From skwigg's journal:
I want to elaborate on what I said in Tonya's journal about how my processed foods versus whole foods ratio has shifted. I said:
My processed to whole foods ratio may be more like 40/60, or 30/70. I do eat mostly whole foods, but barely. It's not the 90% plants and animals I used to shoot for. Clean eating didn't agree with me at all.
It really didn't. The vibrant good health that was supposed to happen? It was more like being cold all the time, being constipated, having no energy, walking around with a painfully bloated belly, insomnia, anxiety, not particularly enjoying my food, cravings, weight struggles, bingey lapses, obsessing about food every waking moment. Woohoo! Clean eating!
I used to believe that thing that if you eat 90 percent unprocessed whole foods, 10 percent of the time, you can eat food you actually want. This was a recipe for crazy. The slightly more lenient 80/20 version of that still made me hysterical. I'd be trying to math out cheat meals, or track treats, or schedule them in weird ways. The overplanning didn't help my mindset at all. It kept me very focused on what I couldn't eat, or what I could only eat at certain times. Then the flip side of that was the default overconsumption of safe foods. If they were whole and unprocessed, they wouldn't make me gain weight, right? Oh, oops, wrong.
Crazy Matt Stone actually helped out a lot here by exposing me to the idea that I might physically feel a whole lot better if I ate some bread and butter once in awhile, or ice cream, or salt. I certainly did!
Then Intuitive Eating came along and reinforced the idea that I could be eating what I want every time I eat, not following any particular ratio or scheme. I was surprised to learn that I still want chicken and vegetables. I tend not to enjoy dry skinless chicken breast and plain steamed vegetables, but who does?
Flavor is pretty important. Left to my own devices, I still like meat, fish, eggs, fruits & veggies, nuts, seeds, beans, and whole grains just fine. I tend to especially like them with fat and processed carbs. :-)
Lean Habit #4 is Eat Mostly Whole Foods. I think I still do that, but like I said, barely, not by a landslide or anything, and definitely not every day or every meal. It's more like over time I do.
Today so far I have eaten: Most of a frozen pizza (with extra veggies on it), several spoonfuls of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Fudge Core, half a bottle of Pepsi, another big piece of cold pizza, four Italian holiday/wedding cookies, and a bottle of kombucha. I can't even begin to pass that off as some kind of plan I'm following. LOL But it's exactly what I wanted. Later I will want a couple of tacos, chips & salsa, and more cookies.
It's not clean eating, or calorie counting, or special meal timing, or no snacking. It is eating what I want, when I'm hungry, and to satisfaction. Because I can always have whatever I want, and I can eat again whenever I'm hungry, I tend not to overdo it very often. There's no reason to overeat anymore, definitely no compulsion to do it, not like when I was feeling hungry and restrained from dieting.
A question for you - so based on all of the above discussion, would it be safe to assume that you absolutely never have any conscious feelings of being deprived of what you really want anymore? Do you ever have to make the decision to 'say no' when you want to keep eating or 'be good' when you want to eat donuts but should have your regular cereal? Like you never feel like you are having to exercise self-control to eat the way you do now? Or maybe you do consciously exercise self-control and that is what is at the heart of it? The self-control to eat in accordance with your values?
Ooh, interesting questions. It is safe to assume that I never have any feelings of deprivation. I eat whatever I want, often as soon as I think of it. I never "say no" or "be good" or "should" myself. I never exercise self-control. That was all painful, faulty, f$%ed up diet thinking that had to go.
If I want to keep eating because I'm hungry, I keep eating. If I want to keep eating because the food is good, I consider how that's going to feel an hour from now and decide accordingly. Sometimes it's totally worth it and sometimes it was only the idea of continuing to eat that sounded fun, but I'd really rather not. Weight doesn't enter into it. I'm thinking about how I want to feel.
That's a kind of faulty diet thinking again if I'm telling myself I want donuts but should have cereal. (Why? So I'll live forever? So I don't get fat? To impress the food police?). I don't do that to myself anymore. If it's breafast time and I want donuts (or cake, or cookies) and those sweet foods are in the house, honestly, I'll usually have both, a smaller serving of cereal, a yogurt, and then the cookie. If it's not in the house, I'll picture myself sitting in rush hour traffic, half asleep, in my floppy pajama pants, in the cold, driving to get the donuts. Do I want them that badly? No, never. LOL So, I'll just make a mental not to myself, "Hey, donuts sound good. Find an opportunity to eat one soon." Sometimes the feeling sticks with me and I do find and eat a donut a few hours or days later. Sometimes I totally forget about it, or come across them and don't want them anymore. But I never, ever tell myself no. It's more like, "Not now, maybe later." And that's only because it's not convenient now, not because I "shouldn't" eat something.
Self-control doesn't work, not for long. If you're trying to achieve any objective using willpower or self-control, you're doomed because there's a really limited supply of those. They will run out. You will do the exact opposite of what you intended, usually with some real enthusiasm.
So, no, I never feel like I'm exercising self-control at all with regard to my eating. I'm freely choosing based on how I want to feel. That changes, so it's not like there's one right answer when I want donuts for breakfast or want to keep eating candy. Generally, I'll have a taste of something as soon as I think of it, or decide to have two more and then stop, or decide I'm good for now and look forward to having more later. There are no attempts to "should" myself anymore. Those were stories I made up when I was dieting, the ones about deprivation and self-control. They turned out not to be true.