Yucky week

I've had some kind of virus these past few days and have felt unmotivated to do much of anything other then the necessary holiday preps. One of the many bad things about my husband working at Walmart is that it is a hot bed of germs. He gets sick so often from all the people that not only are shopping there while sick as dogs, but the other employees as well. No one gets sick days so they show up spreading whatever they have to everyone else. It's ridiculous. I ran a day care for 20 years with constantly sick kids and parents in my home and never caught as many things as I have the past 2 years that he's been working there.

So poor Andy is at work today, feeling horrible. My energy is at 0, but at least my head is clear now. I can't imagine how tired he must be right now with another hour and a half to go.(cry)

Needless to say, I have not gotten back to my program. No excuses. It's a week and a half to Christmas and I'm just putting weight loss on the back burner until then. I'm still having my Cambridge of course, but not worrying about the scale for the moment.

Sorry I have not been as supportive as I would have liked to have been, but we're all dealing with the extra burdens of holiday expectations and duties which will soon be behind us. I fully expect to be back 100% come Dec 26th. Until then...survival mode.

Diffusing Triggers

I tell my clients that none of us got fat because we were hungry. We overeat for emotional reasons and because of a lack of coping options. At some point, we decide that food is an acceptable method of dealing with our feelings. We self medicate with food. It is not unlike any other addict. We sacrifice our self respect, health, and happiness to be numb in the present.

Stress and anxiety are two if the common triggers for destructive eating. We can temporarily distract ourselves from the issues and even get a little boost from "feel good" hormones that sugar and other food chemicals can stimulate. Finding a way to handle stress and anxiety in a constructive way is challenging. When you are in the midst of it you are the least capable of making a good decision and more likely to turn to food for sedation. Stress and anxiety hormones need a release. Adrenaline can damage your health if it is not used so a better alternative to eating is physical activity. You will get the endorphins, those "feel good" hormones, released in to your system. It is the body's preferred way of managing stress. Find a way to move your body, sweat and get out of breath.

Depression and loneliness can be overwhelming and food can become your solace and comfort.  At least in the moment you are eating it. Once consumed, it becomes more fuel for your depression.  The hardest thing for someone to do while feeling down is to reach out for help and support. The immediate desire is the exact opposite. Retreating and trying to stuff the feelings down with junk food is normal for someone feeling hopeless. It's a self  perpetuating cycle. Depressed-eat-regret-gain weight-feel out of control-more depressed-eat...and on it goes.  Food will never make anything better. It isolates you even more. The best way to reject old behaviors is to make new ones. Write your feelings in a journal with ideas of positive ways to manage them productively.  Find some way to connect with others. Recovery groups like OA can  help and of course, I am just a phone call away.

Pay attention to your thoughts. Take note of how life events direct your actions and reactions. If you get disturbing news, is your first reaction to go to the fridge?  I have a magnet on my fridge that says, "The answer is not in here. It's inside of you". It's a good little reminder.  Start paying attention to your triggers and come up with alternative productive ways of diffusing them. It's not easy to change, but it's required for a lifelong success story.

Diary Of A Chubby Kid

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 01/16/14:
From about 13 years old on I starved myself. I had been a chubby kid all my life and once I got in Jr High the teasing was relentless. 7th and 8th grade were horrible, but that summer I started restricting calories and lost weight. My family was happy to see me losing and didn't seem to care how I was doing it. I got through 9th grade very hungry, but I was able to fit in and wear those hip huggers and tight clothing and yes, my beloved Dittos, a brand of pants very popular in the 70's. I still felt very fat compared to all my super lean friends. Being so tall, (5'9" ) I already felt like some kind of amazon.

