The Whole Diet Thing

So, I'm still losing weight, but it's very slow. I'm basically down to 180, and everyone is telling me I no longer look overweight. I'll probably keep losing weight gradually if I stick with what I'm doing.

An interesting thing is happening. My diet is becoming normal. When I first launched into it, I was highly focused on the absolute healthiest foods I could find. There was a big variety of vegetables, and some fish. I was probably eating roughly as healthily as anyone who's ever lived.

At the time, one of my main goals was to stop the really over-the-top eating and weight-gain that was bringing me past all boundaries of health, and into a really bad zone. I was extremely strict with myself about every aspect of the diet, to the point where my friends and family were scared I might do harm to myself just from being on the diet. I was nervous about that too, but I figured it was life or death, and I was choosing the option that seemed available to me. I was attempting to thread the needle in the only way I could figure.

Since then, certain things have come clear as the real significant issues, and other things are turning out to be less important than I'd first thought.

One of the main things that I've come to understand is that the ban on snacking has to be maintained pretty strictly. Certain snacks are allowable, but they need to be regulated, and I can't let myself get into the idea that I can just go snack on things.

For me, a snack is anything I eat before lunch, between lunch and dinner, or after dinner.

Certain foods are things I'll eat to keep my protein up; but that aren't necessarily wonderful to include in a meal. Sardines, hard boiled eggs, and nuts fall into this category. If I have a tin of sardines, 2 or 3 hard boiled eggs, and a handful of nuts over the course of a day, that falls into the acceptable range of snacks.

Likewise, I might stop at the store and pick up some chopped watermelon or mango to eat after dinner. That's not a great source of protein, but it's also acceptable, just because it's fruit, and a bit of fruit is OK.

Those are my snack options. They've been changing over time, where I'll think about what's working for me, and what I'd like to adjust, and then finally make a decision about it. I try not to make 'impulse snack' decisions; and whenever they happen anyway, I take it as a sign that I need to clamp down and get back into the right groove.

So for the most part, I'm not snacking during the day. And when I'm getting lunch and dinner, the way I think of those meals is as the main chance for me to eat during the day. I don't assume that if I get hungry later I'll be able to just have a snack. The vast majority of my food is consumed during lunch and dinner.

The reason that's good for me is because it makes it much, much easier to guess how much I'm eating. If I were snacking all day, I'd have a much harder time figuring out how many calories I'd consumed that day. And with me, it's so easy to just keep snacking on more and more stuff, which is exactly what happened before I went on this diet. And the more I ate, the hungrier I got.

So the general ban on snacks is one of the key things I've identified as being really useful for me personally. It's not for everyone. But for me, snacking is a huge trigger for more snacking. I have to keep it under tight control or it gets way out of hand.

Another main thing that I started out with in this diet, and still believe, is that I should avoid things that have a lot of sugar, salt, and grease. For me, those ingredients feel highly addictive. They make my brain go dingdingdingdingding! They're extremely tasty in a weird way that's a little disturbing. There are plenty of other foods that I find very tasty - various vegetables - that don't have that disturbing kind of "must...have...more...." quality.

So, like snacking, those particular ingredients seem to be a big trigger for me to eat more and more and more.

Now, the third main thing is more of a surprise. As long as I stick with the first two main things, and only have a reasonable portion of food at mealtimes, I'm realizing it's no longer so necessary for me to be quite so focused on eating only the absolutely most healthy foods.

I still like to make sure I get a nice big helping of vegetables; but I'm starting to feel like it's OK to also delve into grains and various meats. I try to keep the meat servings relatively small, but I don't shy away from them completely like I used to. I still haven't had red meat though.

Basically my preference is to have the vegetable portion be the largest, the grain portion be next, and the meat portion be the smallest.

But that actually describes a lot of the foods available at many restaurants and in the café at work.

So when I say my diet is "becoming normal", it partly means that I'm becoming more used to it, and also that the things I'll eat are coming more in line with what a normal person might eat who didn't have an eating problem.

In terms of my caloric intake, I'm pretty sure there were several weeks or a month there, when I was getting way too few calories; and the result was that I was starting to get extremely exhausted in the middle of the day, and need a lot more sleep at night than I ever had before.

So, even before I started relaxing my approach to lunch and dinner foods, I had started raising my protein and calorie intake; and that ended up having a big positive effect on my exhaustion and sleeping habits. I'm almost back to normal now, in terms of wakefulness and sleep.

And now that I've relaxed my lunch and dinner requirements somewhat, I'm finding that I'm still gradually losing weight. Maybe in 6 months or so the BMI will think I'm normal. But the continued gradual weight loss is basically a confirmation that I'm not swinging too far in the wrong direction by easing certain restrictions.

Overall, things are looking pretty good, from the eating perspective. I seem to be settling on some good habits that work for me, and the health issues I associated with making such extreme changes to my diet seem to be fading as well.

I recently had a little scare though. I decided to quit eating at the super healthy restaurants I usually go to, and to start cooking healthy foods for myself again. The result was pretty strange. I didn't end up cooking for myself, but the effort to do so resulted in my restaurant behavior and snack behavior beginning to spiral out of control. I started eating more, especially snack foods.

It wasn't a huge lapse, and by most standards I was still eating really healthily; but I could see the fabric of all my good habits beginning to unravel. It scared me. I quickly decided to abandon the idea of cooking for myself, and try to settle back into the habit that had been working for me.

What that told me was that my eating habits have become a bit more rigid than I want them to be. I definitely should not have to confront the prospect of total failure, when something unusual causes me to change my eating regimen. I need to have the flexibility to cook if I want to, eat out if I want to, or go on a fast for the day if I want to.

So I'm not 100% sure how to deal with that one. For now, I'm planning to stick with what I'm doing, and just give consideration to the problem and see what I come up with.