I have a friend who did her own weight loss journey after having her son. She's done incredible with eating a diet based around whole foods....basically she doesn't eat processed foods of any kind, keeps her carbs low, and stays away from sugars as much as possible, and of course CICO and exercise. She was around 280lbs at 5'1", and is now 115 - 120 lbs and has kept it off for the last 5 years. I'm both proud and jealous of her. I lost a fair amount at the same time as her, but unlike her I gained most of mine back. So we had brunch together on the weekend and I asked her why I had such a hard time sticking to the lifestyle change and she didn't. This got us talking about diets and cheating and here's some insight she gave me that I am now going to try.
She told me when she first started the cravings were insane, which is totally normal. She'd do great for a few weeks then binge for 3 or 4 days. Always she'd say "just one meal, I just want one meal that's not on my diet." but that one meal would turn into a day, which would turn into a weekend, which would spill over to Monday or Tuesday. All the work she'd done would go down the drain in the blink of an eye. It was like 2 steps forward 1.25 steps back. She felt like a failure and would struggle to start again. This went on for a few months before she decided that changing her relationship with food had to also include changing her relationship with cravings and how she reacted to them. So, she'd mark on her calendar Day 1 and stick to the diet for 3 weeks. That's it, just 3 weeks. Then on a Friday she'd allow herself to have ONE cheat meal. Just one. She said knowing that day was coming made it easier to stick to just one meal. Trying to hold out for as long as she could made her crave even more foods and she just had to have everything she'd been dreaming about. But, knowing that in 3 weeks she could let loose just once made it so much easier. Plus this trained her brain to be okay with doing this for one meal. I asked her why 3 weeks and she said "I dunno....something about holding out that fourth week made it harder to stay in control, so I decided to try 3 weeks and it worked!" Suddenly that 2 steps forward 1.25 steps back were more like 2 steps forward 0.25 step back. After a while her cravings dropped. They didn't stop completely, but they did ease for her. Sometimes she was able to wait another week, if there was a special occasion or event she felt she could hold off a bit longer.
Now that she's at maintenance, and has been for a long time, she said it was a lot easier to continue to control her cravings because she'd been training her brain for over a year to do just that. She allows herself to indulge every 2 weeks rather than 3, and she keeps an eye on the scale so it doesn't go over 120 lbs. I told her I see on this subreddit people often saying you shouldn't ever give in to cravings and to treat this as a complete lifestyle change. She looked at me and said "anyone who says that lives in a fantasy world. You think people who've lost a ton of weight NEVER indulge? That's bullshit and it's a recipe for disaster! Everyone craves. Everyone has an event that's surrounded by food you shouldn't eat, everyone decides to give in to cravings. It's how often you give in that matters. Telling someone to never give into cravings? What? They should move to a deserted island and never have access to these foods? They're all around us all the time, everyone's going to give in, but it's training yourself to only give in a little bit and not go back to how you ate before the weight loss that matters. That's just not realistic at all." And she's right. We all face temptations in our lives, but it's how you've developed your relationship with food that allows you to make the right choices.
She's not saying you must give in to cravings or to do what she did, but retraining her brain on how to react to cravings and developing a habit for when she reached maintenance is what has helped her over the years and I agree with her. Take this how you will, I'm sure some of you will comment about how destructive this mindset is to have, but it really makes sense to me. When I entered maintenance I saw it more as "now I can eat what I've been craving all this time" and I went too far with it. I'm going to try her 3 week plan and hope that it heals my own relationship with food.
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