you will certainly struggle to maintain if you don't find out why you would want to eat large amounts/binge
Exactly what I was planning to say once I'd read the first post.
You need to try and identify why you want to eat all the 'bad food', what it is about it that draws you to eat it.
Food is a very emotional thing; overeating, comfort eating and always making the bad decision with regards as to what to eat almost always stems from emotional issues. What is it that seperates those who can happily eat a salad for dinner and those who come home from work and eat 1500+ cals in a pizza meant for 4 people? It's all in the head.
The human body will never, EVER, prompt you to eat chocolate; that idea and decision comes 100% from your head. All your body does it inform you that it requires nutrition; what you do with that information, it entirely your decision.
So, learn your triggers, be that stress, boredom, anger, tiredness, lonliness, depression, anxiety, or whatever. And then use the time in anstinance to start learing how to deal with those emotions without using food as a crutch/suppressant.
for example if I want chocolate could I have a medium sized bar instead of a lousy 6 piece bar?
This is a prime example of where you need to really change your thinking. Why is 6 (
SIX!) pieces of chocolate 'lousy'? And what is a "medium" sized bar? 12 pieces? 18 pieces? What do those extra 4 or 6 pieces do for you that the first 6 pieces don't, besides make you fatter faster?
To my mind now, a medium sized bar IS one of the 6-piece bars; a small would be something like a single milky way, and no way will I *ever* buy one of the 320g of larger bars again, those things are just ridiculous and sit on the shelves begging for people to get fat.
Try thinking of it in terms of the actual *content* of the choc bar;
the calories in 6 blocks of Dairy Milk make up over
20% of the fat you should have in an ENTIRE day, not to mention containing over 40% of the saturated fats you should have in one day, and a shocking
30% of the sugar you should have in one day; looking at it that way, suddenly 6 blocks doesn't seem so lousy. In fact, it's quite scary that something we can eat so mindlessly can constitude upwards of one-third our RDA of some things!
If I remember rightly from your other posts, you are very new to the diet yes? (first week even?) and so some of the things mentioned above might come off as sounding "high and mighty" on my part, but I assure you that as your program progresses, and your mental attitudes change, you will thinking and feeling the same way as so many of us now do.
The change doesn't come overnight, and it takes hard work and dedication. You have to *want* it more than anything. And not just to lose the weight, it goes far beyond that. The loss is merely the initial stage.
A few months of abstinance is merely the pre-cursor to years and years of maintaining, so putting in the groundwork of changing your mentality is essential to longer-term success.
But as I said, all this will come along and happen to you as you progress with the program. For now, just concentrate on the abstinance and the rest will come from self-examination, reading and posting on here, and the changes you see and feel in yourself will alter your mentalities too