Everyday Systems

sheepish

I have been totally derailled by holidays/other disruptions to routine a few times now. I think it's because No S is very much about routine/habit and so, when other aspects of your routine go, it's very easy to let your eating habits go as well.

I don't pretend to have this down yet but I've ...

sheepish

Something that I'm trying out at the moment is going for some positive rules for N Day meals: that lunch should start with some vegetables (usually a salad/raw vegetables) and that both lunch and dinner should end with a piece or two of fruit. I'm not making it a hard and fast scary rule - if I end ...

sheepish

I'm TTC my first at the moment and one of the things that motivates me with No S is that I would like to model good food habits for my children. I don't want my kids to see me eat immoderately and do that themselves. I don't want my kids to think that snacking is normal. I don't want them to think ...

sheepish

I do a martial arts class once a week (well, sometimes I skip it due to other commitments but I'm usually there 3 times a month) which has really helped me to build strength. I have resistance bands that I use at home for a few minutes every other day and I definitely have more muscular arms ...

sheepish

Having lost quite a bit of weight on No S (I think about 25 lb?), I've run into some problems lately. Going on holiday for a couple of weeks, moving to a team which has LOTS of sweet things around all the time, Christmas lunches and parties.. it's not good.

I haven't had many green days at all ...

sheepish

My current favourite is carrot, sweet potato and coconut milk featuring:

some carrots
some sweet potatoes
a tin of coconut milk
vegetable stock
fresh ginger
a couple of green chillies
salt, pepper, paprika to season

It's really tasty!

sheepish

To be honest, having read a fair few of your posts, I kinda get the impression that you're not losing weight because you don't need to - that you're at a normal weight, you have a normal BMI and I bet you look really good.

If you don't feel good - I recommend doing some resistance work. I use ...

sheepish

I've been weighing myself recently - didn't used to. I started because it was frustrating me not to be able to quantify my progress - I know I've lost a fair bit of weight because I've gone down 1-2 dress sizes but I'd like to know more about how much!

It's been an interesting exercise - I've been ...

sheepish

It's an extra. Have a good birthday!

sheepish

I actually don't like the idea of two S days weekly. This is how I see it: S days give you the freedom to go wild with your eating. I think there are a handful days annually that should be S days and most S's are actually S events and don't need a whole day. Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas ...

sheepish

I'm sure it can work well but it doesn't work well for me. For two reasons:

Firstly, I eat more that way. If I sit down and think about which days to make S days, I might say go for Wednesday (as I'm going out for dinner and want dessert) and Saturday (because I'm going to a party) and so I'd wind ...

sheepish

I try to plan but also allow for spontaneity.

Yeah, me too. A fair amount of the time, my S days are just like my N days. Occasionally, my S days involve vast amounts of fruit in between meals. Once in a while, they involve a lot of junk (usually because I was at a party).

The dessert shooters ...

sheepish

I think it's more about your attitude to the food than it is the nutritional content of the food. If you replace cake after a meal with a muffin after a meal, I think that's a sweet - you're clearly avoiding breaking your habit of a sweet after a meal by substituting something that you can pretend ...

sheepish

I tried No S a few times before this attempt (which seems to be sticking - 8 months or so and 25ish pounds lost) and one of the things that I think was going wrong for me before was that I'd try to make up for failing by not taking S days. These days, even if I fail on a Friday, I still take my two ...

sheepish

I think you're being too hard on yourself. Maintaining a 65 lb weight loss is AMAZING. You're a statistical anomaly - virtually everyone who loses that much gains it back again but you didn't. Why? Because all that work you did in developing good habits has really paid off.

sheepish

Fruit was a big concern of mine when starting No S. I love fruit, I can eat vast amounts of fruit, it's lovely, my favourite food group by far.

Actually, what I realised through doing No S is that, even though it's not unhealthy intrinsically, I was eating FAR too much fruit. I now eat some at the ...

sheepish

I like variety so, no, I don't eat the same things every day.

I do try to stick to a routine about timings of meals because I've noticed that not doing so tends to lead to snacking - I don't eat breakfast, eat lunch between 12 and 12-30 and dinner between 7 and 8. I also have a routine about ...

sheepish

I keep a habitcal-like spreadsheet tracking my successs, fails and special days (I like being able to run off my own stats as I am a geek) and I noticed today that yesterday was my 100th successful day!

I've been doing this seriously for 188 days which means that 53% of my days have been successes ...

sheepish

You're doing the diet correctly if you avoid snacks, sweets and seconds Monday-Friday.

