reply to an email
hf2006 said:
Hi I thought that since you are so addicted to the people on here you could give me advice on a diet. What kind of diets do you think work best?
Here's some insight on my personal situation...
My whole life I've been larger and always tried dieting. When I was 17 I became aneorexic and went to about 160. From ge 18-20 I skyrocketed to 325. Now, I'm 23 and around 230. I want to get to 180.
Is there any diet that you've found extrememly helful?
Well, I guess that's all for now. Talk to you soon!
Hope your dieting is going well for you.
Holly
Just so you know, I wrote a book. You asked for it. If you'd checked out my diary, you'd see that I'm like this all the time. Oh, to get me started.....
Well..... that's a loaded question. I can tell you what works for me, but it won't necessarily work for you.
For me..... I like to eat. Period, the end. I like the diet where I don't feel like I have to starve myself. So, it's been kind of a trial and error this time around for me.
I cut out soda entirely, with the exception of an occasional sprite. This is for several reasons. #1 would be all the wasted calories in a regular soda. #2 would be all the sodium (which causes bloating) and #3 after I gave up diet soda, I realized it was giving me IBS. And I occasionally miss it, which is when I allow myself one glass of sprite.
The other thing I did was educate myself on food. Since I like to eat and I like to eat a lot, I wanted to find foods that tasted good and that I could eat a lot of.
And that was good old fashioned veggies. However, I discovered at the beginning of my diet that one cannot exist on veggies alone. I felt like a cow grazing on bags of veggies all day and still being hungry. The good part was that I could keep eating the veggies since I was hungry, but I wasn't getting any relief from the hunger.
So then I looked through other people's diaries and they were eating more meat than I was. So then I educated myself on protein. (which you can get from other sources than meat, BTW) So my next step was to incorporate more protein in my diet. That helped a lot in curbing the hunger for longer periods of time. The trick was to choose lean cuts of meat, hence chicken breast, turkey, lean ground beef, beans, lentils.
Then, of course, I'm going through sugar cravings. And, of course, they say you should eat more fruit to combat this. Honestly, I hadn't eaten fruit, except for melons in years. So, here I go again, I educated myself on fruit. Like did you know that one of the few fruits that have fat in it is the banana? Weird. And believe it or not, the fruit killed the sugar cravings. (it helped that it's summer and everythings in season and so thus tastes really good.) And, of course, when I need the chocolate, I buy those chocolate rice cakes.
For me, keeping the food diary and relating my thoughts on how hungry I felt and how full I was after each meal in our diary section really helped. It let me look through at the end of each week and make better choices until I figured out for myself what kept me satisfied the longest. The key word here is
satisfied. Not stuffed full. When you're stuffed full, you don't want to move.
It also helped when I found out that it takes 20 minutes before your stomach realizes that you've eaten. So, I would try to take a while to eat. Whatever works for you, taking sips in between each bite. After a while, I realized I wasn't consuming as much food as I used to. I wasn't always able to finish each meal I'd packaged.
Then came the moving part of it. Getting off my butt and burning some calories. I am still really out of shape, but I tried to find something that made me feel good about moving. So I took up bike riding. Other people go for walks, others are into the whole gym thing, others like doing videos. The key is to find something that you're going to want to do. If you don't want to, you not going to. If you don't do it, then you start to give up. If you give up, you're right back where you started. And you don't want that, do you?
So, there you go. That's my rant. If you still want to ask me any questions, feel free. Just be cautious because you'll never know how long they'll be.
