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Breaking the Hunger Cycle
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Hi. Tomorrow I'm going to start doing videos reviewing and describing my experiences with the new book by Julia Griggs Havey,
"The Vice-Busting Diet".
I've read the first part and browsed enough to know I'm recommending it to anyone interested in health and fitness, regardless of whether they have a weight problem or
not. I had never heard of Julia Havey before I saw her on the CBS 'Early Show' earlier this week. I have no interest in promoting her book other than wanting
to use a lot of what she says to promote QFE and Energy Focused Exercise. I did send her an email about the show to which she responded and I sent her an email to let
her know I was going to review the book on this site.
First I want to describe how I get past the initial period when you go on a diet and you're just so hungry you almost feel sick. It's a good
way to get past most of the physical cravings that make dieting such a misery. Then you can just focus on losing weight,
or just eating clean, or whatever your goal is without feeling so out of sorts. In fact, you should increasingly feel better than you normally do.
Beware however; recurring psychological pressure can revive the physical cravings in literally seconds if you
give in to it.
Before you actually start on this plan, you should read Julia's book.
My goal is to convince you that the cravings do go away so you'll be inspired to get in better shape. But if you
intend to buy the book then do that first. You can use my method along with the book, or you can ignore my method and
just go with the book. Choose the one that makes most sense to you, I just want to convince you that you can make a change
and you don't have to be miserable while you do.
Believe it or not, it is possible to reach a state where you can feel hungry and rationally think about whether it's really time to eat or not. You can
actually run on a "half-full tank" all the time and tell when you really need to re-fuel as opposed to just feeling "peckish". It's an awesome
place to be, because not only is hunger manageable, but your mood and energy are good just about all the time, you get up in the morning feeling
great, and you don't feel logy after naps. I actually made it back to that place (inspired by seeing Julia on the TV)
a couple of days ago, so now I can describe it accurately instead of trying to inspire you with memories I can only half-believe myself when
I haven't been eating right. I've got a few strategies, including Julia's book, to stay here permanently this time, but right now I just want to tell you how to
get here in the first place.
Try to start when you can take two or three days where you don't have any responsibilities you have to focus on. It's very difficult to
work when your brain and stomach are screaming at you non-stop to eat something yummy. If there's work that can't wait, you reach the point where
the psychological pressure is just too great; you're not getting the job done because you just can't focus long enough.
I'm not saying you can't work, just arrange it so you can drop it at any time and divert yourself in some other way. You might think TV would be
bad, but it's a lot better than trying to perform under pressure. You'll probably still get the urge to eat every fifteen seconds, but if your
focus is on "eat clean and eat small" and that's your only focus for a few days and you know the cravings will go away, you should be able to grit it out.
And anyway, it's not like you won't get enough to eat. On the first day there's a couple of ways you can go. One is to eat a lot of very small
meals, maybe just a couple of bites but never enough to get full. After you've eaten, wait at least 15 minutes to see if you don't feel full
enough you can at least hold out until the next snack. The more you can gut it out, the faster the conversion will happen. The big challenge
here is to stop eating after just a couple of bites or so. That's when you just have to clench your teeth and look forward to the next snack.
This is good and bad. It's good because food tastes incredibly good and bad for the same reason. It makes it so hard to not take just "one more
bite". Try to really enjoy each bite and remember you'll be able to do it again in an hour or two. Preferably you should eat clean, but what's really essential is that you
eat very small snacks to "shrink" your stomach.
Another strategy for the first day is to focus more on eating clean and less on restricting quantity. When you get cravings, eat something else
that will satisfy your hunger but not stimulate you just to keep eating. For instance when I started a few days ago I kept the meals fairly
small all day, then in the evening instead of giving in to what I craved, I ate raisins on bread and butter. It tasted good and satisfied my
hunger and I could resist eating until I was stuffed. Bread and butter are mostly off the menu now, but when I was starting I was more interested
in just quelling the cravings with something less seductive than what I really wanted. The idea behind both these strategies is to avoid triggering
the physical cravings that are almost impossible to resist. Specifically, I can graze infrequently on small amounts of junk food through the evening, but
I reach a tipping point where there's almost a queasy feeling in my stomach that will only be "satisfied" by more junk. Of course it never really
gets satisfied; I just get to the point where I'm stuffed or I realize eating anymore would be insane.
The second day will vary depending on how dependent your metabolism has become on the foods you crave. You may feel weak and headachy or you may
feel pretty good. I've had it go both ways. If you're feeling ok the constant craving will probably decrease so you actually forget for minutes
at a time that you feel deprived. When you remember, you'll probably feel like you're being cheated, but it's a lot easier to hang in than it
was the first day. You need to really focus on making meal and snack sizes small and eating cleanly on the second day.
