Binge = Response to Starvation - POSTED ON: Feb 23, 2017
No one in life gets away with avoiding all problems. Some problems are physical. Some problems are mental. Some problems are the two combined. If it’s my problem, I’m the one who has to deal with it. Defining a problem helps me understand it, which helps give me wisdom to know the difference between what I can change, and what cannot be changed.
What is a Binge? The dictionary definition of bingeing is:
Bingeing isn’t usually because of lack of self control and weakness. We binge because of a complex interaction of habit, brain chemistry, and external cues that signal us to eat. This interaction can be overcome, but it's harder to do and takes longer to change than most of us realize. Current scientific research indicates that bingeing has a physical (PHYSIOLOGICAL) cause, and that mental & emotional (PSYCHOLOGICAL) problems are a RESULT of the condition, not the CAUSE of the condition. Neuroscientists say that Bingeing is a normal response to Dieting because:
Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters’ weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding. The brain’s weight-regulation system considers your set point to be the correct weight for you, whether or not your doctor agrees. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. The same thing happens to someone who starts at 300 pounds and diets down to 200.
Our brains send signals to the rest of our body that it is starving when our weight is below its Set Point range. A person’s Set Point is determined by a person’s genes and life experience. Life experience involves a person’s weight history, because when a person gains and holds “excess” weight, their Set Point...
Emotional Eating (2) - POSTED ON: Sep 04, 2016
Emotional eating is normal behavior. We don’t need to feel bad about it; find out WHY it happens; or stop doing it. Here at DietHobby, (See Archives from March 18, 2016 through April 6, 2016 - first one: Here ), I Scrapbooked a series of silent gif images, mostly film clips with superimposed dialogue about food and eating, in order to illustrate the fact that our bodies are designed to make Eating Food involve our Emotions.
It isn’t accurate to define our eating behaviors as “emotional” or “physical.” The process of Eating Food, …including our Food Choices…, is BOTH physical and emotional, in differing degrees and combinations. Everything we eat affects us physically AND emotionally. All food affects our blood sugar and gives us sensual pleasure …makes us feel good. Like all other body processes that are designed to make us feel good, it’s impossible to separate food from emotion. Food is not “just fuel”, just like sex is not “just reproduction”. The body’s relationship with food, like the body’s relationship with sex, is interwoven, and driven by both physical and emotional desire. Labeling our food choices as motivated by one or the other is neither practical nor realistic. This type of thinking about food and eating is an inaccurate, oversimplification of a complicated biological process.
“There are about seven people in the world who righteously use food as fuel. Six of them are professional marathon runners from Kenya... ”
Our physical and emotional hungers work together …including our need and desire for food. We receive information from all of our feelings of hunger. Our bodies are designed to make Eating Food emotionally satisfying, as well as physically satisfying. Eating IS emotional. Food, like sex, has an impact on the way we feel. The effects may be temporary, but they still exist, and we are allowed to utilize food as a coping mechanism if we so choose. Everything we do in life involves CHOICE. Even refusing to choose is a choice. All of our Behaviors are based on the personal, individual choices we make as we follow our own true life VALUES. Each of us has the mental power and the physical ability to make and follow through with personal and individual choices about our own Behaviors, despite feelings of physical or emotional hunger, ….including what, when, and how much food we will eat at any particular time. Some might be thinking… ........“But where do I draw the line? If I let myself eat emotionally I’d NEVER STOP.” And the answer is ........“Each one of us individually gets to draw the line.” Where ever we want to draw it. Every human behavior brings consequences, either positive, negative or both. Although we have the ability to control our BEHAVIORS, we have NO ability to control our RESULTS, &helli...
Is it REALLY up to me? - POSTED ON: Jul 29, 2016
Sometimes I simply shake my head in wonder at the falsity of diet and fitness marketing. This picture is a prime example of it.
First, it clearly indicates that body size and body appearance are totally under one’s own control.
“If you are a fat person then all you have to do is eat less, move more, buy this, do this and don’t do that and YOU will get “healthy” and look like THIS.”
Most women as large as the woman at the back of the picture would love to believe that these claims are true, and some seem determined to to live in Denial, even though many of them KNOW in their minds that those claims are Lies.
Note, that the desired body is a firm, young body. Next, a body that has been really fat is never going to have an appearance like the body of the woman at the front of the picture.
People also have different genetic body types that determine where fat deposits itself on their bodies. There’s no such thing as “spot reduction”, and we don't get to choose which fat goes and which fat stays. The fact is that even after a successful large weight-loss there’s a lot of loose skin to deal with, and it is unlikely that any “reduced fat” person ... of any age ....will ever achieve that kind of voluptuous, tight-skinned body even with plastic surgery and 6 to 7 days a week of heavy-duty exercise. Also, the statement isn’t based on ANY kind of evidence. First the entire “lose weight to be healthy” idea is based upon an untested hypothesis. So few people have achieved significant long term weight loss that there simply aren’t enough to commission a statistically significant study. Those who put forth weight loss as a health intervention can’t produce a study where more than a tiny fraction of participants ever lost weight l...
The Finish Line - POSTED ON: Jul 21, 2016
What did
one skeleton
say to
the other?
Congratulations!
You
reached
the
Finish
Line.
When it comes to the issue
of Weight Loss & Maintenance
of that Weight-Loss,
Good Food, Bad Food - POSTED ON: May 09, 2016
Good food, Bad food, and Subversive Food Combining.
By Michelle May 9, 2016 @ fatnutritionist.com
The idea that there are universally “good” foods and “bad” foods is an old one, ancient even. There are traces of it in Leviticus, though the way the concept was used then is perhaps different from how we use it now. Given what we know about clinical nutrition, that sometimes a startling mix of foods can be used to help people in certain disease states — more ice cream and gravy for someone undergoing cancer treatment, less protein and fewer vegetables for someone with kidney disease — and since dividing your risk among a wide variety of different foods can help hedge your health bets, the idea that there are universally good or bad foods doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny. I take it more as evidence of black-or-white thinking — a hallmark of diet culture — which is almost always false. The words themselves, good and bad, imply a moral dynamic to food that I just don’t think belongs there. Sure, food can be literally bad if it’s spoiled or contaminated with botulism. But even if you eat this kind of bad food and get sick from it, we don’t generally assume that you now have become a bad and contaminated person. We just think you’re sick, send soup, and wait for you to get better. Getting food poisoning doesn’t stain your character or reputation, even if you are literally contaminated by a bacteria that a food has transmitted to you. There’s an implicit understanding that the body is self-cleansing and will get the pollution, the infection, out of its system over time. And though you might be averse to eating a food that made you sick in the future, due to stomach-churning associations, you probably won’t assume it is a universally bad food eaten only by bad people.
We do, however, make this assumption about moral contamination, that (morally) bad foods (which are coincidentally usually high-calorie, presumably “fattening” foods) are eaten by bad, gluttonous, ignorant, irresponsible, and usually low-class (and coincidentally fat) people. And we try to avoid those foods, we claim, out of concern for our health. But, in practice, it appears to be much more about avoiding that moral stain. Even if there are foods that, in isolation, don’t produce ideal health outcomes for most people, does the idea that these foods are uniquely bad while other foods are uniquely good actua...
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