I grew up in Southern California in the San Fernando Valley so it was very much an appearance consciousness culture and the beach was the place to be. I needed to be able to feel ok in a bikini to fit in with my friends. The summer before beginning high school I went on 800 calories or less a day. I didn't care what I ate, as long as it was under 800 for the day. A whole can of Franco American spaghetti has about 270 calories. I loved it. I would have a piece of white bread with it and call it dinner. That summer I dropped down to the size 6/7 and grew boobs and everything was looking GOOD! People were shocked when I showed up in High school. The problem was that I was starving every single day. I don't remember one day of high school that I wasn't faint with hunger. I left home in the morning starving, spent the day starving, and then picked at my dinner and went to bed starving. This was before anorexia was a thing, but I don't think I was anorexic. I just knew that the only way I could not be fat was to not eat. I had been on a diet my entire life so this was not far from normal for me.

I started getting sick a lot, then bruising and hair loss started. It worried my mom and dad enough to take me in to our old family doc to see what was wrong. He was forever testing me for diabetes as a kid and he thought for sure this time it would come back positive. It didn't and I didn't say anything about my diet. He congratulated me on my weight loss though! Oddly enough, I did eventually end up becoming diabetic.

It will always remain a mystery how in a family of 4 kids, 3 girls and one boy, that I was the only fat one. All of my siblings were stick thin. As children, we all ate the exact things in the same amount. My mom served us our meals and that was all she wrote. No seconds or in between snacking, nothing. We rarely had sweets or sugary drinks or chips and never ate out. I was the only active one too. I was a total tom boy and they all were couch potatoes. Honestly, I don't think I have a single memory of my brother ever being upright! lol!

I came to the earth this way. I was a chubby baby, (9lbs 3oz!) a chubby toddler, a chubby pre-teen, a starving teenager, and an obese adult. I never felt "normal". It took about 5 years after my weight loss with Cambridge to finally experience life without constantly thinking about my weight. It's not completely gone of course, but it's no longer in the forefront of my brain at all times. I know I will never be out of control again and that as long as I have Cambridge I can relax and live life, but that chubby kid is still in there. I should have a talk with her and let her know we are going to be ok.

Welcome to 2014!

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 01/01/14:
Yes, another new year. Time is going so fast it seems. Do you have your goals set for 2014? I haven't put too much thought in to it yet, but I do know that I want to lose a few more pounds and get as lean as I can be. I haven't had a gym membership the past year and a half since we moved here to Florida. I have a beautiful pool, but it's unheated and yes, even here in sunny Florida it gets too cold to swim. You get about 6 months of the year before the water gets too cold. My goal is to need a new swim suit for summer because my old one will be too big!

This year had some challenges. My sister recently died. She was only 2,5 years older then me, (55) but she was diagnosed a couple of years ago (at the age I am now) with cardio pulmonary hypertension. She basically died of congestive heart failure. My mother died of congestive heart failure when she was only 62 and I also had congestive heart failure when I was only 26. So you can see there is definitely a genetic factor here I am determined to beat. Thankfully, I am currently in decent health, active and living as stress free of a life I can create. My Cambridge keeps me healthy and is my main tool for keeping a life time of obesity under control. I am so far away from the person I used to be 12 years ago. I understand that even though there may be genetic tendencies in my family, that doesn't mean I can't counteract them with a focused effort to eat and live healthy.

I hope that 2013 was kind to you, and if it wasn't, I hope 2014 will be all you hope for. I am not one for magical thinking, but people seem to be expressing a common sense that 2014 is going to be a great year. If we welcome it with that attitude, then we stand a much greater chance of it being so.

If you have weight to lose, don't wait another day. Go to my website at cambridgediet.org and order your product today. You will have it in your hands in less then 7 working days. You can take the time you spend waiting for it to clean out all the sugar and simple carbs in your diet to prepare your body for an easy transition to the diet. There is nothing else out there that can give you the results that Cambridge can!

The World We Live In

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 09/29/13:
It's just a sad fact that for us here in the country, food is an obsession. More so now then ever before with social media recipe sharing, cable food channels on tv, even network cooking competitions are pretty much taking over programming. It's impossible to avoid all the food stimuli and we are no better then Pavlov's dogs. We see, hear, or smell food and we want to eat it. It doesn't matter if our body does not need calories or nutrition at that moment. We've been conditioned to eat pretty much whenever and whatever we want.

