She Said: I Want a Forever Weight-Loss. Do the Cravings Really Go Away?

Many high caloric foods have dropped off my radar entirely, except for this one little ingredient.

Hello Everyone!

I’m coming to you from oven-central. I know. It’s hot almost everywhere; hope you’re staying cool. ♥

Pearl One

I can’t stop thinking about a question a reader asked me ages ago, “doesn’t it get easier? Does keeping the weight off become an automatic habit or will I forever be battling my cravings?”

Flippantly I replied, “you’ll always want the raspberry pastry.”

But over the last few months, her question keeps tapping me on the shoulder, and when it does I ask myself, “after these seventeen years of preserving my original loss, is it easier? Did I give “C” the right answer?”

So, after a lot of thought, my final answer is that yes, it does get easier.

I can forgo fast-food and junk-food 24/7, no problem at all. I’m also great at dealing with the endless porn-food in the grocery store aisles largely because I never shop hungry.

And you should know that – back in the day, I could eat a whole Pringles can by myself. No trouble whatsoever. It took the magic of time, but once I’d fully embedded the habit to never eat cracker/chip type snacks, it’s become very easy to bypass them.

It Wasn’t Overnight

Looking back, I lost interest in crunchy/salty artificial “food” in stages like at first it was somewhat difficult to say no to the chip then it became a bit easier and so forth until I got to the point where I have absolutely no lingering, “oh, I’d love a whole box of Cheez-Its right now.”

But here’s what I do still have issues with: anything made with sugar. And since I have zero intention of gaining the weight back, I monitor my sugar intake carefully.

How I Helicopter the Sugar

Habit Alert! As with any entrenched craving, I keep myself relatively full so that I don’t get hungry and commence to lobbying myself for an ice cream sundae (homemade or Dairy Queen; either suits).

When The Scarfer (my husband) brings home a pink box from the bakery filled with fancy cookies, yes, I still yearn to try one. At that, I have an automatic question I ask myself to put the cookies in their rightful place: do I want a double-fudge chocolate shortbread cookie or do I want to be a size 8? This question gets me out of the danger zone immediately.

But, again, it took time for this muscle of asking the right question to develop.

To combat the sugar-urge, I also eat fruit to provide the sweet vibe I’m looking for. My favorites are strawberries, grapes, watermelon and cherries. In my world, there is nothing better – outside of our fur-kids – than laying down with a great book and a bowl of grapes or cherries on my tummy. In the olden days I’d crunch through Oreo after Oreo as I read a book; but not anymore. I’m very happy to report that I completely detoxed from Oreos and have replaced them with fruit.

Going Cold-Turkey

These days, I want to not want sugar, the same way that I don’t want chips or french fries. I want to be done with sugar (other than fruit). So that said I’m implementing an action-plan right now (mid-July) to stop my extraneous sugar habit. A reader reported that she reads food labels and allows herself twenty-four grams of sugar a day (because sugar shows up in places you wouldn’t expect like bread). Note to reader: As you know, I’ve given up all evening sugar and haven’t relapsed. The evening sugar is definitely gone — detailed here — but I still partake a little here or there during the day and that’s the type of sugar I want to put an end to.)

As I ditch the sugar, I’ll keep notes and let you know exactly how this challenge is going. I’ll share the times I goof up and the times I got it right. My promise to you is that I will not give you the rosy picture. I will share every bit of the trek.

Wish me luck. ♥

Pearl Two

Have you read When You Give a Mouse a Cookie? This darling five-star children’s book details the chain of events that unfolds when a hungry mouse shows up at a little kid’s home and requests a cookie, and then needs a glass of milk, then looks in the mirror to check out his milk-mustache, and upon seeing his scraggly hair requests a pair of scissors to trim his bangs and so on and so forth.

You and I are living When You Give a Mouse a Cookie every day of our lives. We just haven’t known that we’re both the mouse and the little kid.

Here’s what I mean.

