Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

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Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby roundcoconut » Fri Jul 08, 2016 5:58 pm

So, I seem to have gotten myself into some weird overeating phase over the last week or so, and wanted to share. I have no idea why I like to publicly talk about my food indiscretions, but uh, I guess that's just what I do.

Anyways, for whatever reason, I started getting loose with my eating habits last week -- still eating wonderfully recommended foods, but I started having a meal after getting out of work, meaning picking up a bunch of groceries around 10pm, and eating around 11pm, and then going to sleep on a full stomach (meaning an overly full stomach).

So that was my first foray into a food pattern that feels really icky to me. Especially, I somehow was eating especially large quantities (like, a whole head of cooked cauliflower, a few red bell peppers, two peaches and two apples -- I know it sounds enormous, and it WAS beyond the comfort zone).

Another food pattern that I want to get back on track is the habit of buying the RIGHT amount of food at the store. Like, the above example is perfect -- I think I feel good about eating a head of cooked cauliflower in one sitting, OR the peaches and the bell peppers, but yikes! Buying all that food is just a set-up for a binge.

So: here's my thought -- buy three items at the store, not eight. Make sure they fit into three bowls (like, lentils in one bowl, peaches in another, tomatoes in another). So even if I buy a whole kabocha squash, there's no WAY that that should be cooked all at once or eaten in one sitting!

And thirdly (good lord! I am such a mess some days!), two meals a day during daylight hours is probably much, much better for me. Meaning, there's no need for me to be in the produce aisle at 10pm!

If anyone is needing the reminder that whole natural foods are not "free" or not a good idea to eat in unlimited quantities and beyond satiety, my last week or so can attest to this! (I would have to look more closely to see when this all started 0-- I'm not 100% sure, but I DO write down my weight in the mornings.) Today was the first day since last weekend, that I did not wake up with a still-full stomach (which feels like crap!) and that was only because I had dinner at a friend's house last night.

But then I had a big, huge, obnoxious late-lunch-early-dinner today (whole head of kabocha squash, some carrots, some plums, and two red bell peppers) which put me right back into not-so-hot eating practices. I just think eating food well beyond satiety is a step in the (very) wrong direction for me, so I had to come clean!

Throw any thoughts my way that come to you! I'm glad it's only been a handful of days, not weeks or months. So I'm not too far gone! :)
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby hope101 » Fri Jul 08, 2016 8:22 pm

My first thought, just looking at your food description, is that you might have been undereating starch. If you haven't already watched Dr. Lisle's two Youtube interviews on emotional eating, I'd highly recommend them. Might ring a few bells.

If you're certain that's not the issue, may I project my own hobgoblins onto you, roundcoconut? Sounds to me like part of you, stuck in this crazy food environment, was yearning to rebel from your normal pattern of uber stability and conscientiousness. Nobody--that is, nobody human--will go without experimenting periodically. Adjusting their long-time habits to see if they still fit and are absolutely necessary.

When you think of it, that's probably a useful quality in many areas of life, and one reason human beings have thrived as a species.
Also, you are engineered to eat more in times of plenty. In the natural world, a few weeks of modest overeating would self-correct.

The important thing is that you consciously abandoned your self-imposed/self-protective limits and got rapid feedback.

Even better, the results were a disappointment. Now you know you' are not the one person in the world who can escape the laws of thermodynamics. :)

I myself, periodically, have to prove this to myself. I think it's when I get tired of my inner health-tyrant and want to make her wrong. In the past, rather than loosen the reins a bit until I can regroup, or being proactive and finding a way to feel spoiled on plan, I've chosen to go unconscious. I stop weighing myself and take off my pedometer. Next thing I know, the food begins to slip. At a certain point, the predictable results are unacceptable and I begin again.

We all have to find that "certain point", IMHO. For me, that's choosing to stay conscious. The minute I start lying to myself, I seem to lose the capacity to correct course and the health fluctuations are bigger.

