Covid messed me up, and I gained 20 pounds last year. This year, I finally feel like I understand how to change my situation, so I’m sharing in case anyone feels they’re in the same boat as me.
Background/Motivation: I got a shock when I went to the bariatric clinic in April and realized how much I had gained (352lb: my highest F/5’5”), the doctor prescribed RNY again. The thing is; I’m terrified of the surgery itself, and of the massive life long changes, like malnutrition, vitamins, and further revision surgeries. I’m not currently a great candidate, because I’m still smoking medicinal cannabis to medicate my mental health issues and chronic pain. (That’s why I was removed from the program last time, 2019). I’m trying to switch this out for prescription medication and better therapy, but I expect it will be slow going.
My first step: Last year, I began seeing a dietician through my local family health team. It was the first time ‘intuitive eating’ was discussed. I read a book she recommended called ‘Big Girl’ by Kelsey Miller, and her humour and trials convinced me this might be different than anything I had tried before. I read the original plan by Evelyn Tribole, and I was off to eat my meals intuitively. It took about three minutes, to realize I was not going to be able to jump into this program as easily as I thought. My mind is full of distractions, so trying to have silence and listen to hunger cues was very difficult. In the end, I chose ‘lunches’ and continued on for months, eating more intuitively than I had before. The problem is that, I was still bingeing in the evenings.
Step two: Realized how much my mental health was playing into the equation. This is pretty self-explanatory, but I realized the weight of it. (Eating when I wasn’t hungry. I was bored, or sad). I began replacing those emotions with other distractions, (a halfway point) to reduce the distraction. For example I would read, or watch a TV show, play with my cats, make-out with the husband.
2.5: It also helped that, around this time, I figured out I was not eating enough in the mornings, and that was causing me to over-eat later in the day. I thought I just wasn’t hungry in the mornings. I was getting very uncomfortable GERD symptoms throughout the night, and decided to stop eating three hours before bed, and oh boy was I hungry in the morning again! Plus, my symptoms cleared up at night. (Yay!)
2.6: OK I also realized that my regular toilet habits were not great, it was playing into my mental health decline, so I added Metamucil too. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but if it helps someone it’s worth it.
Step three: I set up a routine I could live with. It included three meals and two snacks. Basic, I know, but it worked wonders when I coupled it with the mindful eating; eating what I liked/felt like, and stopping when I was full (I also worked hard to reduce the size of a single portion that I was serving myself, and being very sure that I wanted seconds, before having them). I decided to eat my snacks right after lunch and dinner, even if I wasn’t ‘hungry’, because I didn’t find myself getting hungry between the three meals, but I wasn’t ready to cut out my sweet treats yet. This is when I realized that, week to week I was eating way less treats over all.
Fast forward to today, where I realized I have lost 11 pounds in two months practising this routine. I’m still new to it and there have been a lot of challenges, or days, or meals, that went South, but I feel like I made the realization that I needed to make, in order to keep working on this process, and get to 100% intuitive eating.
Some might say that at my size the weight loss should be quicker, but the truth is; every time the weight loss has been quicker for me, I have ultimately failed, so this feels right.
TLDR: Got a wake up call when a bariatric surgeon told me how much I weighed, and that I should have surgery to lose weight. Learned how my mental health, and the way my mind works, was working against me. I had a lot of symptoms, that were making me uncomfortable, and together all this spurred the change, and helped me to implement a routine I could live with, based on the intuitive eating model.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/oo28o5/the_first_10lbs_are_gone/
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