I just can't keep going, after 3 months or so I stop, not sure what my trigger is for stopping. I have an appointment with a Therapist tomorrow. I've come to grips with that fact that there's something else going on with me and it's not about the weight.

There must be other things that I'm not dealing with that makes this journey so hard. I do good for 2-3 months and then bam, falling off the wagon again. Like most I do have childhood issues, drink too much and maybe the benefit of a therapist will do me good overall, with the extra added bonus of finding out who and what I am and want.

I truly want to lose this weight. My high was 260 6 years ago and my lowest was 185. I've maintained most of the weight lost, but can't seem to get below 185 with out crashing and burning and running from a smaller size at the stores. The attention, the nervous feeling I get with comments from people, the constant focus on food. It's safer to just eat and stay in a corner and humm!

Clearly this is a battle I need help with and it isn't about the pounds!

Anyone else experience this feeling of trying to figure out what it really is????

I asked myself that questing a million times....why do I get so far on a diet and then just give up???..Speaking from my experience; I came to the conclusion that I was my biggest enemy, it wasn't how people looked at me that made me give up it was ME!....I had no Will Power and constantly made excuses to why i couldn't stick with a plan, once i stop making excuses for myself and found a plan I could live with I am now doing IT and Losing.I had to change my whole frame of thinking. I used to look at dieting as just that a DIET...but now I look at the atkins as a life style change and that frame of thought has made all the difference. I am still scared that I will fall off or that I would come up with some excuse to keep me from sticking with my new life style...but I am still hanging in there....Good Luck on your journey!

*food is like any other addiction , you have to take it one day at a time.

There have been SO MANY emotional things I've gone through that happened as I was losing, it has truly astounded me what a rich emotional journey it has been. Your experience doesn't surprise me, it has been truly hard for me to face the different facets of it. I've been amazed at HOW losing weight has made me FEEL. There's a big difference for me with this WOE and other diets, being that, THIS time, I know the loss is permanent, because I'm confident that I've finally found the right way to feed myself, so I'll never be my fat self again. I LOVED my fat self, and others loved her, just because I also hated her doesn't mean I didn't love her, and I'll never see her again. And I don't KNOW my thin self, I've never met her.

Maybe private, not just online, journaling would be a good exercise for you. With a pen, it slows you down from typing so that you focus on what you're writing. Or a pencil, it depends on what you think would be most helpful to you; being aqble to erase what you write or being forced not to erase it.

I just noticed, 260 is my high, 185 is my low, and I also live in baltimore.

I've had a ton of therapy that looked for causes of regrettable food choices other than the food, and I now think it's 95% the food - the physical part from nutrition, and 5% our learned habits around getting ourselves fed, and response to trauma, stress, and so on.

I did learn all this through another online group. So I think if you can find someone who ties together the physical and behavioral, that would be helpful.

Just some things I learned -

Poor impulse control. Low serotonin means literally low impulse control because serotonin is the neurotransmitter that allows for the THINK part of impulse>think>react. With poor serotonin it's impulse>react. What makes whacked out serotonin levels? carb poisoning and not enough sat fats and protein. But it takes weeks to level this out (just like it takes weeks to experiment with SSRIs, the drugs for raising serotonin levels by manipulating brain chemicals - sheesh). I was a low serotonin person.

Crisis living, risk seeking, drama queening - for me, this can be from the endorphin cycle, the highs and lows. Also hitting dopamine. Excess carb eating changes the brain chemical receptors so you need the white powder foods, I mean carbs, to feel good and feel awful when the effect wears off. What restores the dopamine and endorphin system to non-upregulated, healthy state? laying off the excess carbs and having enough sat fat and protein. This also takes time - people report 6 months!! I had some of this but not much.

Stress and blood sugar - some people have a heightened insulin response to carbs, making blood sugar wonky. Low blood sugar feels awful and can be crazy making, I hate that! the constant carb cycle can keep blood sugar level, at the expense of constant high insulin and weight gain. What can even out blood sugar highs and lows? Cutting down on white powder foods and having enough sat fat and protein. It took weeks or months for me to adapt my system to quit running on constant carbs, depending on my system and how long I've been exposed yadda yadda. I had too much crisis from not planning.

So if it takes kind a long time - weeks and months - to heal the physical, meanwhile it looks like I am "failing" when my body demands the bad old ways. But in reality it's transitioning.

The idea that one day we can say, for behavior, "I will eat clean tomorrow" that doesn't account for the time needed for the physical body to rewire. What living thing does new growth that way, overnight? None that I can think of.

And the 5% of behavior that turned out for me: I had to learn how to plan and make sure I had good food. If I didn't, I would eat whatever, whenever, because I would be nutty from low blood sugar, have poor impulse control, and used to crisis living so I had to run to the store right this minute and get an icky dreary protein bar, no wait, I deserve a tuna sandwich. You get the idea.

Same with eating on stress - if I was properly fed on time, stressful things didn't even weird me out like they did before, and I wasn't reaching for the regrettable things.

But it took time to get those new habits! I had no idea I was such a careless eater and planner until I noticed! I always thought I was oh so flexible and spontaneous. I used a log to connect food and behavior. I was SO EXCITED to see a pattern of mine, that 3 days without enough fat and protein, caused me to overeat on carbs. There is a reason for these things if I could just find it.

Now when it seems like behavior is off - I look for a reason in the food.
I know it is backward from how behavioral therapists think.
Watch out for the kind who think it goes like this -
thinking > leads to
food choices.

