Life after Re-feed-thought this might be helpful - New You Forums
Found this on the "1st Personal Diet" forum.
Thought it might be helpful to those finished re-feed & struggling a bit.
I thought it has some very helpful advice.
It seems impossible -- and unrealistic -- to deal with eating under the strict guidelines of re-feed for the rest of my life. If I deprive myself of something, I crave it even more. Is this really my only option? I worked so hard to get here. This makes me ill just thinking about it.
There has to be some happy medium between the rigid guidelines of the diet/re-feed and the way we were eating before. I'm not seeing it in the literature, which is why I am writing. I am hoping you can provide "real world" information from your experience after the diet.
Friends who finished awhile ago keep yo-yo'ing back and forth from regular eating/gaining weight to strict Cohen and back and forth. Yo-yo dieting is what got many of us in trouble in the first place and is a proven way to kill metabolism. This can't be healthy, and frankly scares me.
How do you eat? Do you stick only to the portions and foods that are on the re-feed list and no others? Really? I would really appreciate your heart-felt help, please!
Here's what the first one replied:
Sorry to hear that you are struggling... let's see what we can do to help.
Firstly, I want to compare your afterlife to a process such as learning to drive a new car for example - in the beginning this may be a challenge, but, once you get use to it, it becomes second nature. While some people learn to drive they could have some accidents along the way, but hopefully this will not be major and besides, you do not need to stay there...
If you have followed your eating plan 100%, done your Refeeding 100% and if you continue to follow Dr Cohen's advice, you should not need to diet again.
How does your life fit in? Well, try to eat healthy food most of the time. Remember that starch triggers insulin, your fat storing hormone. For this reason you need to limit starch to once a day only. This simply means for example that you can have a similar to diet breakfast, similar to diet lunch and a dinner that contains starch.
So for breakfast you don't need to weigh your food, but you can have egg and veggies and a yogurt with this or even a slice of cheese. What you should not have with breakfast on a daily base is starch. Lunch could be any protein with veggies... Having this as opposed to having bread or starch etc means that your body will get the much needed proteins and nutrients contained in good whole food.
When dinner comes you can have your starch. During the Refeeding you trained your body to cope with 3 slices of bread, some starch like rice or potatoes, 2 extra new fruits over and above your diet fruit. That is quiet a bit of food. Now, after Refeeding you should only have starch once a day - so, you can leave the bread and have some little jacket potatoes with some veggies such as peas and carrots mixed, your salad type veggies etc.
You should try to avoid meals that have lots of starch veggies in one day ie: don't have potato, rice, peas, corn, and beans all in the same meal. You should rather choose to make 1 or 2 starches and complement these with other veggies like carrots, broccoli etc.
About eating out: Dr Cohen advises that a burger or ribs is fine... if you find that you've had too much starch and the next morning you are up on the scale it means that you triggered Insulin, the fat storing hormone. Now what you need to do is for the next 48 hours simply avoid the foods that trigger insulin - this will help your hormones to stabilise and the gained weight should drop.
The big key is to learn which foods have which reaction on your body - this you can only do by standing on the scale the next morning. If you are up... you had too much of whatever you ate and need to slow down a bit and do the 48 hour no starch. This does not mean dieting or weighing foods, just balancing of hormones.
BIG TIP: Keep up the water intake and the multi-vitamin. This should help you to maintain your progress.
What do you think, I would be interested in other peoples comments?
ropemaha
great post SMS, straight to the point and very very true.
Goal 1 = 6kgs DONE; goal 2 = 12kgs; goal 3 = 18kgs; goal 4 = 24kg; goal 5 = 30kgs; goal 6 = 36kgs; goal 7 = refeed
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Great thread, and great post! I couldn't agree more.
I've finished re-feed for about 6 to 7 weeks now, and my experience is the same: as long as I stay away from those carbs such as bread, rice, potatoes, beans etc (which basically makes most 'fast food' unavailable, and here I'm talking not of Macker, but 'healthy' food such as sandwiches, or not so healthy but still normally considered ok: pies), I'm ok. Equally, a lot of the vegetarian stuff is a no-go now. We've got a Hare Krishna restaurant around the corner, they serve food that's normally considered healthy, such as pulses, dahl, lentils, the lot, with rice. Unfortunately, I can't go there anymore, which is sad.
If I have yogurt or egg and veg for breakfast, and a Cohens style lunch (I don't know why people are complaining about it, to me it tastes just fine: vegetables in miscellaneous forms, all meats, fish, MAYBE a kebab some places offer it on a plate without the pita bread), and then for dinner have carbs AND desert (muffin, chocolate, cheesecake, you name it, I don't feel deprived at all), I'm fine.
If I want to eat carbs, say I want to go out for pizza or pasta, I know I have to do cardio exercise the day I go out and preferably also the morning after. Then my body can deal with the carbs. As I said: carbs I sometimes just have so I can have desert, otherwise my whole family incl a 19 year old son do not miss them. We had loads of nicely marinated prawns and a rocket salad with sundried tomatoes, freshly grated parmesan and a dash of olive oil for dinner, and for those who wanted some grilled haloumi. AFTER dinner, I forced myself to have a handful of nuts (carbs) so I could eat one of the blueberry buttermilk muffins I have made.
Exercised 60 mins today, and on Sunday, and will do again probably on Friday, as no time tomorrow.
So in a nutshell: I don't think it's unrealistic or in any way inhibiting to stick to the maintenance rules. They allow good food, nice protein, yummy fruit and veg, and on top of that all, desert/chocolate. the amount of the latter is obviously also partially dictated by whether you exercise or not.
Cohens for president!
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Good question Kylie,
& BEER BEER BEER!!!
Yes yes - that's what I do. Even on "no carb" or "starch free" days I still have my 6 crackers and 3 fruits - gets me through the day!!! Enjoy the saladas
Target maintenance goal is 120-126 lbs.
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Thats a relief that you can at least have crackers. Going on past experience with protein diets I ate right food foods but had lots of volume which didn't work either. The difference with what I am doing now is that I am not working out at all and when I get to goal plan to go back to the gym, that way I am eat carbs. As Kagieson wrote in one of her entries she needs to work out to enable her to eat a decent amount of carbs.
I look forward to the end and appreciate everyones experience on the matter of maintanence.
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