This work you are doing now, retraining yourself to say "no" to things you want but know you don't need, is building mental muscle for the rest of your life. You always have had the power and the right to turn down any substance that you feel is harmful for your body. Addicts of all kinds have to learn this, that you can't justify harming yourself to spare the feelings of others. One thing I have seen happen a lot over the years is when one person in a relationship or in a group of friends begins to take control of their weight and their health, the other/s will feel threatened or left behind or angry that their eating buddy has abandoned them. I've seen marriages end over one member of the couple losing weight. It also tends to force the other/s to see their own bad habits...no one likes that!lol!

Once you lose your weight all these same events and people will still be there knocking at your door. If you lose your weight and then go back to the behaviors and habits that got you obese, you will be obese again. The people in your social circle no doubt have their own health and weight issues and misery loves company as they say. It's going to be a project to become a new and improved version of yourself that has no problem saying no to anything or anyone that is detrimental to your health and well being. You'll know you've beaten it when you can say no and not feel sad about it, but feel powerful and strong and healthy. Others in your life will learn that you have chosen a new lifestyle that they will have to respect. You won't worry about hurting feelings or disappointing someone who is not interested in your best interest. Ideally, you will set a good example to others who may also want to find their way out of a bad lifestyle. They will see your glowing good health and happiness and want it too!

Binge eating, emotional triggers and other thoughts

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 01/14/13:
People get obese for a variety of reasons and rarely does it have anything to do with hunger. We become obese for emotional reasons and over time we learn to attach food and feelings. Binge eating is emotionally driven and once triggered, it can seem impossible to stop. Have you already identified what your triggers are to binge eat or to eat the wrong foods? Is it stress? Loneliness? Boredom? Habit? Anger? Self abuse?  Perfectionism? We all have triggers that set the binge ball rolling. Pay attention to the thoughts you have before you open the fridge or grab your keys to hit the fast food drive-up. By listening to your internal dialog you can begin to change the behavior.

I was a stress eater. Unfortunately I was always under stress. I grew up with panic anxiety disorder. I had my first panic attack when I was 6 years old in a department store with my parents. I had no idea what was happening, only that the world suddenly was spinning, my heart was exploding and a rush of what I now know was adrenalin flooded my body. It was the most horrible thing I had ever experienced up until then and over time I had more and more attacks that ended up being attached to more and more surroundings and activities until I was almost paralyzed. I became agoraphobic by my teenage years. Because of that I missed out on a lot of the normal experiences a young person has. College? not possible. After I was married at the too young age of 19 and had my first baby 9 months later, it became nearly impossible for me to leave the house on my own, even to just get the mail. During that time food was an easy distraction to deal with my unhappiness

I had dealt with weight issues my whole life but had managed to keep it somewhat under control through Weight Watchers, the diet of the month or plain old starvation, but after another baby and a divorce, all bets were off. I went fully in to the worst years of compulsive binge eating that robbed me of my health and any chance at love or happiness. Anxiety, panic, depression, loneliness,self abuse and loathing...it was all there as I struggled with health crisis and single parenthood and poverty. The only thing that gave me any comfort or solace was food...I thought. In reality and hindsight it was the creator of my misery that pushed me in to a deep hole I did not know how to escape from.

One of my greatest challenges during my weight loss was dealing with the emotions that became raw and open without sedating with food. I had to force myself to face the lion's mouth and find other ways to cope. The first was to identify my triggers and the thoughts that immediately followed. I also had to experience the anxiety that would build and build as I resisted the compulsive urges to self medicate with food. I had no tools to work with so I learned as I went. I developing phrases and techniques to defuse the stress and get to the other side. When I faced temptation...the worst being pizza....I would tell myself, "The food will always be there. Anything I want so badly today will still be there tomorrow". It's kind of funny. I shared this phrase some 12 years ago on this board and now I read it all over the Internet. Hopefully it has helped others as it did me.