I think it's best to focus on that for the first 2-3 months at least and, then, take a look at your weight/measurements and see what's going on. If you're not losing, you might want to try one of the mods (see ...

sheepish

In the UK, the advice given to women who are significantly overweight is that they don't need to gain weight when pregnant (but shouldn't feel bad about it or stress themselves out by trying to diet either.)

It's not just the baby you're carrying either, it's the placenta and amniotic fluid and ...

sheepish

I fully admit I have never been on any kind of serious diet before. There have been a few times that I have tried calorie counting but I gave that up after less than a week. It just doesn't make any sort of sense to me. How do you figure out how much food is in Grandma's veggie soup? Or a homemade ...

sheepish

I think our dinner plates are 10 inches or so (as milliem described - 7 inches or so and a rim.) What I go for is: no breakfast, a cereal bowl sized portion for lunch, a full (and sometimes heaped) plateful for dinner. It works well for me. If I ate a full plateful 2-3 times a day, I might consider ...

sheepish

I really don't want to just give myself a break while on holiday because I'm losing weight really quite slowly as it is - 1-2 pounds a month. I'm fine with that pace of weight loss but, if I put on 3-4 pounds on holiday, it'll take me two months to get back to where I was and that's just dispiriting ...

sheepish

I'm going on holiday for a couple of weeks in September (hurrah!) and am thinking about how to eat while I'm away.. I had a trip in May which did not go so well, on the No S front... largely because it involved a lot of family visiting and people insisting that I just try the sweet thing that they ...

sheepish

My Indian background means that I find the concept of yoghurt as a sweet bizarre. For me, it's something I eat with curry or a drink (half yoghurt, half water, coriander, ground cumin, black pepper and salt whizzed in a blender, called a "salted lassi" if you order it in a restaurant though they don ...

sheepish

I saw someone on another forum say that they literally only eat meat and some green vegetables on their low-carb diet. Unsustainable.

I think someone (possibly Reinhard) mentioned a cartoon that they saw in a newspaper - the French, thin eating bread, the Italians, thin eating pasta, the Japanese ...

sheepish

I was under the impression that the U.K. was pretty metricated, with the exceptions of the pint of beer and stones for human weight -- but it sounds like I'm wrong?

It's a mixed bag in the UK and depends a bit on your age. As a 30 year old British person, I would use stones/pounds for weight ...

sheepish

B: banana, yoghurt, 2 pieces of toast
L: Sardines on toast, orange, mashed potato (if some left) and lettuce
D: Chicken Kiev with mashed potato and beans with an orange on the side.

Is this normal for you, or is it "diet" food? Because it looks to me like you're not getting enough calories ...

sheepish

Food! My favourite topic..

I do almost all the cooking in my household (because I love cooking) and, after a bit of trial and error, I've become fairly systematic about it.

Essentially what I do is have a certain number of dinners in regular rotation - things that are fairly easy to prepare - and ...

sheepish

I had a month earlier this year (March) that was just AWFUL. I had 10 failures and 11 successes. I now see it as the turning point for me - I've tried No S a few times without persisting - but I just kept on marking and moving on and no month has been anything like that awful since then. I think ...

sheepish

Try having a smoothie first thing, maybe? If you make it yourself, you can add some oats as well as the fruit and yogurt which would make it quite filling.

Also, what are you eating for dinner? Maybe it's just not quite enough.

sheepish

@Sheepish - clearly being satisfied is a complex matter - many factors contributing to it. I'm thinking of your lovely restaurant meal, and assuming you do in fact savour it? Linger over it? Rather fits what I said about the "French" style of eating. And your reaction to bland food? I'm thinking ...

sheepish

I can see the point of this strategy - in my own life, the more tasty the food, the greater my appetite.

Really? This isn't true for me. I find that, if I eat excellent tasty food, I'm satisfied much faster than if I eat bland boring food. There's a restaurant I really like in London that serves ...

sheepish

Thanks all for your nice comments! All very much appreciated.

This week, I've been trying on things in my wardrobe that were a bit too tight to wear but I kept around in the hope that I'd fit into them again. I don't fit into all of them but there are several that I do fit into again now which ...

sheepish

This might seem a bit counter-intuitive but have you tried skipping breakfast? I am hungrier in the mornings when I eat breakfast than when I don't and I know some others are the same.

sheepish

To be honest, No S is still not a habit for me, around 6 months in.. I think a lot of this has to do with my having a somewhat erratic schedule, though. When I have a "normal" day - work, lunch, more work, dinner at home - it's fine. It's just when something throws that off - going out for drinks ...

sheepish

I wish you both the best of luck!

