they scream at own ass :V [exercise/nutrition/ED? vent/advice request thread]

Ironically, I rather like my ass. It's more like "they scream at own arm and back fat and future health prospects" but that's not the meme. :V I trust you'll forgive me.

Memes aside, I have a fucking problem: I'm prone to eating like a caricature of a fat stoner. I'm talking embarrassing amounts of food, very probably binge eating. I hide food, too, which seems to be a thing people with eating disorders do?

And it's just... BAD for me. A human being should not eat an entire family size package of Oreos (and several mini eclairs, and wheat thins, and ice cream) in the space of 48 hours, but there I go. This is??? Not good???

So of all the things I want/need, getting this under control is the most pressing. I mean, I would like to lose weight, I would like to be slimmer, I would like to gain muscle mass. But Jesus Christ this is not good for me???

I can eat healthy (both nutrition and portions, not overly restrictive*) but it only ever lasts a few months. I don't really know what to do to change this, though. Advice/encouragement?

*My BMR is about 1800 calories, and I'm not very active, so when trying to lose weight I would aim for 1300-1500 net calories a day. That is, if I exercised, I would eat some of it back, usually extra protein and fat. Whether that's a good range to be in seems to depend entirely on who you ask. @~@

 

I'm gonna go to the store later and get some produce, at the very least I can start eating more of that again.

I like healthy foods, I feel good when my diet is good, but *gestures towards depression and possible ADD* so many of them are so much work and the ones that are less work are $$$.

 

I bought some frozen sardines today because fuck yeah sardines. Then I remembered my housemate hates fish smell, and they told me that using the grill outside will also make a lot of smell. ):

I want sardiiiiiinnnesss...

 

(They are going on vacation for a week and I am gonna make sardines anyway...)

 

idk if this is helpful to you, but i'm embarrassingly fitspo, so.

Spoiler

there's all sorts of tutorials on replacing carbs with less carby shit. most of them are bunk. some of them are not. i have a few recipes posted in the last few pages of the kintsugi kitchen thread, and most of them are "do a step and walk away from it," or "do this thing and then let it sit for 6 hours."

find something you enjoy doing. i like boxing. i like biking. do this thing. do this thing maybe to excess. do it until you're really sore the next day. then take a day off, sit in the bath, make yourself a dairy-free smoothie with chia in it or whatever hippie shit, and do it again the next day.

i dropped a ton of weight when i first started working out regularly. make a schedule (easy) and stick to it (hard!). i find it helpful to plan to go to the gym WITH someone, so i feel like an asshole for canceling bc lazy and don't cancel. i bike to the gym and back, but this is not a feasible first step, especially if it's hot where you live.

make switches! use skim milk, swap for dark chocolate, fresh fruits instead of sugary dried fruits, et cetera. if it's green or meat, it's OK. if it's starchy, sugary or fatty*, have a smaller portion. trust your cravings. sometimes i need a fucking burger. that's ok too.

*some fat is good. avocados are good fat. avocados are GREAT fat. eat avocados. eggs are good and you can make them taste like anything. a cheap plastic tool can turn zucchinis and squashes into pasta texture, and a little frying makes them soft. drown them in sauce and they taste the same. replace butter with Some Hippie Not Butter Butter. use peanut butter liberally, it helped cut my appetite.

watch vegan youtube channels. read nasty fitspo blogs. really guilt yourself into making better life choices. don't let anyone else do it for you, if they do they're being dicks. it worked for me, and i dropped 2 pants sizes pretty damn quick.

 

@hanka I'm not sure if it will help, mostly due to brain shit that makes already difficult things (such as "schedules" and "enjoying things") twice as difficult. But it's nice to have someone be encouraging, so thank you.

Related: I've already pretty successfully removed drinkable calories from my diet. My housemates don't drink soda, and there's not enough space on my shelf of the fridge anyway. I get flavored seltzer water sometimes for soda craves. The only "danger" is going out to eat, which I'm doing less of *motions at sad wallet*.

Plus, I've never liked milk much, so I started drinking unsweetened almond milk & I like that so much more.

And that all just leaves alcohol, which I like but it's the easiest to resist.

 

fwiw, I found The Fat Nutritionist site helpful in sorting out my relationship toward food. I still have trouble, but it isn't anywhere near as dire as it used to be before I started reading her site. (My main problem has been putting her ideas into practice because I have no sense of time and a bad habit of tuning out alarms. >_>;)

If you want any exercise recs, let me know - I've found a good youtube channel for cardio you can do at home without a ton of space and no equipment, and they have programs suited for people coming in with all kinds of fitness levels or joint problems.

 

Hey friend Avery, I'm trying to curb some of my eating habits too.
What I've been trying to do is cut starchy carb portions to 2-3 a day, with most of them in the mornings for breakfast. I generally eat as many vegetables as I want, and have maybe 4 portions of meat proteins. Fruit carbs I have for of because that's where I satisfy my sugar cravings, but I still try to keep those down to 3 a day. I don't eat dairy at all because I am allergic, and I don't have use a lot of dressings and such on my salads. Also, I try to only drink water after 8 in the evening.
Some days it's easy, but most days it can be really hard. I feel like I do better when others around me are also being careful with their food choices, but I can't exercise self control for other people, lol. Maybe we can do a food accountability/exercise thread together to encourage each other to make healthier choices.