The goal is to calm the anxiety and find a peaceful place to operate from. Anything you can do to defuse the emotions and thoughts that lead to binging will eventually make you free from that negative cycle of stress/ obsess/ binge/ regret/ depression. Eating should never be emotionally driven. Never eat to pacify an emotion or to reward a craving. Just committing to those two things will stop most binges in their tracks.

Perfectionism was listed above as one of the possible triggers. You may question this, but most overweight people do suffer from it. We tend to be "all or nothing" thinkers. If we can't be perfect we degrade ourselves and use it as an excuse to quit or fail. How many diets have you started and not finished, assuming it was a proven weight loss method? What ended it? My guess is that you had a cookie or some little thing not on your plan and then the self flogging began and the food flood gates opened.

The ONLY reason Cambridge worked for me is because I didn't quit. No matter how many binges I had, no matter if it was just a soda cracker, (and frankly..the perfectionist in us sees a cracker the same as if we spent 2 hours at the buffet) I didn't quit. I pushed past all my old patterns and refused to find excuses to give up.

I have learned over the years that it doesn't matter where you come from, what your circumstances are or what your past contained... rich or poor, tall or short, male or female, loved or alone, young or old, famous or accomplished or just an average person getting through the day...obesity brings us all to the same place. We are equal in this. You can be dirt poor or have every opportunity at your fingertips, it levels the playing field because ultimately we are all the same. As human beings the internal struggle is.. as my country boy husband would say, "A one butt job". You are alone in your head. Only you can control your thoughts, your reactions, your perceptions and your behaviors. A victim thinks these things are controlled by outside influences. The truth is, we make our own destiny. Your past is not an indication of your future. The past is vapor. You can't change the direction of the road you already traveled, but you can change the direction of the road ahead.

Next time you feel the tension building and the urge to eat the feelings away comes over you, stop and listen to the dialog in your head. What are you telling yourself? Are you reacting to an outside stress and not acknowledging it? Are you bargaining or justifying something that you know ultimately will end in a binge or eating something that will make you feel out of control...even if it's just a cracker? Once you identify the emotion you can then change your course before you reinforce the behavior. It won't be comfortable at first, but this is not about being comfortable. It's about recovery and healing and learning. Replace the energy you would have devoted to food with something positive like walking, reading or call a friend.You can learn new ways to cope with life that actually bring you happiness and a sense of accomplishment and control.

How The Foods We Eat Affect Our Mood, Energy And Quality Of Life

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 03/13/12:
I find it very interesting how the foods we eat can have an effect on our physical and mental state. This past weekend was my husbands 60th B-day and we had a big celebration with all of his family here at the house. Andy has been following a low carb eating plan to try and reduce his triglycerides and he has been sticking to it 100% for the past month. He is a sugarholic so this has been a real test for him. I have avoided sugars and grains for some time now so for me it has not been much of a change when I cook for him.

Sunday was the big day and we decided we would relax the rules and just have whatever we wanted. BIG MISTAKE! lol! I won't go in to the menu out of respect for those here SSing but it was for the most part not low carb other then the meat and some of the salad dressings I make with xylitol rather then sugar so we could eat the leftovers. There was a ton of food and 2 Costco cakes. Everyone had a good time and enjoyed the food, including me and Andy.

Well...did we pay the price. He is still paying actually as he feels compelled to finish his B-Day cake that is left. I may have to throw it out to save him from himself! lol! That night and the following day I felt hung over, sluggish, bloated and gassy and just plain BLAH! I'm finally feeling more like my normal self, but looking in the mirror this morning was shocking. My eyes were so puffy I looked 10 years older and my skin was dull and pale. I probably still have some water weight retention, evidently mostly in my face, and my tummy is still a little rocky, but wow! Was that a rough couple of days!

When you eat clean and then dump in a bunch of junk you can really feel the difference in quality of life. I'm now used to having lots of energy and feeling clear headed. That was not always the case however. I spent most of my 30's in a food induced fog and feeling horrible was my norm. My weekend celebrating was a bad flashback of those days that I have no wish to ever go back to.

