Pieces of advice for a food lover

Hi guys. I have a small problem. Namely, I love eating. I used to be quite chubby, then to please the-one-I-hoped-to-be-my-girlfriend-but-no-way I lost some 20 kilos. Now I look cool but I still love eating. It's not that I'm always hungry but I love certain tastes. For example I have mornings when I wake up and get a red alert in my brain: "today I gotta eat a big spicy pizza with pepperoni, no matter what it takes". I can fight it, do something else, study, play guitar, name it; but I keep thinking about the food I'd like to eat...and at the end of the day I end up eating the pizza.

Do you have any idea how to "talk my organism out" of behaving like that? As long as I hoped to be with that girl, I had motivation but now there's absolutely NOTHING which motivates me to keep my weight at the constant level while at the same time I don't want to waste what I've already achieved. The official statement is that I'm on a diet but whenever somebody asks me to go for a pizza or a kebab, I never refuse.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2010 11:28AM by abdelkader.

Now you've lost the weight, just burn the calories instead of limiting them. Get out on a bike or take up running or something.

I used to bike a lot, and regardless of what I ate (none of which was healthy), I was still thin as a thin thing. The biking stopped (well became far, far less frequent) when I was getting back at 6:30 each night, and of course, as my diet didn't change (and I still refuse to change it) the weight came on very quickly - hardly much, but still enough to struggle to get back the energy or motivation to get back out on the bike in order to do something about it...

You've done the hard work - it's easy to keep it at bay now.

Very solid plus one for what Gav said.

I'll delve deeper, if you'll permit me, as doctor mike....

Firstly, you mentioned that it's "some" days where you wake up wanting something or other....can you see a pattern in what days these are? Perhaps, for example, days where you're not busy with your job/study or days when you're feeling a bit down? Secondly, why have you lost motivation? (re the girl)?

Thirdly, how did you lose the weight to start with? Are you still doing whatever it was?

Answer what you see fit. I'm also PMable

Thanks for advice guys. I'll have to think about taking up running. Up until recent days I used my stationary bike but my doctor discouraged me from doing it as I can't raise the bike's saddle anymore which seriously harms the knees as they are bent all the time (I've got some cyst under my knee and the doctor says that training with the unadjusted bike will do me more harm than good). Luckily, warm days have come and I'll be able to do some running as I said.

Well, I don't see any pattern in it - sometimes there are three days in a row on which I feel like eating this or that, sometimes it's like 2-3 weeks I don't want to eat anything. There's no regularity in it, I suppose.

Speaking of my motivation. I used to be chubby and I never really felt bad with it as I liked my body and never thought about losing weight. When I fell in love I thought it'd be cool to lose some weight to be more attractive. When that love thing didn't work out I realized I was thin and now I simply don't want to waste it ...but there has never been any other reason for which I wanted to be thin.

How I lost weight? Oh my God...that's a story
My breakfast - a slice of bread with two slices of tomato, 100 pushups. Lunch - a soup or a chop of pork (or nothing, if I didn't want to eat), 100 pushups. Dinner - nothing, 50 pushups. That was my daily routine but I soon developed some infections and felt powerless as my immunological system seriously deteriorated. I think I was undernourished. I reached my goal of losing weight but I paid a huge bill for it. Of course I had to give up on this method.
From the mid of 2009 I started putting on weight again. At the beginning it was a slow process but recently I noticed it's speeding up.

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2010 02:03PM by abdelkader.

find another girl who wont date you

but in all seriousness, exersise is good

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"Arguing on the internet is like taking part in the Special Olympics...Even if you win you're still retarded"

Naboo Wrote:
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> find another girl who wont date you


I arrived at the same conclusion recently

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Eating nothing for dinner isn't a good way to lose weight, because your body becomes accustomed to not having any energy coming in, and so it stores fat.

