When I started this back in January, hunger was my main concern, and the thing that would almost always end up derailing previous efforts; specifically, being hungry at night. With previous attempts, I would have all my calories for the day, everyone else would go to bed, and I'd stay up a little later. The pantry and refrigerator would just call my name. I'd give in and eat, well, whatever we had - leftovers from dinner, peanut butter, ice cream from the tub, chips/nuts/you name it, and boom - I'm 1500 to 2000 calories over my daily budget. I'd go to bed feeling like a fat loser, promising myself "Ok - we'll start tomorrow".
So, getting through that first week was the hurdle I needed to keep building on. It's almost like I went through some "stages of hunger", especially with the hunger at night thing. At first it was just me sitting in a chair and willing myself not to go to the fridge or pantry to get something, but fuckballs, I really wanted to. Next, it was realizing that I'm hungry, but there's no point in obsessing over it, since the part of my mind that was committed to staying on plan had made the other part who wanted two double cheeseburgers its bitch. After that, it gets a little hard to explain - it's like I would be hungry, but I really didn't care, being a little bit hungry every now and then seemed almost irrelevant.
That's about where I am now with things - I'm a little hungry every now and again, but it's not like that hunger feeling pushes itself up to the top of my thoughts and says "PAY ATTENTION TO ME FATTY!!!" Now that's not to say there aren't times when I'm extremely glad it's time to eat, or that I wouldn't slip back into my old eating habits if I fell off the wagon. But all I can do is take things day by day and adjust if needed.
I think one thing that has helped me keep everything on track is the fact that I'm allowing myself to eat anything I want - I just have to keep to my daily calorie target (about 1850). So, if I want to consume my entire day's allotment in maple syrup (hold on let me see how much that would be - 1.5 pounds - holy shit), I can. I just have to accept the hunger and craving consequences that come with it. For this reason, I've noticed I'm eating a lot more vegetables and "filler" type foods, vs. just the low-volume, high calorie stuff.
Something happened the other day that made me think I've got my mind on the right track. I was doing the weekly grocery shopping, and came to the candy at the checkout line. Snickers, Reese's, and Hershey's, oh my. I though to myself, "Wow, it would take me like forever to eat all of this". Well, of course it wouldn't take me much actual time at all, I'm fairly certain I could set some sort of speed record that would stand for quite some time. But my initial thought was about how long it would take me to consume all of those calories based on my daily budget. It may seem trivial, but I was kind of proud my thought process went there instead of "I WANT THAT FUCKING CANDY!!!!!"
Another thing that has helped is this:
It's a digital kitchen scale that I got off Amazon for around $30.
Whenever I was working on a plan where I'm counting calories, I would often struggle with what I call "calorie creep", where I would either over or underestimate the calories for something I was eating. Each of these has their own pitfalls. The problem with underestimating is obvious, but I would often overestimate my items, so I would make sure not to go over budget. This would lead to me thinking "Well, I'm really hungry now, and that sandwich I made was really closer to 200 than 300, so I'll have a little snack now and call it even". Quite the slippery slope. With the scale, I can be confident of the calorie content of everything I eat, and the number is the number, no bullshitting.
I'm down another 3 lbs this week, with another inch off my waist. As long as I don't try anything stupid like the above mentioned maple syrup experiment, things should keep progressing well.
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