Making Changes

I know I have to look at losing weight differently than I have in the past if I want to succeed where I have failed so many times.  I need to implement real changes in the way I live so that I don't feel like I'm constantly "on a diet," but I'm also building toward something I can maintain after I lose all the weight.  I want a healthy lifestyle to become second nature to me.

I know that isn't going to happen overnight.  For most of my childhood and all of my adult life, I have only known what it's like to be fat.  I'm not just going to wake up one day and completely change the way I look at food and the way I look at myself.

What I am going to do is identify the things I am doing now that are contributing to an unhealthy lifestyle and then implement changes, make new habits that will get me moving down a healthier road.

One of the biggest problems I have right now is my relationship with food.  I posted about this a couple of years ago in one of my last posts before I went MIA, but I am a binge eater.  I need to figure out how to stop the binging.  It is not uncommon for me to eat absolutely nothing until 5:00 or 6:00 at night.  Sometimes I don't even take a drink of water until then.  By that point in the day, I am ravenously hungry and don't care if I eat healthy foods or not.  I just want food...and lots of it.  I need to figure out why I binge and how to stop it.

I have never really been a breakfast eater.  I just didn't do it when I was a kid and continued that habit into adulthood.  I was a very picky eater when I was younger.  I absolutely hated school lunches, but my mom would rather give me money to eat at school than buy ingredients and prep something for me to take from home.  From kindergarten on, I refused to eat lunch from the school cafeteria, so I just didn't eat anything.  Then in middle school, you could buy other things with your lunch money like ice cream or just French fries.  If I ate anything for lunch at all, it would be ice cream.  Our high school had open lunch.  It was located near a group of fast food restaurants and they would let us walk to the restaurants and eat lunch.  On the rare occasions that I did eat lunch, it would be Wendy's or Taco Bell.

Habits that you form during your childhood are hard to break.  After 25 years of no breakfast and rarely lunch, I have gotten used to not eating until the afternoon.  Now I actually have a hard time even thinking about food early in the day.  The thought of eating breakfast when I first wake up makes me feel nauseous.

So, ironically, one of my biggest hurdles to overcome right now is that I don't eat often enough.  My metabolism has got to be incredibly slow because of years of going long stretches in a day without food.  I feel like I need to wake my body up and force it to start burning some calories.  In order to do that, I need to eat more than once a day.  I need to eat breakfast and lunch.

Ideally, breakfast should be a big meal, over 500 calories, and lunch should be the same.  I know I am not going to be able to just wake up tomorrow and eat a huge breakfast.  I am, however, going to start making a habit of eating in the morning, even if it's just something small.  Hopefully I can get over feeling nauseous at the thought of food in the morning and get to the point where I am hungry in the morning.  Then I can increase the calories and increase the amounts I eat.

So Operation Eat Breakfast is in full effect.  Today, I had an egg.  It's something, and something is better than nothing.