The Loser's Bench
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Avoiding Emotional Eating December 28, 2008 4:04 am Do you engage in Emotional Eating? I know that have. That's part of got me to the point that I need WLS to get my life back. Much to my distress ... pardon the pun... I have found that now that they honeymoon period is over and on top of that some serious stresses have landed square on my shoulders, I have found myself engaging in Emotional Eating. I define Emotional Eating as eating to soothe or comfort myself, instead of eating to fuel my body or quell true hunger. I find that often if I'm engaging in emotional eating, I feel out of control. I often am not waiting until a planned meal and that I'm not following 'the rules' ... I generally will partake of something that is higher fat and higher carb, and it's usually not high protien. So.... what to do?
1 comment | Leave a comment.I realized that I need to do some things to protect me from me... - Review my list of reasons for losing weight and maintaining the loss. This sounds simple and even silly, but I find that my reasons for doing this in the first place, along with a before photo can be very powerful. - Determine if I'm 'hungry'... physically hungry, or having a craving... - Try distraction ... I have found that often if I can distract myself for at least 15 minutes with another activity that the craving will subside. I have a list of distraction activities and refer to it. If I'm going to to eat, then... - Plan what and when I'm going to eat. - Eat at the table... even if I deviate from my planned eating, I find that I'm more mindful if I put whatever 'it' is on plate and sit down at the table to have it. - Eat protien first... even if I am going to indulge, if I have protien first, I find that I don't do as much damage. So... Did you or do you have issues with Emotional Eating. If so, how do you tackle them?
2008 Holiday Get Together Was... December 6, 2008 11:59 pm Yesterday we had the Raleigh Area Holiday Party. LauraP ... not seen nearly as often as we'd like ... was incredibly gracious and offered her office conference room as a location for the party. We shared a number of WLS friendly dishes as we all enjoyed a lovely pot luck. There were sooo many goodies, but here are a few standouts that I enjoyed... Dalton's Bar-b-que Meatballs Susan's Tabouleh with lentils Judy's fabulous chicken chili Laura's lima beans There were so many others, but unfortunately there were so many choices and so little pouch room... We had a wonderful time sharing tips, challenges and successes. It was great to see some that we hadn't seen in a while and look forward to seeing more in the new year. We will be having more get togethers in the new year and while we will continue the monthly General Support group meetings, we'll also be starting some new special interest groups as well. To name a few, we'll have a - Grad's group who focus will be on issues that affect people who have reached their one year anniversary. They may or may not be at goal. - Over 50 (BMI) Group which will focus on the issues and challenges that those who start with high BMI's. - Banders Group which will focus on the challenges and issues specific to the bandsters lifestyle. They could be lapbanders, realize banders, vertical gastric banders, etc... - DS Group which will focus on their issues as they first try to access the surgery that is not as readily available through insurance and navigate the DS post surgical journey. - Scrappers Group for those of us who would like to document our journies ... scheduling a few scrapbook sessions at Archivers in Raleigh. - Walkers Group for those would like to participate in an 'activity' that isn't sedentary or food related. We'll look for and participate in local charitable walks. A great way to do good for others and take care of ourselves as well. - Cooking Lean Group which would be done as a 'gourmet dinner' group that will meet at various members homes as we gather to learn new cooking tips and enjoy each others company and recipes. I am also looking into gathering some professionals from the community, such as mental health, diet and nutrition, fitness, etc... that would be willing to come talkus about ways to maximize the potential of our WLS experience. I hope that many of you will decide to join us as we enter the new year. Please look for posts about upcoming events and if you haven't done so already, if you are interested in being notified about our events, please sign up at http://wls.meetup.com/101 Wishing you all the best,
Behavior may be the real key to... October 7, 2008 11:22 pm Just about everyone we run into has a story of a friend, aunt, co-worker, etc... that had 'the surgery', lost the weight and gained it all back. The good news is that statistically, after 10 years, 80 percent of patients maintain a weight loss the excess weight loss that they acheived with their WLS. However, 10 percent will experience a regain significant enough to no longer be considered successful (at least 60 percent of their excess weight) and another 10 percent will experience a regain of every single pound that they lost. After extensive studies, they have found that while structural or 'mechanical' issues account for a very small percentage of these failures, the vast majority are due to behavioral issues. To address this, I found a program called the "Beck Diet Solution" developed by Dr. Judith Beck. It's not a diet, but a 6 week program that you step through to learn to 'think thin.' To be honest, it took me much more than the 6 weeks to work through it, but it has been and continues to be an invaluable tool in my arsenal to try to ensure my longterm success. If you are interested, you can get if from any of the major booksellers or online. It comes as a book and workbook and it's really best to get both.
Habits: Good and Bad October 2, 2008 4:26 am There are good habits and bad habits. I know for myself, I had many bad habits that significantly, negatively impacted my weight over the years. Honestly, I didn’t have many good habits in place that might help me maintain a healthful weight in the long term and that made me nervous because once you get the weight off, statistics indicate that it is generally behavior that makes or breaks your long-term success. Like you, I want this to be successful in the long term. We have all had too many weight loss boomerangs and I don’t want that to happen to me anymore than you want it to happen to you. I decided that since habits, good and bad are the foundation for so many behavioral changes that I needed to address them head on. It has helped me a great deal to identify both bad habits that need to be eradicated and good habits that need to be cultivated. Bad habits are part of the reason that we ended up needing to explore the possibility and finally decide to have WLS. Taking a look at these behaviors and trying to conquer them is something that I’m working on to try to ‘stack the deck’ in my favor so that I’ll be able to maintain the significant losses and gains that I’ve enjoyed as a benefit of my weight loss surgery journey. Good habits are probably as important to long-term success as eradicating bad habits. It isn’t always easy to know what good habits should be, so I look at how others before have succeeded and try to leverage the habits that they have incorporated into their lives. I have two lists that I use; The Bad Habit List and the Good Habit List. The Bad Habit list allows me to look at the Bad Habits I have, try to assess how ‘dangerous’ they are, why I do them, why I’d be better off if I didn’t and actively think about what to do the make a change. The Good Habit List allows me to take time to think about what I’d like to do for myself, why it’s good for me and how I can make it regular part of my healthier life. Bad Habit List
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Boost your Metabolism
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March 5, 2008 12:17 am Here's a nice article from the Health Magazine website that Paula (amruby) turned me on to ... As we all know, our metabolism can be lowered by our restriced caloric intake from our WLS. In order to combat that, it's really important that we work on boosting our metabolism. Also, remember that when we are heavier, it takes more calories and a high metabolism just to carry on the minimal daily activities. As we lose much of that mass our resting metabolic rate, or the rate at which we burn calories just to maintain basic life functions such as breathing, digesting food, etc. drops, so anything we can do to Boost our Metabolism is definitely a step in the right direction. Here's the link to the article: http://www.health.com/health/slideshow/0,26086,1717995-1,00.html?PromKey=XET Enjoy! Barb |
