Grease, Guilt and Failure

[StrangeDz 1]

Sigh... This weekend I started the 5 day pouch test to wash out my carbs and get back on track. I did really good day 1 and day 2. I drank only Protein shakes.. ALL WEEKEND LONG! It was hard, but I was determined. I even went to a bday party were they served pizza and cake and ice cream and stuck to my Protein shake like a good fat girl.

Well, today, day 3, I started out strong! That is until lunch... I went to the gym for lunch and got so dizzy and lightheaded after my workout, I was miserable. I thought, well, i'll pick up something light on the way back to work.

I didnt want to screw up my pouch test, so I opted to go to LJS to get some healthy flakey fish (which is recommended for day 3).

Did I get the healthy flakey fish??? NOOOOOOOOOOO... I ended up with 8 deep fried shrimp. I reasoned with myself saying i'd peel off the breading and it wouldnt be so bad. I did that for about half of them then went for it!

The last 4 I ate WITH the grease soaked, carb encrusted breading! Why do I do this to myself??? My efforts all weekend are a waste.

How can I succeed if I keep sabotaging myself like this??? I'm just miserable and disgusted with myself. Although I ate it in the car on the way back into the office, I feel everyone can smell the grease oozing from my pores! I know they cant, its just my guilt. I am not happy.

[Unforgettable 0]

I'm sorry to hear you're feeling so guilty. Sometimes I think we are too hard on ourselves. Think of what you WOULD have ate before you were banded if you went to LJS? I know I would have got a couple of orders of the shrimp and ate ALL of them with the batter and extra greasey goodness on the side. Try to focus on the little accomplishments like this, and the fact that you've lost an amazing 59 pounds. For me personally, when I feel guilty over things like this, I feel defeated - when I feel defeated, I just want to give up and then I REALLY eat bad.

Take it for what it is, and keep on moving. You can do it!

[Jachut 487]

I just dont understand how people can put themselves on these crackpot nutty fad diets and then feel bad because they break them!

Why on earth would you need to do something like that to yourself? Its madness, of COURSE you're going to get hungry and make poor choices sooner or later and of course any weight lost gets regained because all you achieve is to dehydrate yourself and burn up your muscles.

Just stick to sensible, regular eating and it becomes much less difficult to avoid blow outs.

That pouch test is ridiculous and by following regimes like that, you're setting yourself up for this kind of fall. It doenst matter that there's a band round your stomach, starve your body like that and it's going to retaliate. I know I would have done the exact same thing.

That's why I got a band, to leave that kind of behaviour behind forever.

[ParrotheadCathy 0]

:thumbup:

Thanks, Jachut! My sentiments EXACTLY.

[LeeB1946 261]

Sigh... This weekend I started the 5 day pouch test to wash out my carbs and get back on track. I did really good day 1 and day 2. I drank only Protein shakes.. ALL WEEKEND LONG! It was hard, but I was determined. I even went to a bday party were they served pizza and cake and ice cream and stuck to my Protein shake like a good fat girl.

Well, today, day 3, I started out strong! That is until lunch... I went to the gym for lunch and got so dizzy and lightheaded after my workout, I was miserable. I thought, well, i'll pick up something light on the way back to work.

I didnt want to screw up my pouch test, so I opted to go to LJS to get some healthy flakey fish (which is recommended for day 3).

Did I get the healthy flakey fish??? NOOOOOOOOOOO... I ended up with 8 deep fried shrimp. I reasoned with myself saying i'd peel off the breading and it wouldnt be so bad. I did that for about half of them then went for it!

The last 4 I ate WITH the grease soaked, carb encrusted breading! Why do I do this to myself??? My efforts all weekend are a waste.

How can I succeed if I keep sabotaging myself like this??? I'm just miserable and disgusted with myself. Although I ate it in the car on the way back into the office, I feel everyone can smell the grease oozing from my pores! I know they cant, its just my guilt. I am not happy.

Guilt gets us all on the weight loss journey. I don't care what path you take. I have been in OA for 24 years and I have guilted myself and have heard others guilt themselves into the refrigerator. I used to measure my self worth by the numbers on the scale. What dumb idea! Oops there I go, dumbing myself again. Anyway the numbers on the scale are just a measure of my body weight not my self worth.

I don't know exactly what has happened lately, but I accept myself as a good person with some bad eating habits. All the guilt in the world will not taken away those habits. So I accept who I am, let go of the food, when I can, and somehow in the last month have lost about 12 pounds without a preop diet. From what I have read the pre op diet is sort of stressful.

So what I am saying Strangedz, not put yourself down! Next time you are tempted count 10. You are a good person not a bad fat girl! It will work for you.

[Soybean 4]

I'm another OA'er and also accepted my weight somewhere along the way. I'm not happy with my weight but I accepted it. Accepting my body is another issue, but I'm working on it. Pouch cleanse, liquid diet, etc. is all a luxury if you don't have that "special relationship" with food that most of us have if we need to lose 100 pounds to get to a healthy weight. I like what you said about being the "good fat girl" since I've always felt like the bad fat girl who couldn't control her eating. With the lap band, it hurts to eat a lot of different foods, but I can still eat enough variety to be healthy and be losing weight consistently so far since it's been tightened to what works for me.

I really believe the obsessive focus on food is the avoidance of so many other life issues. After working in an environment for over ten years where big women are still considered attractive (I work in an African-American company and neighborhood) my whole outlook has changed. Still, I would never have been psychologically ready to give up so much of my food without the year post-band that I didn't have it tight enough to stop me from eating a lot of what I wanted to, when I wanted to. So, I think it is a process with a lot of factors involved: your environment, the level of your addiction to food, your psychological readiness to give up certain foods/behaviors/diet thinking. I hope it doesn't sound condescending because I've just had some weight loss success in the past couple of months but I had a lot of smaller successes prior to and just after the surgery in terms of my thinking. I still check my scale regularly, though I've been told to do it just once a week. So, I hope talking to others on this forum will also help me with success with the band. Good luck.

[LeeB1946 261]

Soybean you are so right. The food will always be with us and the use of the band as well as the support groups we chose to use will help us to avoid what is not needed for a healthy life style. Still have not be banded but have appointment Jan 3 with the Thoracic surgeon about the hiatal hernia and hopefully he and the bariatric doctor can coordiante a date. Lee