We don’t want the things we can have without having to work for them.

I’m not sure if I would make a diet of this, but I know for certain that there will be junk in my home as I do not want my children looking at it as a reward or a faux pas

Okay about your topic. I, too, used dum dums to train my toddler! She just turned 3 and now she doesn’t care about them anymore either. Funny we had the same potty training experience with this!

I read about the abundance thing in a Geneen Roth book many years ago. She wrote about having cookie dough for her dinner all week. Um, cookie dough is my trigger too. So I did it. I made huge batches of cookie dough and ate it all week. Sadly, I NEVER got sick of it, I just wanted more and more. I ate so much cookie dough my face was perpetually broken out, I was cranky, and I gained like ten pounds. Finally I decided I was a freak who would gladly eat cookie dough for every meal for the rest of my life until I weighed 500 pounds, so I had to stop.

But yeah, apparently this does work for some people!

Comment #82, Ann – everything she said. All of it. For serious.

Second thing: I think this works especially well if you have some sort of disordered eating. And frankly, I think most of us have some disordered eating – it’s part and parcel of our culture. There are certainly a few who DON’T have weird food behaviors, and something like this would probably not work for them. (I didn’t believe that until I read these comments, but some of them made me think differently.)

Speaking as a complusive eater/emotional eater/binge eater/and AND all of the above – doing that with a trigger food (jsut ONE or maybe TWO at a time) was extremely helpful. Because after a while, the food didn’t bury the emotion anymore. It lost its drug-like power. I remember one evening in particular, reaching for the ice cream (again) and realizing suddenly that I WOULDN’T FEEL ANY BETTER AFTER EATING IT. And I got so mad, so angry, so FRUSTRATED, that I hucked the pint across the kitchen. (Which made a BIG mess that was not fun to clean up. I don’t recommend ice-cream-throwing.) And then I sat on the kitchen floor and CRIED.

But then? After the crying (and the cleaning)? I felt better. And I KNEW what was wrong. The thing buried in my psyche (under layers of ice cream and Nacho Cheese Doritos) that never quite got out into the light of day? GOT OUT. And then, I could see it, examine it, FIX it. It helped a lot.

In the end I find, with people that are really ready to change, that when they see how little cookies and ice cream they get in comparison to how much Veggies, Meats, Fruits, etc you are normally going to pick more quantity.

I don’t think that people should have in their heads that they can’t eat something, they should just remember that is the spice of life. Really interesting post though Thanks for sharing.

Fattygetsfit I used to get stickers from my mom too! Now when ever I make a list of things I need to get done I give myself a sticker when I complete it

The thing is, we’ve probably all been on this merry-go-round long enough to know we each have very specific issues that trip us up in our eternal quest for health. I know that there are a lot of people who struggle with a “paranoia of scarcity” – in that, if there are only six sausage biscuits in the freezer, they will want one every hour because, you know, what if someone else eats them? Or perhaps a better example is, say, pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving or Christmas. If that’s the only time of year you get it, it’s nearly impossible to tell yourself “I’m only going to have tiny slice” or “No, I had all that turkey and dressing, the pie is too much.” You KNOW it won’t be there tomorrow or in a week, so if you don’t eat it now, you won’t get it for another year. So you eat it, and you probably eat a lot of it.

Whereas, if you knew there would be pie in the refrigerator every day, you’d say, “Nope, I’m done for now, I’ll just have some later.” And maybe you’d want it later, and maybe you wouldn’t.

Only some people have that issue with everything, not just the seasonal treats. So for those people, I think this is a great concept. And honestly? I do have this issue. But I’m probably not a good candidate because I think it would take a LOT of retraining…and yeah, I’d be about 50 pounds heavier by the time it was done.

Cause here’s the thing – when I was eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, I weighed 210 pounds. For about five years. I hit that weight and then I stopped gaining, because honestly, I wasn’t eating tons. I was eating bad stuff, but not that much – because I knew it would be there when I wanted it. But I had to eat it enough to get fat before I figured that out.

Sigh. It’s a great concept. But like many great concepts, I am afraid it might be flawed in the execution. At least for me.

V.

Miz.

The Abundance Diet is exactly what happens with me and men!

The more available a gentleman becomes, the less interested Cara is. Hmmm…