IMHO so long as you stick to a sensible balanced diet (i.e. a range of things, not too much of anything) then you'll be fine. But I'm not really one to offer advice, I'm one of those annoying people who feasts on whatever I like and never puts a single kilo on.

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K*bots UK, specialist providers of 'fun science' Curriculum Enhancement days for Primary and Secondary schools in Britain.
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I would be wary of running if you have anything wrong with your knees. I can't do any impact sports due to a previous knee injury, if i go running my knee swells up like mad. So i stick to low impact stuff like swimming and cycling.

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i can't run for sh*&, i feel like i'm going to die after about 2 minutes. but i can cycle for over an hour unbroken, varying the resistance on my exercise bike throughout. i found it boring to do in the back room of the house, so started listening to music through wireless headphones linked to my computer, and that passed the time a bit better.

then i hooked up my PS2 on a small tv in the room with the bike in, and so now i just put a DVD on while cycling, and the time just flies by when your mind is concentrating on the tv rather than the biking.

so now i don't reluctantly go and cycle, i just see it as time spent watching tv which i would have done anyway, and cycling is the accidental by-product. getting over the mentality of seeing excercise as a chore is probably the biggest and hardest hurdle to overcome when trying to get fit, and to stay fit once you're there.

don't become obsessive about missing food and training many times in the day. start something that you can realistically continue in the coming weeks, months and years. otherwise you'll burn yourself out in a few months and stop, instead of doing less exercise but continuing it over a long period in your life.

i just try to cycle for at least an hour 3 or 4 times a week, and that's very achievable. if you want the big pizza, then have it, just stick to some sort of realistic exercise regime and try to make it less dull and boring by including music or tv if you can.

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RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael

One fascinating alternative is the "Big Brother" inspired method of connecting your TV to a dynamo powered by the exercise bike. The TV only works when you power it up by using the bike. No exercise? No TV.

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K*bots UK, specialist providers of 'fun science' Curriculum Enhancement days for Primary and Secondary schools in Britain.
Please find us on [en.wikipedia.org] for more information.

Locke Cole Wrote:
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> One fascinating alternative is the "Big Brother"
> inspired method of connecting your TV to a dynamo
> powered by the exercise bike. The TV only
> works when you power it up by using the bike. No
> exercise? No TV.

You've made my day I also thought about that one day but it was one of those mad-scientist-like-thing-which-one-only-thinks-about-and-never-gonna-do ideas


Now seriously. I decided to do some jogging early in the morning when there's nobody around on the streets. Starting from tomorrow :D
It's already bright at 6 AM so I think I can cope with it. They have just made a looong and wide pavement near my house. I'm gonna give it a go.
I also used to cycle with my tv on. I once had been cycling already for an hour or something and watching a snooker game Ebdon vs Higgins. I said to myself "Ok, I'm gonna finish as soon as this frame ends"...The frame lasted around one hour as a result of lots of safety plays. I thought I'd kill Ebdon for that...if I didn't die of a heart attack first, of course
I also find stationary cycling quite boring and I'd always take my mp3 player for the practice some time ago.

Yes, I know that if I stop eating my organism will start storing fat "just in case". However, other things never worked in my case. For example, I was thin in 2007 and 2008. In February 2009 I got a blue collar job and my weight would stand still. However, from June onwards I started putting on weight despite working just as hard as before. Now I don't work there anymore and my weight started increasing even faster.
I hope that morning jogging is gonna get my guts going :P

As it comes to running with my knee cyst - it won't do me no harm. The knees are not bent all the time, the blood circulates all over the body faster than normally, as you're not sitting on anything while running so it's ok in my case. I only hope I'm not gonna die after two minutes as Muks_C wrote

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2010 08:36PM by abdelkader.

I should probably start exercising. My diet hasnt changed, and my exercise hasnt changed (From none, to none) and ive put on 4stone in 12months.

Sim

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"I'd love to know what goes on in that crazy head of yours sometimes, Sim..." - Locke Cole