This is kind of a stream of consciousness type rant, so here's a warning that this might be long. Just to give some background first... I'm a 5'5" 23F that used to weigh 150lbs 3 years ago. I know it's not that large of number, but for me this was a lot. With that weight, I was just on the line of being in the overweight bmi category for my height. I had been feeling bad about my body for years though, and I think a lot of it was originally caused by me feeling uncomfortable in my body when I was younger due to suddenly having hips and boobs and being seen as a woman all of sudden. Yeah that's not a great feeling in middle school. I gained a lot of weight from having body confidence issues and emotional eating. At 150lbs, I saw a picture of myself at my sisters wedding, and I was scared. I didn't even look like myself, or what I had imagined myself to look like. I didn't want to continue on this trajectory. I made a new years resolution to lose 20lbs that year. I lost 30 instead. I've stayed at 120ish lbs for the last few years successfully. I was literally only able to do this through calorie counting. I bought a food scale, and I counted my calories for about 80% of the days in a year. I decided to go with a 1200-1400 calorie diet. The biggest shocker for me was how small the portions I should be eating are. In my mind, having a pb&j sandwich was a small meal that meant I could have a big meal for dinner. Uhhh...no. A pb&j is about 500 calories. That's almost half of my calories for the day in just a small sandwich. Hummus and crackers is healthy, right? I mean it's healthy, but extremely calorie dense. The same goes for those breakfast smoothies, trail mixes, etc. I just feel like I was tricked all my life. Why is everything SO calorie dense? I get that volume eating is a thing, and you can have like 50lbs of lettuce and still need a ton more calories, but sometimes I just want greasy pizza and cheesecake. I love calorie counting because it makes the weight loss process easy. You can just count, follow the rules, and you lose weight. But, I hate how much effort you have to put into it! Weighing everything little ingredient for a meal, figuring out calories in restaurants discreetly, forgetting to weight the pot I cooked all my food in...ugh. It was just a lot of effort. Anytime I found myself getting relaxed with counting, I noticed my weight moving back up, and it was frustrating. This past year, I've been quarantining for covid and I just decided to forget counting. I was tired of it. I weighed myself in late February/early March this year, and I was up to 132lbs. I'd gained 10lbs. Honestly, it was better than I expected, but still dissapointing knowing that I needed to start calorie counting again. This time though, I just said no. I've been counting for at least 2 years now. I know what my portions sizes should look like at this point. I know what it feels like to be done eating food and not feel stuffed. I know how to do this. So, I finally let go of my calorie counting crutches, and I started the whole intuitive eating thing. It's been a month and I'm back to 125! It's actually easy now! I'm not restricting myself on any foods. I'm just eating smaller portions (or rather the correct portion sizes). If I have a salad, I let myself have a big salad, but maybe don't use a ton of dressing. If I'm having pizza, I can have one or two slices at a sitting, but save the rest for leftovers. If I'm eating out, my general rule is to just eat half of what's on the plate and save the other half for leftovers. I've almost entirely cut out snacking on things besides fruit. Desserts still happen, but maybe only once or twice a week and in small servings. It's just common sense stuff, but actually being able to apply it while knowing it will work is amazing motivation. I don't think I would have even been able to do this without calorie counting first and for so long. It taught me to re-learn my portion sizes and to understand my hunger cues. I'm still gonna have those days where I just want to go have a blizzard at dairy queen and eat a bunch of junk food afterwards. That's OK. Tomorrow's another day and I can splurge every now and then. I know it hasn't even been that long since I've started this intuitive eating thing, but it doesn't even feel like a thing right now. I don't want to jinx myself, but It just feels like my new normal. I'm eternally grateful to calorie counting for helping me to get here. But also, can I just complain about food manufacturers for purposefully making food addicting to get us to buy more? Adding tons of salt, sugar, and fat into things that don't need tons of salt, sugar, and fat. That makes foods more calorie dense. Any commercials where snacks are advertised as healthy also annoy me. In my personal experience snacking has almost never been fulfilling. I find that even three meals a day is honestly too much sometimes, and I usually skip breakfast in preference of larger lunches and dinners. Also, what's up with crap like Nutella being advertised as a healthy breakfast option for kids? Like, since when was chocolate smeared on bread healthy? Because it contains calcium? Ughh. I'm happy for getting to where I am currently and "beating the system", but I'm also just angry that the system is so hard to beat. There's so many kids out there that are growing up and probably don't know what a reasonable serving size looks like. Snack foods and desserts are everywhere and completely normalized as an everyday thing. I saw a stat the other day that 70% of Americans are at least overweight. That's crazy! My thought process is that it's not our fault either. We didn't always used to be this way. People don't change. Corporations, on the other hand, can be greedy though. And, if making us addicted to food is a way to get rich, they'll exploit it for sure. Granted, we shouldn't just give in to the food because it's not inevitable, but they really do make it hard for us not to. This rant took a weird turn lol. Anyway, I'm just feeling really conflicted right now in both my happiness for making it this far and my frustration of how hard it was for me to get to this point and be happy with myself.
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/3mzRMOX
No comments:
Post a Comment