I'm going to post it here, in entirety, along with my response.
I don't have a blog so that's why I am anonymous. Nothing sinister.
Here's something I learned (and it was true) about losing weight.
Every time you drink a shake you are teaching your metabolism "Look, this is all you are getting today." And your metabolism says, "Well, I'm not happy about it so I'll dip into your fat cells and use some of those for energy."
In my experience, the only way I'm going to lose weight is to do exactly that. I've tried counting calories, Weight Watchers, you name it, and the only thing that I've found that works is to drastically reduce the number of calories I consume. I'm not sure that it's possible to eat a nutritionally balanced diet with real food if you are eating less than 1,000 calories per day, and that's exactly where I have to go in order to get any weight to come off.
Then, when you eat what you want to eat, your metabolism says, "Damn, man! You mean I don't have to work today and eat fat cells? Hot Dog! (pun intended)"
You have to either decide to be on Cambridge the rest of your life or learn how to eat what you KNOW you should be eating.
It may very well be that I'll have to use Cambridge products, or something similar, to keep the weight off. I fully expect, given my past experience with dieting and weight loss, that I'm going to have to work very, very hard to keep the weight off.
Otherwise, you are just shocking your metabolism on a regular basis and it just freaks out.
I agree I need to do a better job of sticking to my diet. I'm sure it will be easier once the MIL comes and goes. I expect that the rest of the summer will be mostly free of family gatherings, which are the biggest temptation when it comes to food.
It's not really the food that shows the pounds on the scale the next day ... because you know in your heart that if you eat a slice of pizza for dinner that it's impossible to show on the scale the next day.
The increase or decrease of poundage on the scale is only the result of what you ate 3-4 days earlier.
It is scientifically impossible to eat a piece of pizza for breakfast and show it as a true weight gain at lunch.
The only way this is true is that the pizza clearly has salt in it ... salt that you have removed from your diet. Salt has an immediate affect on the body's system, causing it to retain fluids.
If you ask any nutritionist, (as I did) you will discover that weight gain is not an immediate result of the [name food here] you ate for lunch.
I have been meaning to tell you this for a while.
I know this, and I don't believe that the fluctuations I'm seeing on the scale represent a "real" weight gain. I know it's scientifically impossible to put on 7 lbs of fat overnight, even if I did eat an entire box of cookies. I know about diet math, and the fact that 1 lb of fat is equal to 3,500 calories.
Bottom line ... I don't care if you use the Cambridge diet for 365 days with no cheating. The very second you go off it you are retraining your metabolism to stop working so hard to chew up those fat cells. And now you have to teach your metabolism to slow down. And you end up with hunger pains because you're giving it more food (instead of the drink) and it had been used to not having anything substantial for 365 days.
While I agree that going directly from Cambridge Diet to eating everything I want to eat would result in the described weight gain, I know of plenty of people who have not regained the weight. They don't quit the diet cold turkey, instead they gradually add in healthy foods while increasing their activity level as well.
It's a prescription for disaster. You will eventually gain it all back and then hate yourself even more.
I respectfully disagree. I don't think it's a prescription for disaster, and I don't believe that gaining it all back is inevitable.
And you're not being fair to yourself because you think you are trying to do the right thing with the Cambridge diet.
But you're freaking human. You gotta eat real food. You just have to work on your brain and tell yourself you can control food urges.
I've been reading your blog a long time. I think you are too hard on yourself
I don't think I'm being unfair to myself. I've come to realize that as hard as I've tried, I don't lose weight on conventional diets. It's easier to stick to a plan of less than 1,000 calories by doing the shakes than it is eating conventional foods.
Maybe I won't make it. But if I don't at least try, I haven't given myself the opportunity to fail.
I've decided that this is the last diet I'm ever doing. If it doesn't work out, then I'll just die fat.
And although that's an undesirable result, I'm not going to hate myself for it.
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