Not eating so much.Follow

NOT GAY

Seems to be going easier yesterday and today. The biggest thing is the boredom hunger. 9pm, watching a Doctor Who special, suppressing the urge to go grab a sandwich. Not to hard as long as I keep busy. I think I may shift my sleeping hours a bit to lower the time I'm sitting awake after supper. And it will let me wake up earlier and eat breakfast.

I did end up buying some lower calorie versions of common foods I eat for supper. Like tortillas, the normal version I used to eat had 210 calories per tortilla. I different one I'm trying today has only 80 per tortilla, for roughly the same size. It'd be hard to keep eating those and try to lower my calorie intake.

I have tried those Mio things in the past. I don't know what flavors they come in though, I've only seen the sweat tea versions at the local stores. Tastes good though, but I'll probably still just drink water.

I found a second flavor today. Strawberry Watermelon. Apparently there are 6 flavors. http://www.kraftbrands.com/mio/index.html I've only seen the two though.

There is a fine line between tastes good and way too much in your water, and being that there is no set measurement for it, it's pretty easy to cross.

I like water that's flavored with ice.

If bored eating becomes a problem try using healthier foods for snacks. I'll eat chips and cookies, but I don't keep them at home. Instead I keep raw almonds, berries, fruit, spinach, carrots, and cheese (+mandatory crackers), and yogurt.

You'll find it quite difficult to pack away calories if you're snacking on spinach and carrots.

Not much to add, but water is good. A lot of the signals that people interpret as hunger is actually thirst. So if you are feeling hungry, drink some water. If after that you are still hungry, get something to eat.

You want to eat dinner 3-4 hours before bed. Any less and you're not giving your body proper time time to digest the food before bed. Any more and you're creating too big of a gap between dinner and breakfast.

The fruit punch MIO isn't bad, just don't use a lot. I use the Crystal light fruit punch or wild strawberry. I use two packets (each packet is a .5L serving) in a 1.5L bottle. It's enough to add some flavor without overpowering it. I drink anywhere from 4.5-6L of water a day.

I went from 1-2 large meals a day, to 4-5 small meals for about 1500-2000 calories a day, and completely stopped drinking pop. After two months I didn't drop a pound. I started talking to a few people and found out proper sleep has a huge part to play, as big a part as proper diet and exercise. On average I would get about 5-6 hours of sleep a night. Once I started getting 7-8 hours a night, I started dropping weight. If you aren't getting enough sleep for your body to properly recover, no amount of dieting is going to help.

Edited, Aug 21st 2011 4:01pm by Raolan

Transfer some of dinner calories to lunch and add in a couple 100-200 calorie snacks in between. You're a big guy and dropping down to 1200 calories a day is going to slow down your metabolism. You'll certainly lose weight at 1200 a day, but slower than with the extra snacks and you'll be in a prime position to gain it back once you stop dieting.

ETA: There's an old saying, "Breakfast for a king, lunch for a prince and dinner for a pauper." We do it ***-backwards in the US and it's very hard for some people to change their eating routine.

Edited, Aug 24th 2011 6:34pm by Kaain

Prior to the change I'd eat maybe 100-200 for Breakfast, 500-1000 for lunch, and then, looking back now, probably 1500-2000 for supper at times. It's amazing how fast those large dinner calories add up. Eating 3-4 tacos, using about 1/2 lb ground beef and 4 tortilla shells, plus cheese). I made myself a small pizza yesterday for supper ended up being about 500 calories. Looking back at the pizza I'd make before... that alone must have been 2000.

So before I was probably eating 2500-3000 every day, sometimes more.

I was kind of hoping that eating a decent sized breakfast now would help keep my metabolism from dropping too much.

I'm not really trying to diet, in the sense as it's something temporary. I'm trying to change the way I eat permanently. I will probably go back to a 1500-2000 calorie diet after a while once I see results from the lower.

Source? Everything I've read suggests that "eating before bed" theories are all myths.

You digest food while you sleep, and I've heard that for some this can make sleeping more difficult, but that has much more to do with the quality of the food that you eat (stuff that can cause heartburn or indigestion) than it does with the timing.

Other than that, I haven't found any relevance. The "if you eat before bed, it turns to fat" theory in particular appears to be an old wives' tale.

Eating before bed is bad due to the fact that you're lying still and burning off NONE of the meal. Again.. food is fuel. You don't need to fuel up to go to sleep. There's really no point other than indulgence.

It's not unsubstantiated. It's based on the fact that most people eat their biggest meal of the day at the end of the day, and then don't do any extra activity to burn it off. You're correct that if you're eating right in the first place, it shouldn't matter. But most people don't, and for those people it does matter.