Say you eat beautifully at breakfast and lunch, and only “ruin everything” (drama-alert!) around three in the afternoon.

A micro-chain of events leads you to the Snickers bar at mid-day.

In your journal, deconstruct how you end up at the candy bar.

Write about:

• what you eat for lunch.
• what small snack you have at 2 p.m.
• how you’re feeling (both emotionally and physically) at 2:30 p.m.
• how you’re feeling (again, both emotionally and physically) at 2:45 p.m.
• how you’re feeling at the hour you usually lunge for the chocolate.

Write your sequence of events that lead to afternoon junk eating for six or seven days and become an expert on why/how you’re caving into candy around 3ish every day. (Get to know your sequence so well that you could give a TED Talk on the subject. No, I’m not kidding.)

There can be both highly personal reasons why you specifically want sugar in the mid-afternoon (such as when you were a kid, your mom returned home from work in a terrible mood at 3 p.m.), but at some level my guess is that you’re also merely hungry.

Journal-write about emotional pain from your past, but at the same time, keep yourself relatively full during the toughest windows of your day.

Because learning how to shut down your particular mouse and cookie — the immediate trigger — is the hack to creating so much goodness in our lives. ♥

Pearl Three

Topic for July: how to keep steering yourself back onto the Smart Eating Path.

I live in Atlanta and it’s super hot in July. My sister lives in Arizona where its a billion degrees beyond hot.

We call Atlanta’s heat, “humid.”

Shelbie calls Tucson’s heat, “dry.”

My grandma referred to the heat she lived in as “muggy.”

If I tell you that it’s “blazing” or “freezing” outside, you immediately get the picture.

Naming things makes them real and helps us talk about about them without calling concepts or items “the thingy.” We can’t call everything “a thingy” we need to give “the thing” a real name.

Which leads to my point, we don’t have enough words for smart eating, but that’s about to change.

Today, we’re talking “intentional eating.”

When I’ve strayed off the Smart Eating Path and have become intimately involved with Publix’s ice cream aisle, one of the ways I rein myself in is with smart self-talk; I ask myself, “are you ready to get back to intentional-eating or do you want to continue ravaging the kitchen?”

Asking myself this question is powerful because it floods my brain with all that “intentional-eating” encompasses which to me includes: having my smart foods on hand in the kitchen, going everywhere with my cold-tote packed in smart snacks, stopping food at 6 p.m. and going to bed around 8 p.m. with a delicious book-dessert.

Intentional-eating also includes the very effective “drip, drip, drip” method I featured here in Pearl Three of this post.

Your Takeaway

Write what intentional eating means to you. Edit the list and write some more.

The next time you’ve overeaten or binged, and are ready to hop back onto the Smart Eating Path, pull out your intentional eating list and steer yourself back on course. ♥

Pearl Four

Books love us and want us to be happy.

Richard Powers, won a Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory, but I “met” him reading his 2021 book: Bewilderment. An Oprah Book Club selection, Bewilderment delivered one of my most favorite things: a first chapter that draws me into the story immediately. Too many amazing reads start slow, so I often remind myself to be patient and chill. Bewilderment‘s story is about a nine-year-old boy and his astrobiologist dad (studies the possibility of life on other planets).

I was feeling blue when I picked up Bewilderment, but finished the book feeling positive and perky. Also, Bewilderment is slim meaning you can read it in a weekend. I give it a solid four-stars, and have already ordered The Overstory at the library. ♥

Pearl Five

Stay away from those people who try to disparage your ambitions. Small minds will always do that, but great minds will give you a feeling that you can become great too.” ♥

Mark Twain

Sounds harsh, but it’s important to say good-bye to the “that’ll never work, it never did before” crowd. Let them dump their Eeyore-thoughts elsewhere.

Protect yourself by staying mum re: your burgeoning smart eating habits.

Have a good one and see you on Tuesday!

♥, Wendy

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My favorite cold-tote

The best book-desserts on the planet