Banana crisps? not quite what I have in mind...
I met up with E yesterday, and showed him my food diary for the last three days. I think doing a food diary is so important… and it also was really useful to have someone else look at it. What jumped out at us was the volume of crisps I’d eaten in three days. I’m almost ashamed to admit to it… 11 packets! I was shocked. We decided that this was my most pressing issue, so E has set me the goal of only one pack a day. He (rightly, he is very wise!) felt that it was better to reduce rather than cut them out because I need to learn to be in control of eating crisps. If I cut them out, there would come a point where I couldnt hold out any longer and I’d just go on a crisp binge and be back to square one.
He’s right. All these experts who are against dieting say that dieting fails because we feel deprived. Going cold turkey is going to make me feel deprived, then if I break the cold turkey, classic dieter behaviour is to then go ‘oh well, I’ve broken the diet, I’ll just have some more and re-start the diet tomorrow. Then follows a huge crisp binge because tomorrow I won’t be able to have them anymore, ‘ever’, and so I must eat as many as possible NOW. Which is unhealthy behaviour and isn’s helpful in any way.
Soooo… reduction in volume is the key. I was actually talking to a friend with ME about bingeing on crisps and chocolate the other day. I was surprised that I came up with so many ideas to reduce the crisp habit. I’ll put what I wrote below because the time has come to practice what I preach!
plan a snack for certain times. If you know you have one planned, you are less likely to go down the ‘unplanned eating’ route. If you have the munchies before snack time, you can tell yourself ‘aha, i have a snack at # O’clock, thats only an hour away’, then you can look forward to and visualise that snack and once you have eaten it, you will consciously know that you’ve had it.
I tend to find that unplanned eating keeps on going because I didnt start out with a plan to eat it, so it kindof becomes ‘off the record’ eating and for some reason its then soooo much easier to munch mindlessly through piles of food.
Another thing to do is to put your planned snack on a plate… that way you have predetermined how much you will eat and your brain will eke that snack out for longer. Im not sure about you, but when I binge, I tend to just be putting stuff in my mouth that I hardly even want anymore but theres this compulsion to carry on because its there beside me and it isnt finished yet. By putting it on a plate, and keeping anything else firmly in a cupboard, you then behave as though it is a mini-meal. and finish the plate instead of the multipack… *ahem… yes thats what i did last night!!!*
I find that with crisps and chocolate, it only takes one bite and I want to finish off all the junk food in the house. A good plan to overcome this if you still want to eat them, is to, again, have a predetermined amount, but then have something filling afterwards, like porridge, or a banana… to fill you up and kind of break that sudden urge to eat until you are full… coz crisps and chocolate take a VERY long time to fill you up… *hence the multipack incident
* so your planned snack would be a controlled amount of the foods you usually turn to, followed quickly by a predetermined filler to get you to the full point BEFORE you’ve finished off a whole day’s worth of calories without feeling satisfied.
Alternatively, if having the filler after the 1st portion of junk food doesnt work, then it would appear that the planned snack will have to be something satisfying and healthy(ish) so that you dont get the initial trigger to eat the junk food. I’m thinking a banana, oatcake with peanut butter on, small bowl of porridge, slice of toast and choc spread, a hot choc drink… something small thats interesting enough for you to look forward to, that youcan prepare, put on a plate, and treat like the mini meal to avoid the junk raid afterwards.
So… in order to be sucessful in my plan to stick to one pack of crisps a day, it looks like I will have to have something else after the crisps to signal that I am full. I’m thinking a banana…
