Thanks wenchsenior. I’m absolutely with you on habits vs willpower but right now I’m in weight loss mode. Which means I get a big boost in motivation every 3-7 days when I drop another pound. Plus, I’m not sure how I would eat now to lose weight but eat the same way to maintain. Unless I try to lose very, very slowly like maybe a pound a month. Also, I have a reprieve from work stress for the next 2 months. I’d like to overdo it now while I can and move to something more moderate later.
The problem with volume eating is when I can’t. I brought a high volume chili for lunch today. I went to warm it up and there was leftover pizza. So I had a slice of that low volume food. Today I had the focus to stick to one piece and wait for dinner to get my veg. But in a normal day it won’t fill me up. At home when I make pizza I make sure and have a big salad or other veg with it. Pizza is just one example. Last year with work stress I was munching on peanuts while working. Now I can stop myself from snacking between meals, but high calorie snacks will return eventually. Again the volume eating habit means I eat more of high calorie foods before realizing it.
The highlighted quote makes me laugh. A pound or two per month is the fastest I'm able to safely lose (without seriously increased workout time). If I relied on fast weight loss to motivate me, I'd likely never lose weight at all.
I think a lot of your post here highlights that most of weight loss (or other long term goals) has to do with cognitive framing. Several of the phrases you use don't make any logical sense, so I assume they are coming from a place of emotional truth but not actual objective reality. That's important to recognize so you can figure out what your trip up points will be. This is very common; I've been through this too, esp when I was trying to give up a longstanding habit of regular drinking, with all the associated subjective (and often illogical) beliefs about it that I was very emotionally convinced were true.
"I’m not sure how I would eat now to lose weight but eat the same way to maintain." I assume that you are referring to emotions here (not math of calories in vs calories out). If you are losing weight at a rate of 5 lbs per month, that means you are in a calorie deficit of about 580 calories per day on average. Mathwise, once you reach the weight you want to maintain, presumably you wouldn't need to be in that big of a deficit (though your TDEE might be somewhat lower), so you could add at least a few hundred calories back in. You presumably know this, so your phrasing here implies that you anticipate feeling a big sense of struggle and restriction to maintain your new weight. But that won't necessarily be true because you'll have a few hundred more calories to play with, presumably. It might be true, but not necessarily.
Your phrasing is similar in the second paragraph... I'm a little unclear what the issue was with the pizza. It seems like you discarded your planned healthy/high volume lunch simply b/c there was pizza sitting there? And then you compounded the problem by restricting yourself to eating no more food until dinner? So you were triggered by the pizza; and didn't have a good preplanned response for that situation.
Here is how I would approach this. 1) Assume that your work is very likely to offer regular triggers such as random appearance of pizza and baked goods. There is never going to be a time where this temptation will stop for good until you retire or work from home, so you have to plan specifically for it. 2) Understand that some days your willpower will likely win out, but some days it won't. Budget a few hundred calories per week for those times when you cave. 3) Bring a salad to work every day (or some other high volume, lower calorie food). If willpower is weak, then eat the pizza AND the salad, so you feel more full and aren't counting the hours before dinner. 4) When you go home for dinner, slightly adjust serving size or ingredients to account for the pizza. Anticipating in this way you can eat the occasional 'office food' without getting into a cycle of feeling super restricted/feeling upset that you caved-'failed'. If it is a preplanned manageable deviation, it isn't a failure.
And again: "...high calorie snacks will return eventually" There is no law that says this is true. That's a choice you can make or not make. Millions of people (like me) go through life without snacking at all. For sure when I was young I used to eat out of stress, boredom, because foods were 'sitting there', because other people were eating, etc. But there are methods one can learn to manage all those triggers and learn new ways of reacting. Not to mention that eating under stress often removes the very pleasure of enjoying the food b/c we are distracted by the stress, so you are not even getting optimal 'value' (see below).
If you do decide to snack within your calorie budget, that's great. PLAN FOR IT and enjoy it. In general, I'm a big fan of figuring out what foods you truly love and working hard to keep them in your menu, you just have to plan serving sizes accordingly. If you love peanuts, plan to snack on them regularly but in small amounts. But if volume eating is more your thing, then look for things like baby carrots or apples or something like that that you can eat a raft of.
A lot of this type of thinking is similar to Your Money or Your Life...only with calories standing in for dollars.
I tend to think about food as fuel... so my goal is to get as much nutrition + pleasure for my 'dollar' (= calorie) as I reasonably can within my calorie budget. If I'm going to spend 'calories', I want big value for it... so I try not to waste calories on food that is 'empty' nutritionally and that I don't really enjoy. I try to stick mostly to nutritionally dense foods, but there are a few junky foods that I adore so much (e.g., full fat ice cream) that making room for them in the 'budget' is worth it to me. But what I don't do is 'waste' those calories on foods that are nutritionally empty and that I find just 'ok' (e.g., most candy, cake, pie, cheesecake etc.).
This reminds me of some advice I gave someone else recently who was trying to lose weight but hadn't tried actually tracking calories:
If you don't know exactly how INSANELY calorie dense certain foods are, you can't make a smart judgements about what you would be ok cutting out of your diet, or eating only occasionally, or what you really want to make room for eating regularly.
For example [EDIT b/c Runrooster pointed out I was accidentally doubling my calorie count for pb], I regularly come home from lap swimming (30 minutes moderate pace freestyle...burns roughly 250 calories). I'm often a little peckish, and the jar of peanut butter beckons. I like pb a lot, so I still eat it occasionally, but I can't justify eating a big spoonful as a little snack after exercise for the simple reason that it is one of the most calorie-dense foods on the planet.
Two heaped spoonfuls from the jar....just TWO big bites... contain almost twice as many calories as my swim burned off. Do you know how many baby carrots drizzled in vinegar I would have to eat to equate with that much pb? MORE THAN FIFTY.
Peanut butter just blows my mind, even though I've seen the numbers many times. It's almost never worth it.
Lots of foods are like that.
Make proactive plans to eat what you love within your calorie budget, that's my motto.