 

@Mercury I'll look into that site! And I would be interested in checking out that channel, thank you. :)

@Soul Good luck to you! If only it were as easy to eat produce as it is to eat a slice of bread. You don't have to WASH bread. XD

We have a treadmill in the basement. It's kind of a clunker but it's alright, and I managed to walk on it for a while. Walking is weird because it's either the most boring thing in existence, OR I get completely zoned out and suddenly I've exercised a lot.

 

@Avery it turns out they have a whole site - http://hasfit.com/ The workout I've been doing recently is this one, but without the handweights because I don't trust my tiny hands to keep a good grip on a waterbottle when I'm sweaty. :') The coach doing it's patter is kind of annoying but I ultimately found him more encouraging than not, and he's really good at giving countdowns so when you know how to switch. I also find it kind of fun! HASfit has simpler workouts too for people who aren't quite up to that one, and harder ones, ones that use equipment, etc. as well.

This blog I found that workout through has even more suggestions, but some of them take floorspace I don't have or look a little too hard, so I haven't tried them. Of the ones I have tried, Denise Austin strikes me as frighteningly manic (those rictus grins), the 12-minute circuit was good but a little much, the Jane Fonda one is good for days I'm feeling a bit slow and tired because it still gets my heart rate up without needing a ton of coordination and balance, and the Yes, You Have 9 Minutes to Work Out one is intense and kind of hard on the knees but it definitely does what it says on the tin. Get ready to drip with that one.

 

I'm seriously considering throwing out the granulated sugar that I have, because last night I had strawberries with my sugar rather than the other way around. I love sugar and I hate throwing out food though...

Today was okay foodwise, oatmeal with blueberries (and a reasonable amount of sugar) for breakfast, salad and apple for lunch, and then Mexican food for dinner (housemates were ordering out...). I think I would have skipped that had the salad I had for lunch not been so light. But.... I also slept A LOT today, like I slept pretty much the entire time between breakfast and lunch and I was so hungry when I woke up. Weh.

Then I went for a walk because Pokemon Go came out and I'm a huge nerd. >:3

Guh, I hate making plans for these things, because that makes it feel a lot worse when I don't follow through. But if I don't have something to follow, I completely lose track of what I'm doing. *lies down, waits for tomorrow when they can go chase Pokemon again*

 

I'm of the school of thought that says regularly netting below your BMR is a bad plan, especially since doing so exacerbated my depression. But dieting is such a subjective thing, so do what works for you.

What helped me the last time I set out to lose weight was using a calorie counter, which I know is not a viable option for everyone. At the time I had a pretty bad idea of calorie contents in general, and I was usually over-estimating. Combining a scale with the counter meant a more accurate picture of what I was eating, which meant that I was able to eat more and stay within my target, which in turn meant being able to stick to it. I started treating it like a budget; framing it as "I can have these chocolate bars now or I can have a big-ass steak for dinner" worked well for me.

I think the most important thing is treating yesterday as over and done with - don't punish yourself/restrict to make up for overeating: it makes you more likely to treat it as an all-or-nothing thing.

 

This is what I need to remind myself, I think. Like, it's one of those things you can be told, but it doesn't help unless you're able to embrace it, you know? I'll try keep it present in my mind so I'll be able to embrace it if that becomes possible. Thank you for pointing it out.

 

I'll add on to that: skipping meals is not, generally, helpful. It's not always avoidable, but doing it on the regular just tends to make your body all on edge, not knowing when it's going to get food next and wanting to stuff down everything while it has a chance just in case you never get anything ever again.

I found this out the hard way when I was overrestricting and I was hungry most of the time. I'd end up bingeing on the one day a week I'd go to a particular RPG group because the hosts always had lots of food and bought everyone dinner, and I felt really guilty about it and beat myself up about it over the week and resolved not to do it again - but I always ended up doing it again, because I was hungry the other six days of the week. (Not so coincidentally, that one day a week was usually the only day I could count on having a good mood.)

Eating regularly is better for bodies and metabolisms, and does a lot to quiet any animal fear that if you don't eat everything in sight right now you'll never get enough ever again.

 

Doing ANYTHING regularly has always been a crapshoot for me, unfortunately. Which, uh, is probably why I have the problems that I do! XD Recently I've been able to look at these things in terms of "not 100% my fault" because really, who would chose to feel like they need to sleep all day?

I've always hated missing meals because when I was younger I got awful headaches a lot, and being hungry was one of the triggers. I've outgrown the headaches (well, mostly) but it still feels like being hungry = the day being ruined because I'm about to be in severe pain & wreck all the plans because I need to lie down. ):

 

!! Same, but stomach aches. Hunger is a big anxiety trigger because it means I'm soon going to have an appalling stomach ache for 4 hours. I'm not sure if I've grown out of this or if I'm just an adult now and can eat enough food when I need to.

 

At the risk of jinxing myself by pointing it out, I'm gonna attempt to eat healthy without tracking my food. This is hard because I tend to forget I have certain foods, and then they go bad.

Hmm, I know there's apps for "here's a meal you can make with what you have in the fridge"... Is there a "here's what you have in the fridge" app? I need an inventory list. XD

 

The housemate who doesn't like fish smell 1) has a cold and 2) is at a doctors appointment.

This steelhead trout is delicious. >:3

 

@Avery May I suggest smoked salmon for when roommate's cold passes, for the delish fish flavour and also minimal fish smell? It is wonderful in omelets, among other uses.

 

I successfully made myself go home and make a healthy lunch of stuff I already had rather than keep running errands and risk getting cranky, sick, or buying food. GO ME.

I've had a decent supply of spoons for making food lately. I'm hoping this is a sign that the new meds are helping and not just a fluke!