Weigh-In Day, Emotional Eating, and My Plan

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So I joined a Biggest Loser group that my friend set up. There are 40 members, all of who pitched in $25. If you lose 8% of your weight by July 7th she rips the check up. If you don't, the money goes to the Biggest Loser (the person with the greatest percentage of weight loss).

I started losing weight 5 weeks before this started. The first week the competition started was actually the first week I gained weight since March 19th. Yeah, bad timing. This is the second week of the competition and the good news is... I've lost the 2.6 I gained plus .4 more lost.

It's easy to get frustrated. But you're never going to lose weight if you don't keep at it.

Yesterday I overate for dinner. I wouldn't call it a binge, but I was more full than I usually am and I didn't count calories. I started seeing a therapist last week and she told me to notice what I was feeling when I started to overeat or binge. So I tried, but it was really hard to tell what I was feeling and why I was doing it.

I thought of a few things:
*I was famished. I had lunch at 12:30 and had nothing to eat since. I got home around 6 I think. That's way too long to not eat anything. One of my points under "How I'm Doing It" page is to eat every 3 hours. If I don't follow that, I get too hungry, eat too much, and don't feel well
* I had a headache, didn't feel good
* I was tired, it had been a long day
* I was stressed about a family problem
* I had tried on some shirts and none looked good and I felt depressed and frustrated about that.

I thought of something this morning though. I have to learn to deal with that. Yes, I can do everything in my power to prevent this (making sure I have food every 3 hours, planning for my day...) but there's some things I can't control. So, what am I going to do when that happens? What if I didn't have time to plan? What am I going to do about it? How will I react when this happens again? When I forget to bring food, I am famished, tired, headache, stressed...? It's bound to happen. So I need a plan.

Recognizing weight loss isn't going to be perfect is huge. Learning how to deal with my emotional eating in different situations is important.

Next time I will think about this post that I wrote.  I will look at myself objectively- (are you tired? head hurts? starving? stressed?) Once I recognize what's going on I can say to myself, "Hey, you're really tired. That doesn't mean you need lots of food. It means you need sleep. Go take a bath, go to bed early, something that is not food related that will help alleviate the problem."

This is my plan. I'll report how it works out!

One more thing. I used to overeat or binge almost every day. So having one day a week where it happens is definitely improvement. Gotta celebrate all successes!