One thing I have been doing a lot is looking into breaking psychological barriers to weight loss (or more importantly, for me, diet control).
The first of these that I was thinking about, that I learned about a couple months ago, is the concept of a diet as empathy for your future self. This really resonates with me. Yeah, I want to lose weight, but it's way more important for me to stop caving to cravings because they're often for foods that legitimately make me feel terrible and sick. The main disaster is wheat, which is a disaster specifically because it doesn't make me feel like hell while I eat it, but its effects are probably the worst. So I have a morel mushroom toxicity reaction that makes me projectile vomit if I eat even just one of them, but it happens relatively quickly, within a half hour or so, and so I can definitely trace it to the mushrooms and it happens so fast that there's no opportunity for me to try convincing myself that it won't be so bad if I don't eat as much, or that it's "worth it" just this one time. With wheat it's more insidious... I've definitely (through trial and error as well as medical testing) found that wheat makes me very ill, but it only happens after several hours, and only after I'm laying down. So say I eat a bunch of bread and then go to bed a couple hours later, there's a good chance if I don't take a lot of antacids I'll wake up coughing and gagging, with a sore throat. Usually this is connected with dreams where I swallow something inappropriate and ridiculous (like my cell phone) and when I wake up I start trying to eject whatever absurd thing my lizard brain thought I swallowed.
I've been eating reasonably good paleo/primal for the last maybe week and a half, and this has not happened even once. And I haven't even taken an antacid. I know it works. I know it's better for me, even if I weren't also losing weight. I know that future me in a couple hours will greatly appreciate present me keeping him in mind, and I know that future me in a couple months or years would appreciate not having to worry about needing to buy new clothes every ten pounds or feeling like he's going to die after a playful romp or trip up two flights of stairs. This is something that is important to keep in mind: Even if you feel a little deprived now, your future self will feel so much better.
Relatedly, yesterday I was on PaleoLeap and read an article on the power of "don't." It's called "Fake It Till You Make It." The gist is that when you are on a restricting diet, it's easy to say you "can't" eat something. "I can't eat bread." "I can't eat sugar." But when you frame it like that, you frame it as something depriving. It's also not true... I certainly can eat that cupcake if I really want to. So instead of saying "I can't eat bread" or "I can't eat sugar," I should instead frame it as a "don't." "I don't eat bread." "I don't eat sugar."
This switch in framing turns a term of deprivation into a term of empowerment. Saying "I don't" means you are making a choice and acting upon it. It's also, as long as you're trying not a lie. Even if you screw up after having said "I don't," what you were was merely mistaken. When you say "I can't," knowing full well you can, then that's a known untrue statement. I can eat bread. I just don't.
Another idea that I think about sometimes but not a whole lot is the idea of willpower. The problem with willpower is that... it's a problem. Willpower isn't really a choice, so whenever possible you need to remove the need for willpower, not just try and stick it out. That means removing yourself from situations with a lot of inappropriate food, minimizing interactions with people who don't respect your dietary and exercise decisions, and things like that. It's not feasible to live out your days in a secluded hut of only people who eat like you do, and you certainly shouldn't cut off all your friends over something that petty, but reducing your exposure to enticing foods and contact with people who actively encourage you to stray reduces the amount of willpower you actually need.
That'll vary from person to person, and your "willpower" can increase as your diet and exercise habits become habitual, but in general it's better to try avoiding having to use it rather than trying to force it.
Finally, and this is related to the willpower bit, it's really important that people around you know about your eating habits. And I don't mean going on and on about it or pressuring people to eat like you, but if people don't understand your boundaries it's easier for them to cross them. Every once in a while I go on about this guy I used to work with who used to trigger my food addiction like crazy... this was because he had recently lost a lot of weight and assumed that the way he did it was accessible to everyone. Food addicts usually can't just do moderation, we can be triggered into binge eating if we do this, but his persistent unsolicited advice unintentionally shamed me a lot, chipping away at my willpower until I finally caved.
Here's the thing, though: This guy didn't know I am a food addict. He didn't know I was on a paleo diet. So even though he was annoying, I also didn't really give him the tools to know that this was an effect he had on me.
Letting people you are around a lot know that you don't (see notes above about "don't!") eat a certain thing rather than just giving people a general sense that you're kind of on a diet changes entire conversations. My workplace went from pebbling me with food requests to people literally not offering me food at all... it's not "just this once or you'll feel deprived!" like the above co-worker, it's "oh, Jackson can't eat this, he's allergic to wheat." And when they do insist on food for everyone they are mindful of the fact that I may need something different. My friends know about my DietBets, too, so they have the mental tools to suggest different restaurants or not invite me to ones they know I can't eat at. This has helped way more than trying to forge iron willpower.
Anyway, that's my philosophical thought process for the day.
As far as updates... I just finished my first DietBet since restarting this, have a couple weeks to go with the other one I started, and will be starting a new one in a couple of days. I'm hoping this will give me a lot of positive motivation, as the first time I tried this long ago I just did one at a time and succeeded in totally binge-eating all my progress away when they'd finish. Whoops! Not going to let that happen again, but then again my allergies and body weight weren't nearly as problematic as they are now.
Right now I'm not craving non-paleo food practically at all, so willpower isn't an issue. We'll see how long that lasts.
I have started exercising again and using a step tracker. I work an office job where I sit practically 12 hours straight, but I've started walking in place (my cube's right in the middle and everyone can see me, but they get it; even without the need for exercise it hurts your legs and back to sit this long). On Saturdays I work alone so I take figure-eight type walks around the cubes when I get bored (which is a lot), and on Thursdays and Fridays, when I don't work alone, I get a good 25 minute walk in during my lunch break, when I play Pokémon Go and run CharityMiles and Endomondo. So far I've found that on those Thursdays and Fridays I get about 3,500 steps. I'll just increase that gradually. We'll see how many steps the figure-eight walks generate today!
Anyway, happy trails,
-- Jackson