Eating whole fresh foods makes all the difference in energy and mood and overall health. I already knew that, but I got a refresher course on the subject! That energy and sense of vitality you get while SSing on Cambridge is a taste of what's to come if you make this a permanent change in lifestyle. Right now you are giving your body complete balanced nutrition and it is rewarding you! Once you have lost your weight the next challenge is putting together a good eating plan for maintenance. You can continue to use your Cambridge as I have these past 11 years as a base for your diet. Exercise is important. Then by adding just whole unprocessed foods cooked properly and avoiding grains and sugars you will find maintenance is not going to be an issue this time. It simply just happens.

Cambridge News: Metabolism

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 01/04/12:

This was my response to a post yesterday on my support board. The question was regarding advice given by a personal trainer and was about the common misconception on how weight loss, calorie restriction and metabolism work. You can visit the board here,

http://members5.boardhost.com/pam140/index.html?1325691851

Posted by Pam T on 1/3/2012, 6:18 pm, in reply to "Metabolism"

Not his fault, but he is passing along old information. It used to be thought that it was impossible to get the nutrition your body needed on less than 1200 calories a day. That was possibly true if it is on regular food. It would be very tough to balance every bite you take to be sure you get everything your body needs for safe weight loss. However, Cambridge provides every nutrient known to be needed by the human body in the proper amounts. It gives your body complete balanced nutrition on around 400 calories a day. Remember, calories are not a nutrient. They are only a way to measure how much energy is produced by food. If you have stored body fat you already have an abundance of calories. That is why it has been around for 30 years, is the top selling diet in the world, and why medical supervision is not required to purchase or use it.

There was 11 years of research that went in to the development of Cambridge with the goal being to protect the lean tissues of the body while allowing it to use primarily fat for energy. This is unique to Cambridge and why people feel so great when they follow it correctly.

Let me explain why it makes no logical sense what your trainer told you. There is an old saying, "Feast or Famine". This is because in past generations before the food industry was mass producing an endless food supply it was normal for people to only "feast" when there had been a successful hunt or harvest. They ate seasonally and that meant there were also times of famine. The human body was designed to handle this. It was not designed to eat what we do, as much as we do or as constantly or frequently as we do. We store fat for a reason. It was to keep us alive. If having a significant period of time without regular eating caused the metabolism to permanently slow down there would have been a lot of obese people back then. In fact, the only ones that were obese and suffering with the diseases like we do now, diabetes, gout, vascular disease etc, were the rich because they had an endless food supply all year round.

It has been scientifically proven that a low calorie diet actually prolongs life and prevents many of the health problems we now have.

Losing weight will mean that your smaller body will not need as many calories (energy) to run as your larger one did. That makes sense, right? A small compact car will not burn the fuel that a SUV will. I suppose that could be part of the reason people thought that the metabolism slowed down, but more likely it was just because people return to the same old eating habits that caused the weight gain to begin with. Of course...you will gain it back.

I have kept my weight off for 10 years now. I've never been able to do that before. I may go up and down a few pounds, but overall my weight has been stable and that was with little effort on my part, just the normal lifestyle changes that happen when you lose weight and get healthy. I move now! lol!

So to answer your concerns about what happens when you go back to regular food, can you gain it back? Certainly. This isn't a cure for what got you overweight. That was an emotionally based issue and if you have not taken the time to work through it you are vulnerable to going back to old habits and ways of coping. It will not be due to the diet or how fast you lost the weight or a slow metabolism. There is no science to back that up.

Cambridge does supply the body with essential nutrients better than anything you were eating before. The only thing it is lacking is calories so as long as you have body fat you have everything you need for whatever you are doing. You can supplement with some protein if you are really working hard and building muscle. That won't slow you down. Avoid any form of carbohydrate though. It will kick you out of fat burning mode, stimulate your appetite and likely cause you to overeat.

Why So Hard On Ourselves?