It's more like

1. Food choices > lead to
2. mind body responses > lead to
3. Go to step 1.

My experience is similar to Seejay's. I figured out that the bit of our brain that drives out eating behaviors is about as sophisticated as a lizard's. So... it just becomes a game to outwit the lizard.

Here's a couple of blog posts I wrote on the topic:
http://mostlypaleo.blogspot.com/200...-binge-eat.html
http://mostlypaleo.blogspot.com/sea...al%20psychology

Wow - you guys bring up some interesting points. Seejay, seems like you have monitored and/or studied your behavior and have a clear understanding of your relationship with food and chemical dependencies. Interesting.

The therapy session was good and its allowing me to think more outside of myself. Homework; is to journal. Look for patterns, try to stay in touch with my feelings before and after the thought of straying. Just to be more awake.

This is a very good discussion.

Best advice I got about journal was to not only journal the food, but then the physical and mood response to it.
Food - body - mood.

So, not just what I had for breakfast, but my energy and mood 2 hours later, and did I have a headache or nausea? it all counts.

Well put, Sejay! Those are my thoughts, observations and emotions, too! You SAID it so perfectly!

Bmore4now, I have alot in common with you. My high is 260 and I have been as low as 178 in the past. Once I got there, it was a struggle to go lower and instead I ended up going back up.

I agree with alot of what Seejay said about the physical and mental connection. But I think for me it's more of a 80/20 split.

I had to go to therapy to get over my black and white mentality about things... I'm this way with all things, not just food. If I can't do it perfectly, I don't do it. It took 3-4 months of therapy to re-wire my thinking, and I have to consistently work on it. But it is so much easier now that I have changed my internal script.



I so can relate to this! At 260 I was pretty much invisible. But at 178 I got "checked out" alot, people complimented me. I was actually more socially uncomfortable in my smaller body than I was at my largest! I am at the point now where I am starting to get the looks and comments again, except this time, I am more comfortable. I feel, I don't know... more mature and accepting of myself. I guess that comes with age. I think the therapy helped with this too.

I still have a hard time wearing smaller clothes though. I'm still hiding in my bigger clothes for a while. I hope to get to be a butterfly soon though.

I'm flat amazed at how common the disease of perfectionism is. And how much misery it inflicts.

And people suffering from it don't realize! They actually think this makes them "better" than others, because they have such "high standards." What a trap. Yeah, if we'd ever get something done, we might be able to feel good about it.

But we don't.

Ha! i now think excess perfectionism is a symptom of the disregulated system brought on by carb poisoning.

My DD was hospitalized at 14 for anorexia. (PS, a family history of all the sugar addiction disorders = diabetes, obesity, and alcoholism, maybe add bipolar)

The "eating disorders" ward was full of two extremes: anorexics or bulimics. Each group thought the other was inferior: the anorexics thought their control was cool and the "sloppiness" of bulimics was icky, the bulimics thought their devil-may-care "impulsiveness" was cool and the rigid control of anorexics was icky.

What was striking and kind of amusing - when the therapists gave each group opposite goals, they all reacted the same!
Anorexics were supposed to skip their routines and be impulsive.
Bulimics were supposed to skip impulsiveness and adopt routines.
Both groups kinda went into freakout and withdrawal and you could see how in spite of individuals gravitating to a certain way of coping, what was universal was the need to grab onto the coping thing.

At some point, women who have lost weight might ask themselves, was I getting any subconscious benefits from my extra weight? Does that seem crazy to you, that a woman might find real advantages to her additional pounds? It's not -- extra weight not only gives you more physical presence, but it also provides more of a barrier between you and the rest of the world.

Oh this one made me smile. When I have lost weight I ask myself, well my dear, what shall I eat and wear and do now on this lovely day?

Asking about my subconscious benefits in the past is not even on the list.

Even that question is from the behaviorists - excess fat accumulation pretty much has this subconscious benefit - that of getting energy through incoming food when energy won't come out of fat stores.

I am so on board with this discussion! I have struggled with my weight ever since menopause kicked in. Before that any low carb approach, however casually followed, kept my weight down around 115 (I am 4'11''). But when the hot flashes started a couple of years ago the creep began. In the meantime, I lost my job of 30 years (company shut down) and was diagnosed with breast cancer. The stress of the two things keeps me on the verge of severe depression almost constantly. I self-medicate with sugar and alcohol. This weekend I hit 132 lbs and really, really panicked!!
I agree with Seejay that the feedback from the sugar-induced insulin surges and blood sugar drops affects my moods and makes me reach for the booze or bread to stop it. Once I started really paying attention to my emotions before, during, and after eating, I could see what was happening.
I decided the booze had to go first, and it has been pretty easy to do, but last night as I was falling asleep, that dark sense of dread and depression started up again and I was reminded why I started drinking every night a year ago (after years of light drinking only the weekends): As the evening wears on, I get a growing sense of impending doom. I think I'll scream and cry with fear about the job loss, the cancer, aging, money worries, everything, and I get an almost overwhelming urge to either have a drink or eat something sweet and/or starchy. The urge is really strong, and only by leaning into it and looking it in the face can I articulate what exactly it is.
When the urge came up last night I practiced breathing and thinking through the situation, but this is obviously going to be a long, long struggle.
My medicine (booze and bread) is also the poison causing the depression. Living through the panics is hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.

Nelson, I'm so sorry. *hugs*

But you do know the sugar could possibly be the best fuel in the world for your breast cancer. Stop feeding it! This is the time to really dig into ketosis. It seems to be so promising for treating certain cancers. If I'm scaring you... good! This is the wrong time to go face down in sugar/starch.

Can you get some help for the depression?