Anyway, hope that helps. Be kind to yourself. You're a normal person in an abnormal world.
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby DeborahAnn » Wed Jul 13, 2016 1:54 pm

I think that Hope has a very good point about not eating enough starch. That being said, I do not see anything wrong at all about the amount of food you are eating. I mean, how bad can a whole head of cauliflower be? It seems like you are eating large quantities of excellent, low fat foods. Did you gain weight from eating this way? I would be surprised if you did. But as Hope says, maybe if you add more solid starches to your diet with rice, legumes and TATES! That would slow down your eating, if it is even a problem at all.
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby Katydid » Wed Jul 13, 2016 2:15 pm

I agree with the other posters that your diet may be a bit "understarched". Not that you ever need to limit your vegetables, but I hope fear of "carbs" isn't causing you to restrict your starch intake. I also wonder why your are eating so late at night if you aren't eating for hunger. If the overeating is a way to handle internalized stress (speaking from experience here), you may want to consider another outlet. For example, an evening walk, a warm bath, some bedtime yoga or meditation, or just grab a good book and hit the sheets early. I rather read than eat any day :lol:
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby Partly Cloudy » Wed Jul 13, 2016 2:18 pm

I will third the opinion that it sounds possible that you'd just not eaten enough starch.

From my understanding of Doug Lisle's talks, I think maybe you actually weren't eating to satiety. That the cauliflower and red bell peppers, peaches and apples just weren't calorie-dense enough to set off your stomach's "OK I've had enough" signal, and you kept on eating until you were over-stuffed.

It doesn't seem like all that would add up to more than 500-600 calories, so I don't think there was too much harm done.

But if it makes you feel "icky", then I understand why you want to stop eating that way.

Have you tried eating raw foods first, then cooked starch, then legumes? Raw to start to fill your stomach, then starch and legumes to help send the satiety signal to your digestive system.
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby Ltldogg » Wed Jul 13, 2016 2:27 pm

Dr. McDougall is very clear that fruits and non-starchy vegetables are not satiating and thus recommends that most of the diet is starches with just a little fruits and veggies.
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby roundcoconut » Wed Jul 13, 2016 6:49 pm

hope101 wrote:My first thought, just looking at your food description, is that you might have been undereating starch. If you haven't already watched Dr. Lisle's two Youtube interviews on emotional eating, I'd highly recommend them. Might ring a few bells.


hope101, thanks so much for your thoughts! It really is possible that my quantities were a bit off -- I honestly can't remember what I had eaten on the day this nonsense started, nor on subsequent days that the pattern continued. All I know is that my sense of my own consistent, reasonable, and satisfying eating patterns seemed to disappear as I had these forays into inappropriate eating!

It is always so difficult to discern the emotional overeating component, from the biological component! Like, there is motive and then there is opportunity (as with any crime!) -- and in this case, I gave myself the opportunity to overeat by purchasing food (and too much for one sitting at that) at 10pm -- there was my first step down a bad path. But then, who even knows whether there was a biological component! I don't remember feeling hungry (and certainly not after the first pound of food consumed!), but can proper adequate nutrition help keep us out of a place where we experience decision fatigue, and thus do weird things to upset our peace with food? Possibly!

hope101 wrote:Nobody--that is, nobody human--will go without experimenting periodically. Adjusting their long-time habits to see if they still fit and are absolutely necessary.


Yes! I've definitely been experimenting over the last month or so -- when I eat vegetables freely and frequently, do I need to eat more often??? I dunno. When I work until 10pm, do I need to return to a food-free home, in order to sleep well and not trigger a round of overconsumption? Probably!

I also am not sure, because my starch consumption has been largely white rice and/or lentils -- so I really have so many variables that are experimental -- potatoes have been my go-to for seven or eight months, up until I got my magical fancy fuzzy-logic rice cooker. And I DO have total respect for the satiety of the taters! But I had been tater-free for about a month, and dealing in less satiating starches, including ones that Dr McDougall does not consider starches at all, like snap peas.

Also, you say how humans are engineered to eat more in times of plenty, and I like this explanation! When I bring four pounds of food home from the grocery store, I am designed to eat them, because otherwise my inner homo sapien just figures the bears will eat them, or they will rot, or who knows what! So -- I am keeping this in mind now -- exercise a few minutes of intelligence at the grocery store, and then I am perfectly safe to let my biology take over at home (and eat the whole stash, because it's appropriate in quantity and quality!)