The third day should be an improvement of the second. By the afternoon you may really be feeling the differences - better digestion, more
energy, fewer energy slumps, better mood. But sometime around the evening of the third day you'll probably get kind of headachy. Not intense,
just annoying like a fly that's always buzzing around your face - you can't just ignore it, and when it seems like it might be gone, it zooms
right back in. For me this headache always signals that my metabolism is making the final adjustments and I always wake up feeling great the next day.
So, that's it. Physically, by then, I find that I'm pretty much clear of cravings. But, I want to re-iterate you have to watch out for psychological pressure.
If you can limit your indulgences so you don't fall back into the physical craving trap, more power to you. But I've never been successful.
It's so easy to tell myself I deserve a coke, for instance, after jumping rope. That's great and maybe it stays that way for a couple of
days. But eventually the psychological and physical cravings start working together so one tastes great, but it sets off a desire for
another that just settles in and nags you all day, and the cycle begins all over again.
Once I'm back on track, I like counting calories, because if I'm not going to run out of food before the end of the day, I can never eat enough at
one time to cut into my energy level. Last time I managed to wreck that by realizing I could include a coke and still stay within my
calorie limit. But that leads to adding more junk, which leads to wanting to eat nothing but junk, which doesn't work even if you stay
within your limit - which you won't for long because the cravings will make the calorie limit too small, so you'll conveniently start to keep track
in your head, and of course you'll lose track, and then abandon the whole thing.
As I say, if you can fudge on eating clean and keep a good energy level and not give in to cravings, more power to you. But, it's a
dangerous game. We're geared to crave high-calorie foods, but there was nothing available in pre-agricultural times to
trigger the same intensity of craving as the myriad of processed foods with
highly-concentrated energy content and consequent highly-intense (and thereby even more seductive) taste. Those
foods essentially exploit the same pleasure mechanisms as recreational (and addictive) drugs by stimulating a reaction far
more intense than any triggered by non-processed food. Hyperstimulating the pleasure receptors with intense taste and texture
intensifies the desire for more of the same, even after the pleasure has become blunted. I've eaten candy bars that really didn't
taste that good anymore and I've drunk cokes that for sure didn't taste good anymore;
but I wanted that taste and that burn, and even a coke that doesn't quite pull it off is better than no coke at all. I'm not
picking on Coca-Cola, it's really a left-handed compliment; I could get addicted to any of them, but coke tastes the best (when you
haven't already had two or three that day). When I was a kid, I called every soft drink a "coke" - it's what Santa drinks. By the way,
when I was a kid, we were only allowed one soft drink a day. How did my parents enforce that? Simple - they didn't give us any money.
I want to point out all this craving makes sense for the "normal" person; the metabolism triggers the
pleasure receptors in response to high-energy food because in pre-agricultural times it was a survival trait to store up as much
energy as possible when it's available. So the tendency to gorge and keep gorging is understandable.
the overstimulation of processed food makes the physical craving even stronger and consequently the psychological pressure.
For some people it's possible to consciously suppress that tendency most of the time. But for other people, like myself, it's necessary to
internalize the benefits of not gorging to relieve the psychological pressure. The physical cravings can be suppressed by the method I've described.
That's the story. The time frames will vary, but I think I'm depressingly average, and I think my experience will pretty much be the
average experience. Cleaning out this way is not particularly easy, but it's pretty straightforward and it doesn't take more than a few days. If you can make
it that long you'll see what I mean about how much better you feel and how hunger is manageable. But be careful, it's so easy to get
complacent, and once you push into the craving zone, it's pretty hard to pull back until you "hit bottom" and have to start all over again, and
that may take months and who know how many false starts.
Having said that, don't be too concerned if you don't make it the first few times. Part of the QFE approach lies in programming your mind to
help you out. If you keep trying and making an honest effort, the fact that you make the attempt is a success in itself in that it
re-iterates to your psyche what you're trying to accomplish. I'll have more to say on that when I write about 'Psycho-Cybernetics', which
was a self-help book from the sixties that introduced me to the idea that the mind can be programmed to seek specific goals. I know that
to be true, but only if you 'put yourself out there' and make the effort. The Lord helps those who help themselves, and so does the
subconscious, psyche, or whatever you want to call it.
Last of all, and this is huge. Coffee tastes great again. When I was in my thirties and forties I could drink coffee all day and into
the night; it always tasted great and sleep was no problem. Now, if I'm not eating right and I'm heavier than I should be, it doesn't
taste good a lot of the time, especially first thing in the morning, when it's most important, and it keeps me up. Now that I'm clean I'm back to
enjoying coffee as much and sleeping as well as when I was in my thirties. I think I can remember back that far...
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