I eat impossible-sounding quantities of food on cheat days, help

First time here, sure how much context is necessary but I’m a 5’11 23yo male, currently 160 lbs after a hell of a weekend. Last week I was 150. I started at 210 around a year ago; although I’m proud of my progress it’s really slowed down lately.

I keep adding things — more workouts, graphing my daily weight, better macros, increasingly drastic calorie cuts, IF but it’s not really working. The mental and physical toll (5 days of <1200 calories, weightlifting, and 2 hours of walking is ANNOYING) is increasing but the results aren’t there.

Why? I’m a fucking animal when it comes to food. I’m always hungry, and I can eat literally endless quantities in one sitting (let alone a weekend). Like, I will eat until my stomach is feels like it’s about to burst and still be hungry. I LOVE food. Normally I have some level of self control on weekdays, but weekends are killer. Friends, food delivery, alcohol, and late nights combine and my self control is gone. I usually lose track of calories, but I’ll easily eat over 10k calories in a day. Entire pints of ice cream, a large Papa Johns pizza, and cookies by the dozen is ONE meal for drunk happy me. And that’s not including the alcohol calories! I’ve cut down on drinking significantly, from 6-10 beers a day (college) to 4-5 a week at most (usually all at once on Friday/Saturday). However, this has lowered my alcohol tolerance more than I thought possible. I drink less but get more drunk, and this makes it really hard to resist food.

So every weekend I eat like a horse, and spend the week recovering. At first, I was still losing weight through this, but it just keeps getting worse. I went from losing weight fast, to losing it slowly, to plateauing, to this week: my worst one ever, and my first week-over-week regression in months. I know how fast I can lose weight after a binge, and there’s no way I can recover from this by Friday. Which means I need to fix this issue by Friday, or my cut is over.

Of course there are some obvious solutions like

• stop drinking
• stop socializing
• cut even even harder during the week

But honestly, the thought of any of those really unpleasant. I’ve been in a pretty bad place mentally for a while, and COVID (not really the disease, but related stuff) made things a lot worse. Eating and drinking with my friends on weekends is pretty much the only thing I look forward to, and my weekday cuts are already borderline unhealthy.

Here’s some of what I’ve tried

• meeting my protein requirements before socializing, so I am satiated and hitting my macros. Helped with macros, of course, but did nothing for satiety. Like I said, I’m always hungry. And protein powder or chicken breast are little comfort when I’m staring at my homemade cookies hot from the oven, or the the Doordash menu at 2am.
• eating healthier food on cheat days, so I can have more of it. For example, ignoring carb option in favor of meat or stocking up on low-cal ice cream. However, it’s not enough. I just eat so freakin much, and low-cal ice cream adds up after the 3rd pint. Plus, I always end up saying “you’ve worked so hard, you deserve it” and some point and eating (lower, but still ungodly quantities of) unhealthy food anyways. I still haven’t worked up the self control to just eat plain salads on these occasions, though
• asking friends to keep an eye on me and scold me if I overeat. This worked well at first but backfired. I ended up eating well in front of friend, but cheating when they weren’t looking. It also made me feel resentful of that friend in the heat of the moment, which isn’t fair to them
• not drinking or socializing at all. Also helps, but makes things less fun. I’ve already given up so much for this cut — huge amounts of time (I have bad knees and limited equipment, so I walk hours instead of doing more intense cardio), work performance (more time working out/cooking, shitty concentration during intense cuts), 2 of my hobbies (I’m really into making cocktails and desserts, but can’t really do that any more), and a lot of food itself (which I really really love, and I especially love unhealthy food). Considering that social occasions in my age+demographic often center around drinking, I’d like to keep this one aspect of life uncompromised

Anyways, anyone got tips? Sorry for the rant

submitted by /u/wheytlossthrowaway
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/gv3ak2/i_eat_impossiblesounding_quantities_of_food_on/