The Sunflower Seed Cure-How to end all addictions

Quantified Self General Health
1

(Subject line is horrid. Forgive me)
Sunflower seeds are what I have used to build momentum to get me over bad habit involving the mouth (biting finger nails, smoking, heavy drinking, mouthing off). I shared it with another smoker, a smokeless tobacco dipper, and a marijuana-daily-user.–This was several years ago–

They echoed that it helped them to get to the next level of ‘not using.’ Meaning: some sort of personal development process for abstinence. .

What momentum creating methods have you used to quit or start a habit?

[Got the idea from Baseball players in the 80’s who chewed seeds or huge wads of gum to ‘fit in’ but not give in to the tobacco meme]

2

I used sunflower seeds to lose weight.

It was very much like Seth Robert’s Shangri-La diet, but with seeds instead of oil, I could actually chew on something, and then I wasn’t hungry for a few hours. How it started was that I was too much in a hurry a few mornings in a row, but I had seeds around to snack on, and I noticed that my appetite dipped. Ended up losing about 4lbs in a week. I’ve read that with such sudden weight loss it has to be muscle and water, but I managed to do 20% more chinups than before, after losing 2.5% body weight. Also, my weight stabilized at 150lbs after I quit the seeds and resumed eating the foods I used to eat before.

It seemed that raw seeds worked better than roasted seeds, because of having less flavor and being less enticing to snack on again. Safeway sells them.

3

Nice!

Did you use seeds with the shell or just the seeds? I found dealing with shelling them in my mouth (while a bit disgusting) was the kicker for me.

Oh, and I have yet to find a female friend that wants to load up their mouth with sunflower seeds in order to spit them out.

4

Just the seeds, I wouldn’t waste time with shelling.

5

I chew xylitol gum when I’m feeling stressed, which helps me avoid overeating. The danger is that if I chew too much, I get a headache, so it’s a balance.

6

Interesting. The Chinese eat lots of sunflower seeds and they are quite thin.

7

that’s fascinating.

what was your starting weight? how long did you eat the sunflower seeds? how long was/has been your weight stable at 150 lbs?

what’s happened to your weight since you posted that?

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Update:
After a broken foot allowed me (nice phrasing huh) to gain a mass of fat I used sunflower seeds (with the shell) to curb use of process foods and to get back on eating whole foods.

As an aside, eating ground sea salt seems to stall impulse eating in me EVEN “munchy” induced impulse eating.

Perhaps it is the salt along with the mouth work? I dunno.

9

I used to chew a lot of gum for this same reason. Unfortunately, there’s not a single healthy (non artificial sugar) gum out there that doesn’t like like crap within 10 seconds of putting it in your mouth.