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 07/18/11:

This is a message posted on my support board that I wrote today. You can visit the board at: http://members5.boardhost.com/pam140/

In the 10 years I have been running this board I have met some amazing people. I am continually impressed by the level of compassion and empathy that total strangers extend to each other. So much love and kindness comes from each one of you here and always has. Board members have come and gone...and often come back, but the atmosphere remains positive and welcoming thanks to all of you here. 

So my question is, when we are so ready to encourage others when they are feeling like they've failed or let others down or themselves down...why don't we automatically extend the same grace to ourselves? Why are we so hard and unforgiving when we may trip and fall? 

So often we will have friends here that get off to a good start, maybe even lose a good chunk of their weight, only to have something knock them off track like a wedding or a vacation. They fade away from the board because they feel shame and defeat. Right when they need support and an understanding shoulder to lean on, they disappear and hide letting the negative emotions take over as they have in the past with other dieting efforts. That same love, compassion, fforgivenessand empathy that they extended to others should be turned inward to themselves. Unfortunately what most of us tend to do is revert to the same old negative self loathing dialog. 

The perfectionist in all of us causes us to have an all or nothing way of thinking. The conditioning from years and years of attempted weight loss efforts encourages this and is the main reason for serial dieting. If we slip, we don't just stumble, we dive in to a full on face plant! It's almost a self sabotaging kind of behavior. We commit to 100% on our plan which right off the bat sets us up for failure. NO ONE CAN EVER BE PERFECT ON THIS OR ANY DIET! If you aim for perfection you will surely fail. It's that simple. 

Here's an example to give you an idea of how unrealistic this is. You have your first child. You hold that baby in your arms and you pledge to be the best parent there ever was. Certainly you will be better then your own parents were. Your goals are lofty but you know you want this more then anything. There may be doubts, but you tuck them away. At first everything goes smoothly. Then around 3 months maybe you feed your baby something that he has a bad reaction to. Oh no! You made a mistake! Suddenly your 3 month old baby is whisked away and a newborn takes his place. You must start all over again. This happens several more times over the months and maybe even a year or two goes by. Each mistake takes away all that time and effort and replaces it with a new born.You must begin again. Will you ever reach your goal of perfect parenthood? Will you ever get that child to adulthood? Probably not. No matter what you learn or how much progress you make with each individual effort, you will always make mistakes and then you are back to square one over and over again. 

I'm sure you can see the nonsense in this. It makes so much more sense that we learn from our mistakes and continue on. Nothing in life requires perfection. Not parenting, not your job, not in marriage, not even in the medical profession or there would be no such thing as malpractice insurance and certainly not dieting. Yet, we go in to weight loss demanding perfection from ourselves and anything less then that causes a spiraling down into defeat and shame. Once we get over beating ourselves up we rally and try again, but because of the all or nothing thinking we begin again with Day #1. After all, it only counts if we're perfect, right? We screwed up and completely ruined our previous efforts so in to the garbage they go and we face another beginning. How depressing. Instead of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" how about we just change out the water and continue on with the bath? The little guy will get just as clean in the long run. You will lose just as much weight if you realize and learn from your mistake and continue on as if nothing happened. In fact you will be far more likely to lose your weight if you do. Stop counting the days and just let the time pass. Good or bad choices, learn from them and continue on. I often tell my parents who are in the frustrating period of potty training that they really have nothing to be stressed out about. All kids are potty trained by the time they go to college! If they keep slapping on a diaper every time the child has an accident they will never learn and it will drag on forever. If they just make up their minds to mop up the occasional puddle their child will know success in a much shorter time. You don't berate them for it, you encourage them..keep it positive..and pretend it never happened. Same thing when you have an "accident". You dust off the crumbs, make yourself a shake, tell yourself you are still on your diet act as if it never happened. You continue on to your goal. 

Remember to extend the same positive energy towards yourself that you do to others. You are just as worthy of love as anyone else. You are a work of art in progress. Like a block of marble in the hands of a great artist, it takes time to chip away the bits that will eventually reveal the masterpiece that you are!