I fell into a burning ring of fire....

This is technically week 9, but week 8 was canceled due to bad weather.  So instead of talking about portion control, we talked about eating and triggers that cause us to eat. At weigh in, I had lost 5 lbs from hacking out my lungs for the two weeks previous. Go me! J

Okay, not really go me because being sick is MISERABLE.  The only good thing is that I can’t smell or taste a lot of things—so it takes away my desire to sit and eat.

This class was taught by Chipmunk, and I have to say, she actually did make some really good points about triggers and eating that I’m going to share here.

We all know that you should be eating breakfast, and try to have at least three meals per day—although three smaller meals with 2 or 3 small low calorie snacks thrown in is also acceptable. I try to adhere to that formula, as it works the best for me.  Keeps me from being RAVENOUS when I get home.

One of my BBF’s tends to go all day and not eat anything—and then when she finally does stop to eat, she’s downing a whole days worth of calories for dinner.  She wanted to know why she wasn’t losing weight, because she’s not going over the calories. And Chipmunk had a GREAT response!

She said that you need to think of your body as wood stove and the fire as your metabolism.  To keep your fire going, you need to feed it wood during the day.  If you wait all day without feeding the fire, and then shove a ton of wood on it, the fire won’t do well because it’s burned down, and it can’t burn up all that wood at once—it takes time for the fire to restart.  But if you keep your fire fed, and throw a log on every few hours, the fire maintains itself. So to keep your metabolism going, you should eat every few hours. If you wait all day and then eat 2,000 calories at once—your metabolism will be sluggish and can’t get around to burning off those calories like it could if you had them earlier in the day.  I really took this with me when I walked out—it was a great analogy and I think that my BBF has taken this to heart, as she’s making more of an effort to eat during the day. And I think that it will pay off for her, since her eating will keep her body from thinking it’s starving.

One thing during the trigger class that really kind of bugged me was that a lot of people in my class seem to think that having bariatric surgery is a ‘magic bullet’. I think that they think if they have the surgery, they will get magically thin without having to worry about what they eat, or making the life style changes needed to maintain their new life. In fact, during the class, Now asked the instructor why does it matter about eating habits, because once she has the surgery and her stomach is tiny, she can’t eat as much, and if she eats too much she will throw up and that will train her to not overeat.  Does anyone see the issue with that train of thought?