But gosh, I am just today getting to the point where there is no ready-to-make food in the house, and I can go back to the patterns that have served me well for months and months. Happily, my body has not suffered any toll in terms of taking on any excess weight -- I''ve been between 102 and 108 for the last six months or so, and am right about in the middle of that this morning. But y'know when you start patterns that don't end well, and yeah, we caught it before it turned into a snowball of craziness, chaos and increasing quantities that would've approached true destructive binge eating!
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby roundcoconut » Wed Jul 13, 2016 7:43 pm

DeborahAnn wrote:I think that Hope has a very good point about not eating enough starch. That being said, I do not see anything wrong at all about the amount of food you are eating. I mean, how bad can a whole head of cauliflower be? It seems like you are eating large quantities of excellent, low fat foods. Did you gain weight from eating this way? I would be surprised if you did. But as Hope says, maybe if you add more solid starches to your diet with rice, legumes and TATES! That would slow down your eating, if it is even a problem at all.


I know! It seems illogical that vegetables could be bad, except that I feel I can easily spiral into binge eating, and that was never a healthy place to be!

Like, if you are the kind of person (as I am) who opens the door to eating two pounds of food at 10pm once; then tomorrow it is much easier to again eat two pounds of food at 10pm, and then the next day three pounds of food sneak in, and it all tends to become a mess.

The big problem about binge eating is that you tend to want to be alone with your food (there is nothing good about this!), and you tend to want to hide your problem (like, let me stop at one grocery store today, and then the other grocery store tomorrow, and uh, I'll pretend that I'm shopping for "my family" (uh, I'm single), or I'll exist under the illusion that no one really looks at how much frigging food I'm buying -- I mean, the mentality of the binge eater is a horrible place to be.

I mean, for me, yes, it would eventually carry my weight up ten or fifteen pounds, but even if I would look nice or have good cholesterol levels at "n + 20pounds", it would just be a life unlived. Like, I think eating because you want something to do, and eating because you are addicted to some dopamine effect of mass quantities of food, is really no one's life purpose. Eating can fuel your life, but it can never BE your life.

Yeah, binge eating is a weird thing, because a binge eater avoids relationships so that they can be alone. And they develop horrible feelings about their dysfunctional patterns in life. I mean, it's good that I still look cute in a pair of shorts, but it is weird and bad to wake up with a distended belly from eating way too much the night before.

I DO notice that the binge eaters and the food addicts are not always heavy, although the three populations really seem to "get" each other -- the thin food addicts, and the heavy food addicts and the heavy not-so-much-food-addicts.

Does that make sense? I have always had a theory that my mother was a binge eater as well, as she used to stay up late at night, and as her marriage crumbled, her weight spiraled upwards. Later in life, when she was already divorced, she told me that she would eat herself to sleep, and would sometimes wake up with crumbs on the sheets and unchewed food in her mouth. So, I guess I have some binge eating tendencies from her, and have to kinda make sure i don't let things get chaotic and stupid.

I will eat my taters! With vegetables. Rice some days. But I am solidly back on potatoes daily or every other day as my starch, with starch not neglected at all. (Had rice for dinner tonight -- uh, just plain rice because I didn't get to the store today -- so I don't think I'm becoming starch-phobic!)
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby roundcoconut » Wed Jul 13, 2016 8:05 pm

Katydid wrote:I agree with the other posters that your diet may be a bit "understarched". Not that you ever need to limit your vegetables, but I hope fear of "carbs" isn't causing you to restrict your starch intake. I also wonder why your are eating so late at night if you aren't eating for hunger. If the overeating is a way to handle internalized stress (speaking from experience here), you may want to consider another outlet.


Yeah, I'm not entirely sure how I went down the tubes there. My late-nite semi-binges really lasted for like two weeks total, because even last night, I still had a bunch of food in the house when I got home, and I made, uh, three bowls of oatmeal -- I just need to keep one meal in the house at a time for now. This is how I've always operated, and I know that I develop solid patterns when I do not provide myself with the opportunity to eat pounds upon pounds of anything, whether fruits, starches, vegetables or legumes. Just -- binge eaters shouldn't open the door to binge eating, and when they do, it's hard to close the door on it again.

I am still figuring it out! I like eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, and I am by no means calorie deficient. I think there is some truth to what what's-her-name talks about (the Bright Line Eating woman) about people having decision fatigue at the end of the day. It seems like nearly everyone I talk to, has a better chance of making smart food decisions earlier in the day, and then after eight or ten hours of decision-making at work, they start giving themselves over to their stupider impulses. The Bright Line Eating woman says to take the decisions out of your eating -- where your dinner consumption involves no thought and no opportunity for failure, because it's pretty much been determined in advance.

