty balanced because my carbs come from milk or yogurt (Sugar free). well...not the milk. So i guess theres my sugar fitday is a good place to see how balanced your meals are. i usually use that to double check. anyway hope that cleared some things up

Joanie raises another issues that is certainly resonating with me lately; that is the question of personal life cir****tances and how they impact how we are able to take care of ourselves. If we are living a life that is fraught with personal sadness and emotional pain for whatever our cir****tances (in Joanie's case, her cir****tances were so painful, she left her husband with a child and barely anything other than the clothes on her back to start a new life in a new state) - now she sounds very happy, content, with a man whom she loves and who loves her equally. Her daughter is grown, well adjusted, doing well. Joanie has found peace. It is far easier to take good care of ourselves when our lives are not in constant and painful turmoil - or is it? I am supposing it is. Also, I believe where we came from - how much weight we carried and for how long before surgery - has a lot to do with the struggles we face now as we try to maintain the weight we've lost. I am not suggesting that the bigger we were, the harder it is now...I am suggesting, however, that the more obese we were (in my case, super-morbidly obese for my entire adult life) chances are, the more severe the emotional and psychological burden was - and is - associated with that kind of disability. It's a lovely philosophy to say: ENJOY LIFE. We all should. YOUR FAMILY. Some of us don't have family. YOUR KIDS. Some of us don't have kids. YOUR FRIENDS. Some of us don't have friends. Truly. EAT HEALTHY. We ALL can and MUST do this. Because the one element missing from Joanie's philosophy (although it's implied rather than stated) is: ENJOY LIFE BEGINNING WITH YOURSELF. ENJOY YOURSELF!!! There is no one better equipped to take you on the fullest ride than yourself! Ok, back to work. Love you guys, Maureen

Oh yeah, stress and what you are going through always affects your eating habits. One quote I never forget... "When you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, it shows on the scale!" So true. Whenever we have to carry other people and care for them and worry about them we tend to loose sight of ourselves. The more we care for others, the less time we have for ourselves. That is such a hard thing to balance. WHere we come in and where we just have to make sacrafices. After all, if we can't care for ourselves we won't BE healthy enough to care for others anyway. I try to keep that in mind with my kids. I think to myself, how much better will it be if I'm healthier. I can take better care of my kids. it helps keep things in perspective.