Asarver's Journal, 03 November 2014

I am familiar with that vicious cycle. I often binge when I am feeling particularly fat and icky. I am sorry to hear that you don't get more support at home. FS is a great place to find good support. Take it one day at a time as you get back to healthier eating, and maybe increase your exercise if you can fit in your schedule. I read somewhere that exercise can boost confidence and make people feel more fit. Even in the short run, people feel better about their bodies on days that they exercise. Might be a good place to start!  

For the past two months I've been running / walking about 5 times a week, zumba at least once a week, and I do weights once a week. So I guess it really comes down to me just eating way too much food. :/ Thank you for the support! I appreciate it. I did slightly better today. I think I'm going to count my calories for this week to see where I can make adjustments before I start trying to modify my eating schedule.  

Just to be clear... you are beautiful; you are not fat; 3 slices of pizza on your worst day is hardly binge eating. Plowing through an entire bag of Oreo's in one sitting? That is binge eating! If I could offer you some advice it would be this... track everything at least for a month... "You measure what you want to improve". If you don't know what is going in, then you have no way to calculate what your result will be. You have very little to lose at 5'-4", so don't expect 2-3 lbs lost per week. Aim for 1 lb of fat loss per week , while building muscle at the same time, and your leaner 130 lb body will look better than your "skinny-fat" 120 lb body. Check out the Fast Calorie Calculator on the free site I list in my profile, as I believe it is more accurate than the RDI the calorie counter app uese. Still use the app to track your progress, just get your education from the sites I reference. Looked at a couple of your high calorie days in your log and I see 8 oz chicken for lunch?.. that's like an entire small chicken breast... is that what you actually ate? 4 oz is usually the size of the palm of your hand. Happy "body recomposition-ing"! 

You are beautiful so now don't give up and start working for better and prettier yourself!! 

I'm there with you. I've been eating way too much lately and haven't recorded it, mostly out of shame, but I started recording yesterday and I already feel better about myself. I need to get on the same page as you with the exercise though! Great job keeping up with that! Count those calories and cut out some of that sugar, and I'm sure the losses will come quickly. We can do this, we are beautiful, and we are strong! We just have to figure out how to take the control back over our lives and stop letting food over rule our better judgment. :) 

So, when I started this journey, I had the same problems you describe. I basically started telling myself that food was for nutrition and that's why I needed, not because I liked chocolate or pizza or even for entertainment. I just kept telling myself over and over and MADE myself pick the healthier choices even though I wanted the worse ones....and now I look at it as both nutrition and because I like to eat healthier things. I've found healthier replacements, sure I can indulge in the others from time to time but I know that it's at some cost to my journey. Once your mind gets on board, it'll be so much easier. 

ckworksalot - I think the recording my food (as much as I don't want to do it) really does help. I feel like it's opening my eyes to what I eat, and I feel like I'm doing a little something even if it isn't quite cutting back on food yet. Usually when I measure raw chicken 4 oz never seems like enough (I measure most of my food with a kitchen scale), and so I always eat around 8. Thank you everyone for the support!! Slowly but surely I'll get myself back on track to eating healthy. :) Cutting out sugar is the hard part. Lately it feels like it's just because of habit, which is really bad. I'll definitely start with that! :p 

I was the same way wrt recording intake... once you see where the cals are coming from, it is easy to say no to those cals. "Protein in Chicken According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 4 ounces of grilled chicken contain about 36 grams of protein. Since chicken is an animal protein, it contains all of the essential amino acids you require on a daily basis to build proteins within your body. Therefore, the protein in grilled chicken is considered a high-quality, complete protein. Protein Requirements Eating 4 ounces of grilled chicken boosts your protein intake to more than half of your recommended dietary allowance, or RDA, for protein. According to the Institute of Medicine, protein RDAs are 56 grams for men and 46 grams of protein per day for women. If you exercise regularly, you likely need additional protein -- 0.64 to 0.91 gram per pound of body weight each day, according to the position stand of the International Society of Sports Nutrition." Worth noting that most of my reading research shows that the body can only process about 40 grams of protein at a time for protein synthesis (for muscle repair). So you ate 72 grams of protein with 8 oz of chicken... anything above approximately 40 g gets converted for use as energy. No biggie... just not being used for protein synthesis. Becaue I have 150 LBM, and I want to build muscle, I eat 150g protein per day, or about 30g per meal/snack... so all gets used in syntehesi.  

Asarver, you're doing well by weighing and recording your food. Yes it's annoying, but it works.  

You are beautiful , keep trying ,never give up