I was trying to fix the wrong problem all of this time

SW: 270, CW: 204, GW: 143

Hello

I have been dieting for the past two years .. I've lost ~60lbs but gained a few pounds recently. The reason why I gained them back was because I had a very stressful month, and I went back to my "old habits".

You see, I am a serial snacker. I don't eat 5, 6 or even 7 meals a day. I eat MUCH MORE FREQUENTLY than that. My mouth doesn't stop eating from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep at night. I don't necessarily eat bad food, I actually eat many fruit and vegetables and I do eat some bad food too. I also don't eat a lot in one setting, I just eat enough to stop the hunger. I tried many healthy habits to solve this problem but they all seem to work temporarily:

• counting calories: I count them all, but this didn't solve my eating habits at all. Basically, I still snack but this time all of my snacks are healthy and an added stress lol. I tend to break counting easily too
• no junk/sugar/carbs: just like counting, I still eat many times a day
• eating two meals a day/fasting 16:8 to OMAD: this worked the best for me! I found that not eating at all was much easier than eating little or avoiding junk! I actually lost the 60lbs using fasting :D I didn't feel tired and the two meals were big enough to fill me up so that I don't need to snack!

So, fasting/eating BIG meals helped. But why did I go back to my old eating habits then???? I was fasting for two years already. Sure in an on and off manner but still it's already a habit so what happened?

Simply put, I tried to get rid of the wrong culprit. No, the problem was not eating too much calories. It wasn't eating bad food. It wasn't snacking, It wasn't laziness. It wasn't the lack of willpower, discipline or motivation

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the problem is that I don't have time to cook proper meals

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I was fat since middle school. All of my childhood I was lean. Do you know what happened during middle school? I started becoming picky about my mom's cooking, so I will eat very few of it, then snack later and so on. The time my diet (fasting) worked was very special: I had enough time to cook!

I like my cooking. But because I am stressed/busy, I don't have time to cook a proper meal so I end up snacking. So, instead of focusing on counting, avoiding food, numbers of hours fasted, how many meals a day, how many calories per meal and so on, I need to solve the problem in its root. No matter how strict I am with myself when I fast or count calories, I will end up back to where I was once I lose weight. Because I am trying to solve the wrong problem

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I will start meal prepping from today! I actually cook each week like 3 times. So I don't have to make food for the whole week. instead, I will make 2~3 days portion and meal prep two or three times a week

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Wish me luck! I feel like I could succeed this time haha

submitted by /u/notafitperson
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/kmvo9i/i_was_trying_to_fix_the_wrong_problem_all_of_this/