No, I haven't given up on my diet lifestyle change. I've done a little bit of sinning, especially Friday night at Skeptics in the Pub---beer, burgers, nachos...you name it.
Interestingly, it turns out that it's more uncomfortable for me to overeat than it used to be. I'm not sure why that is (but don't throw around the "shrinking stomach" myth around here). I used to be able to scarf down a large pizza without a thought. Now, I can still do it (and still might) but I feel like shit afterward.
I wasn't too good about exercise last week, and I didn't get around to riding the bike this weekend. I did hike around with my daughter in a back pack (one made to carry children, so lay off). This morning I hit the stationary bike, so hopefully I'm getting back in the swing of things. I'm hoping that my grave sins aren't going to show up on the scale Wednesday, but we'll see.
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Oops. You should watch where you're going.
You know, I've been feeling the same way! I ate a lunch today that normally would have had me looking for the next course, and I was STUFFED. Positive development for both of us, I think.
Recently I've been shifting my food intake more towards MaxDiet type foods (trail mix for snacks, more beans and veggies, fewer meats and dairies and sugars), and I've found that I can't overeat like I used to either. I've been going to the same pizza place (Old Chicago) for a few years now, and I can no longer finish one of their individual pizzas and not feel a little sick. I'm not sure if it's about fullness, or more about what I'm eating... in general, sugars and greasy foods have sounded less appealing lately.
I suspect (but this is little more than idle speculation) that the feelings of discomfort from eating too much result from a down-regulation of your metabolic capacity to digest stuff. If you are not eating very much, there is no reason to have all that liver and pancreas to lug around and metabolically support. The stomach has a pretty low metabolic rate, so it can stay big. Because the stomach has a low metabolic rate, it canât remodel itself easily. The liver and pancreas have higher metabolic rates, and so have the capacity to remodel themselves more rapidly.
I think the discomfort is your body telling you that you are exceeding the capacity of your digestive organs. I suspect that alcohol would exacerbate this feeling (after correcting for the stupefying effects of alcohol) because alcohol specifically reduces the metabolic capacity of the liver (by hijacking it to metabolize alcohol and flooding it with reducing equivalents that need to be gotten rid of).
I would hypothesize that the degree of discomfort would depend on the metabolic resources needed to digest what ever it was you overate. Greasy stuff requires bile which is pretty metabolically intensive to synthesize. If you took some ursodeoxycholic acid before you overate, that might relieve some of the discomfort by providing a bile substitute.
I hope you're being silly with the "sinning" terminology. Any reasonable plan allows for a bit of cheating (80% compliance seems to be the target for many) and it's nothing to say Hail Marys over.
I didn't think that "stomach shrinking" was a myth. I distinctly remember reading about a study several years back that measured stomach capacity using an inflatable intragastric balloon on obese subjects before and after a several-week period of dieting. The study showed that, on average, eating less for several weeks did in fact shrink stomach capacity as measured by the stomach balloons.
OK, I think this is the study I remember reading about:
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/63/2/170.pdf
I've been feeling this way too, and in the back of my mind I suspect it's just because it's August and it's very hot and humid and my body just really doesn't want the extra calories. I have a feeling it will go away once it starts to cool down.
I'm doing the "Line Diet", the sort of diet that an engineer can appreciate. You plot your current weight on one end of a graph, your target weight on the other end, and draw a line connecting them. Every day you weigh yourself and plot the point on the graph. Then there's one simple rule: if you are above the line, you eat less and exercise more. If you are below the line, you follow your normal routine. This diet is provably optimal :)
Cheating every once in a while has never been a hinderance to my efforts. It's also recommended by Sly Stallone in his fitness book, Sly Moves (nice).
That said, in contrast to the slowly slowly approach advocated by many, I found a strict and extreme approach was highly effective in retraining the body and mind when to expect food and how much to expect.
all the best
riz
lylebot@8
There's actually a nice diet lifestyle change management website that graphs these data for you, along with a bunch of other cool metrics for the quantitatively obsessed--food logs, pie charts, nutritional histograms, etc. And it's free: www.FitDay.com.
I love it.
Good luck PalMD, I hope tomorrow's weigh-in will be encouraging.