To start things off, I'm 6'2" 180lbs. I've been running and going to the gym sporadically for years and years now. I'm not necessarily overweight, but I do have some fat on my lower midsection that I've been trying to lose and keep off for as long as I can remember.
For the life of me, I can't seem to permanently lose any amount of weight. It's not that I don't know how, it's that I lack the discipline to actually stick with any sort of weight loss efforts. Despite being a fairly normal and healthy weight, I 100% have an unhealthy relationship with food. I'll eat absolute garbage, completely let myself go for a month or two, gain 10lbs, then start going super hard, running and lifting every day, cold turkey on junk food, and lose 10lbs. I've literally been doing this exact same thing for years, just swinging back and forth.
When I was younger, between the ages of 8-13ish, I was very overweight, most likely obese. Peaked at 210lbs when I was 13. Granted, I was super tall for my age, but STILL. I discovered the gym, and lost about 65 pounds really quickly. In retrospect, I wasn't losing weight in a mentally or physically healthy way. Basically just ate like 600 cals of salad a day and ran my ass off on a treadmill for 6 months, terrified that I would gain it all back if I ate so much as a hershey kiss. Since then I've stayed a normal weight but never really managed to have a healthy relationship with food. Like so many people, it's a source of comfort and temporarily relief from stress.
My issue is that I struggle to do anything in moderation. If I decide to not follow my diet/exercise plans for the day, I stuff my face like I'm a god damn caveman after killing a mammoth, knowing he might not eat for another week. When I do decide to actually be healthy, I'll lift and run 6 days a week and eat SUPER clean. But as soon as I slip up, my body is like ALRIGHT GAME ON, and thus begins another binge period. Again, it's not that I don't know how to lose weight, it's not that I don't know how to use MyFitnessPal and eat healthy and treat myself in a reasonable way, it's that for some reason I'll wake up on certain days and not give a single fuck about my weight loss efforts or progress. I have no long-term discipline, just bouts of frantic motivation until I succumb to the comfort of binge eating.
So my question is, how did you go about breaking long-term habits that you've have ingrained in you for 15+ years? How did you change the way you feel about food in general? I understand that I've spent over a decade reinforcing these bad habits, and there's not going to be a quick fix. But what I'm doing clearly isn't working. How did you personally BEGIN to address your unhealthy relationship with food? I'm looking for personal, anecdotal insight.
In the short term, it would be great to lose that 10lbs I've lost 20 times before. But the long term goal is to keep the weight off, and more importantly, establish healthy and STABLE eating habits. It's only going to get harder as I get older and take on more responsibilities, so I want to ingrain good habits while I'm still in my early 20s.
I know this type of thing has probably been asked a hundred times before on this sub, but I'd appreciate ANY and ALL advice, no matter how brief. Thanks! :)
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2tIhPJe