In my case, I'm pretty much going back to old patterns, of eating a few large meals during the day, and then returning to a kitchen with nothing edible. Takes the decisions out of it, so no matter how stupid I am after ten hours of work, I can't go astray whatsoever.
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby roundcoconut » Fri Jul 15, 2016 6:01 pm

Partly Cloudy wrote:I will third the opinion that it sounds possible that you'd just not eaten enough starch.

From my understanding of Doug Lisle's talks, I think maybe you actually weren't eating to satiety. That the cauliflower and red bell peppers, peaches and apples just weren't calorie-dense enough to set off your stomach's "OK I've had enough" signal, and you kept on eating until you were over-stuffed.

It doesn't seem like all that would add up to more than 500-600 calories, so I don't think there was too much harm done.

But if it makes you feel "icky", then I understand why you want to stop eating that way.

Have you tried eating raw foods first, then cooked starch, then legumes? Raw to start to fill your stomach, then starch and legumes to help send the satiety signal to your digestive system.


Yeah, I don't know what the relationship is -- if you have a "meal" that is high in fiber and water content, and more than ample in calories -- does your biology reject that in some way? From what you are saying, it sounds like you believe the answer is Yes, and I'm inclined to agree with you actually!

I was eating today, and I noticed that my first meal of the day (oatmeal with craisins - maybe 1.5 cups cooked) makes me want to go get more food. So, an hour later or so, I ate two apples and a yellow squash, and a really small head of cauliflower. (You know those organic heads of cauliflower! They are the size of a grapefruit, not much bigger). And combined, this felt like a really happy meal to me.

Then at my second meal of the day, I made a bowl of savory oats (with maybe 2/3 cup of dried oats cooked up with lots of water so it was still soupy, and with some finely diced vegetables in the dish to give it flavor. While it was cooking, I had three small Roma tomatoes, two tiny oranges, and a (tiny) green bell pepper and a large cooked onion. Oh, and a big red bell pepper, too.

Uh, all I can say (writing those quantities down!) is that I know this sounds like a crap-ton of food, but I'm kinda OK with that, and don't find this level of food intake to come from an emotionally unhealthy place. I like to have two large meals -- not ridiculously high in starch, but not deficient either. I feel satisfied, and pretty full, and really comfortable and peaceful, after today's dinner.

And I will cool it with the "high-starch vegetables" in place of oats and potatoes! I can only guess that eating lots of snap peas and calling those my starch, is not the best idea for someone trying to maintain emotional and biological sanity around food.

My new rule will have to be to include starch AT EVERY SINGLE MEAL, WHETHER HUNGRY OR NOT HUNGRY -- which is probably a good idea for someone with any binge eating tendencies. Like, if you are going to eat (even if you are going to eat a meal in the absence of hunger), make sure you put some starch on your plate, because it seems to give a sense of mental and biological satisfaction. It seems to make our lizard-brain happy! (Our brain stem must like starches? -- that is my only guess!)

Well, those are my commentaries! I think some people will read this and think I eat like an insane woman (I've never had to post the quantities of fruits and vegetables I'm eating before!), but days like today are pretty sustainable for me, generally.

If I start going batty again with late night eating, I will post here and update!
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Re: Am Getting Through An Overeating Phase

Postby Franchesca_S. » Fri Jul 29, 2016 2:34 pm

Roundcoconut,
This has been an interesting thread. I work four ten hour days with a long commute, so I'm up very early and get home late plus then I need to exercise and eat. When I leave the office I've generally had my snacks and am not thinking about dinner, but by 7pm I get hit with that hunger (food!) at the same time that I need to be thinking about getting enough sleep (not too much food). I also go through periods of overeating. Lately I've found a pretty good solution. For daytime meals I get my combinations of starches and vegetables and the two servings of fruit. Last week for dinner I tried just making a bit plate of vegetables each night. It's low calorie, doesn't cause heartburn, fills me up. I've been sleeping better and I think my blood sugar has been more level through the night.
I think you're beating yourself up about the late eating. You work late and it means you eat late. So do I.
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