Problem
Since Christmas, I have had trouble with bingeing when ever I tried to restrict my intake. I would be OK for a few days, but then binge. As a result, I was not losing weight gained over Christmas.
Research
I did a few online searches and spoke to people in similar situations to get advice. I also read books in the library about how to stop bingeing. Although the books were aimed at those with bulimia, I still found the content useful.
Solution
The books on bulimia were clean in stating that a normal eating pattern of 3 meals a day and snacks was the way to go, but obviously this was too much for me. Bearing in mind that I just want to get back to 50 kg by summer, I used an app called Pigly to calculate the daily calorie intake to achieve my goal. This worked out to about 850 calories per day. Using this information and the advice from the bulimia books, I decided to try 2 meals a day, breakfast, and dinner with no snacks. I then make an accountability chart based on this information and information I had previously read about zigzagging, the process of eating different calories amounts in the week to shake things up a bit, see figure 1.
Finished diet plan to take me up to Pentecost.
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| Figure 1, weight loss plan. |
Please note that this plan only goes up until Pentecost. The first day of summer is on the 20th of June. This is just the first part of the plan; as for the rest, I will reevaluate after Pentecost.
Result
So far, I have not binged and this plan of two meals a day at <800 cals is working well, but it has been hard to not snack; sometimes I did snake, but only on cabbage or carrot. I also worked in two days of fun where I allowed for drinking alcohol. These days are St George's Day and Pentecost.
What I learned
- I can lose weight on 2mad
- Min cal restriction is working at preventing a binge
- Zigzagging makes dinner time more fun and stops weight loss from stooling.