What a powerful statement. As a woman, honestly ask yourself: Do you really let yourself eat anything you want for an entire day? I know I have perhaps been less strict with myself on days (well, actually a lot of days :) but, I don't think I have ever said, Okay, today it's anything goes. I bring this up because I just read this funny/sad article in the April 2009 Ladies' Home Journal. The woman who wrote it is a member of Weight Watchers, but too many "emaciated people who have no business being at a meeting" prompted her to walk out, vowing to splurge on anything that day. First stop Dunkin Donuts (what would your first stop be?), where she ate 1/3 box of donuts (normally she has black coffee there-no wonder she needed to binge!) Lunch consisted of Bacon Cheeseburger, lots of very salted fries, and a chocolate malted with whipped cream. After a trip to the bookstore to look at cookbooks, she stopped at a cafe to have a piece of chocolate cake. Right about now as I was reading this, I was wondering how much this lady weighs, cause I probably would have stopped there. I'll continue telling you what she ate the rest of the day cause you won't believe it, but first I want to share one of her insights with you. I loved her description of "fat" people and what skinny people think of them. She says skinny people envision fat people lounging on sofa immensely enjoying a carton of Ben and Jerry's or a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. She states, and I know this to be true, that when you are in that guilty act of overeating, you are eating and eating with your shoulders hunched and your head down, and you gobble things without even tasting them. She says "You start with I want and you end with I want, only now you have even more weight added to what is already too much and don't you think we know if all, all, all the time!" Powerful words, I think.
After Lunch, she watched two movies that made her more hungry, so she went out to get a turtle sundae, extra caramel sauce, plus a big bag of Cheetos. At this point I am loving this lady, as she explains that every time she flies she buys a bag of Cheetos, because if she goes down, at least she has had a bag of Cheetos! (again, what is the food you would want on the plane? For me I guess dark chocolate). Dinner: A nice steak with sauteed buttered mushrooms, loaded baked potato with bacon, sour cream, butter, and Caesar salad with a buttered baguette. Apple crisp and crumbled cherry pie topped off the meal. Before it was ready, she helped herself to a martini with olives stuffed with bleu cheese and potato chips dipped in Lipton Onion Soup mix dip. Okay, are you freaking out at this point, because I certainly was. I think I enjoyed reading this because it made me look like an angel. Why am I fretting over my 2 glasses of wine and extra helping of dinner? She is REALLY BAD. Well, as you may have guesses, after her binge, she literally smashed her scale with a wooden mallet. OMG! She ends the article by going to her Weight Watchers meeting the next day, four pounds heavier. Your supposed to confess your slip-ups, but she didn't She just started counting points the next day. I started asking myself, would I want to do that. What's four pounds to experience that kind of freedom. The good news is I don't want to do that, not to that extent. But I wonder: Is it worse to cheat a little every day, therefore keeping the status quo in terms of a weight your not happy with? Or should you binge like a crazy lady once in a while, but then really stick to the plan? Since I have very little discipline, I think I would go through with the binge, but still continue to cheat a little each day. So, that won't work for me. Would you be able to do that? I'll leave you with the last comment that the author of the article made that may help you decide if you want to. She states "I would like to end this by saying that it felt really good to cheat all day long, to eat whatever I wanted. But it didn't. " I think we all knew that. When your thighs start throbbing because your excess food just has no where to go (imaginary or not), there is no way to feel good!
Best of BISJ: Bikini meet torment
15 years ago
1 comment:
There's nothing wrong with eating everything you want. In fact, giving yourself permission to do so helps you find the balance of EVERYTHING YOU WANT and EVERYTHING YOU NEED. Research shows that severe dietary restriction (in other words eating a very low calorie diet that restricts or forbids some foods to be eaten at all) leads to dietary disinhibition (overeating and ignoring body cues that one is eating way too much). I also would like to address the "you're supposed to confess your slip ups" at Weight Watchers meetings statement. That's a popular myth, but Weight Watchers isn't like AA where you are expected to confess. Members are encouraged to ask for help from the leader and each other if they are comfortable doing so. Members are also encouraged to sit back and listen. Leaders are trained to make a Weight Watchers meeting a comfortable environment for all members and that means no member is every "put on the spot" by being asked to confess. Weight loss progress, or lack of progress is kept confidential between the member and the weigher. If a member wants to share that she's gained weight in a meeting, she may. If she wants to keep that information to herself then nobody else will ever know. Finally gaining four pounds of body fat in one day is practically impossible. It takes 3500 unburned calories to gain one pound. Therefore she would have needed to eat four times that amount to gain four pounds. The increase in body weight as a result of a day of eating everything she wanted was mostly fluid needed to process (digest) that amount of food. Salty foods and foods high in carbohydrates tends to make one retain extra fluid which explains why the scale showed such a dramatic rise.
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