Hey everyone!
I recently started losing weight again after slowly trickling up the lbs thanks to a career ending injury, and some depression that left me sedentary long enough to develop every wrong habit. My biggest hurdle in starting was two fold:
1.) Portion control - I'm a plate cleaner. My full signal tends to come about 30 minute AFTER I stop eating voluntarily. That is SO hard!
2.) Cravings for bad foods - I'm talking intense strong cravings. Like I wake up in the morning, and I think about a sugar cookie every minute of the day until I get one. Not just cookies either. It could be for a fast food I want, and the craving won't stop until I get it. It doesn't matter if it lasts days.
So with these two hurdles, I've started and stopped a number of times because it was just so hard.
THE TIP STARTS HERE!
So in talking to my oldest son about this (who is a PhD student in microbiology) he told me "You know Dad, the cravings you get actually come from your gut bacteria, not from your brain." More on that here. So he suggested that the problem is because I give into my cravings, those colonies of bacteria sending the signals are growing, hence, making stronger signals. While the things I NEED to eat, don't get fed, therefore are shrinking and send weak signals.
The plan we came up with was for 3 weeks, to eat as close to the model foods as I could. This would take massive willpower because I'm going to be hearing the cravings of large colonies of dying bacteria and they wouldn't go down quietly. But in time, they would die out and the good bacteria would be growing.
So I did. I REALLY want to love salads. I also really wanted to be able to eat yogurts and other foods that are easier for CICO to fit in since we haven't done anything about portion control yet. So salad after freaking salad I ate. Yogurt parfaits with fresh fruit every morning. Dinner I would allow myself one plate of reasonable foods (spaghetti, chicken, soups, etc.) In the 3 weeks, I messed up maybe 3 times, but overwhelmingly ate salads and yogurt. Don't let me fool you, it wasn't fun in that first week or two. Sometimes I ate the salads like I was a toddler being made to eat something I didn't want, but I just "took my medicine" so to speak.
That brings me to today. It's 8:40 in the morning and I woke up with an INTENSE craving. It's a salad. Oh the lucious lettuce, cucumbers, little cherry tomoatoes with just the right hint of dressing! YES PLEASE!!! The joy from eating it has become exactly the same type of joy I got from sugar and fast food. I just needed to help my body reset the gut bacteria.
I was even offered a brownie at a work function the other day of which I indulged..and it was..."okay".
So now, managing CICO is a piece of cake when the primary thing I feel like devouring is salads. I've already dropped about 15 lbs in the last 3 weeks (starting from 300 lbs as a 6'3" male).
Hopefully if some of you have as intense cravings as I do, this will be a great trick to helping you get your eating cleaned up. Remember...let the junkfood craving bacteria die, and let the good stuff flourish!
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2DwW0AM
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