When I read your post, debrabuf, the first thought that popped into my head was, "Why is she eating out? That's so expensive! She could just bring her own food from home." I'm from Germany, and something I still don't get about US culture is them eating out all ...

sheepish

I was weighed this morning at the Drs and it made me realise that I qualify to do a testimonial now as Iâ€™ve lost over 10 pounds. Around 15 pounds, to be exact.

The Numbers Bit

Iâ€™ve never been one for regular weighing so Iâ€™m not sure if 15 pounds is exactly correct but I have been regularly ...

sheepish

Personally, I think you should avoid trying to do the balanced meal thing at the same time as starting No S. Particularly because you say you used to eat a lot between meals - I think you might really struggle to implement both things at the same time. That said, I think you could make it work if ...

sheepish

What works for me is keeping my eye on the prize - i.e. thinking, "yes, it is already a fail but, ultimately, having another snack/sweet is going to hinder my weight loss and that's the point."

I found it got easier once I started seeing results - basically because I started to think "I don't want ...

sheepish

I've gone through phases of keeping a record of things I didn't eat because of No S - at first I did this for motivation but now I mostly do it for interest value. There were two things that stood out. The first was boring and cliched - how much I was eating in the office for "social" reasons ...

sheepish

I think I first tried this in 2006 and then I had a very stressful period for a few months that led to me stopping (unemployment, finishing PhD, organising my wedding, moving house (twice)) and I've picked it up again a couple of times since then. This time, I've been going for about six months and ...

sheepish

I think No S really helps with the problem of exercise and appetite increase. I quite often walk to work - it's about 4 and a half miles so it takes over an hour. Whenever I walk to work, I am hungry when I get into work and I remain hungry basically until I eat lunch. But, because I want to stick ...

sheepish

You know what? This is a brilliant idea, that's what.

Maybe someday I will get a metric scale. Or I wonder if I could get a scale that measures weight in stone. I have even less feel for that than for metric. Do they sell those in the UK?

You could even use this idea to track progress in pounds ...

sheepish

That is a good exception, SS. I don't know what the experience is like, and I have to trust that the person is paying attention to hunger cues and satiety at the meals as well. I've also read of people who use the plan for weeks or months but still never feel stomach-empty hunger. That is a sign to ...

sheepish

I mostly prefer not to weigh or measure but rely on the fit of my clothing. Lately, Iâ€™ve been wanting some kind of measure to see how Iâ€™m doing. One of the problems that I have with weighing/measuring is that certain numbers upset me. My â€œnaturalâ€ weight and size is about 10 stone and a 28 ...

sheepish

What drives me crazy watching parents/kids is the extent to which parents don't feed their children real food. My nephew (who is 2) loves cheese but my sister-in-law won't just give him a piece of cheese, she insists on giving him special childrens' cheese - string cheese, cheese sticks, etc. WHY ...

sheepish

I don't need to plan but I like to. Basically because I like food (that's how I got fat in the first place!) and I get a lot of pleasure out of searching for new food ideas and trying them out, as well as planning to make favourite meals, etc.

sheepish

I think of my dad when I need inspiration. He never snacks (unless he absolutely has to - he is a type 1 diabetic so sometimes it is medically necessary), he always eats his meals at the same sort of time every day, if it's a special occasion, he'll have a treat and savour it but, once he's done, he ...

sheepish

Obviously, if you eat more food than you need, even if you don't snack, eat sweets or eat seconds, you will still gain weight. No S doesn't defy the laws of physics.

I think of it more as a framework that helps you a) to see how much food you're eating and b) helps you to enjoy your food more. The ...

sheepish

I don't know about the science of it but fasting is fairly normal in my culture (Hindu) and I think it can be a helpful tool for weight maintenance. There will always be occasions on which you eat more than you need (social occasions, special occasions, etc) and the occasional fast balances that out ...

sheepish

400 calorie meals? No wonder you're hungry!

Think you really need to increase the size of those meals. I would suggest adding in stuff that is quite dense in calories if you really don't like to eat a large volume of food in one go - butter your bread for sandwiches, eat an avocado alongside your ...

sheepish

I think, to some extent, you just need to think about hunger differently. Think of it as anticipation of your next meal rather than pain/a sign that something is Wrong. Other than that..

To avoid getting too hungry, for me the key things are: to eat enough fat (oil, butter, cheese, nuts); and to ...

sheepish

Too solid flesh wrote:The deliciousness of "peasant food" probably depended on where the peasants were. Mediterranean peasant food is yummy, but here in the UK it probably involved a lot of turnips.

I love turnips! So tasty raw. Or roasted with olive oil, salt, pepper and a bit of lemon juice!

sheepish

Saving money. If I walk to work (4.5 miles), I save Â£2.50 that I would have spent on public transport.

sheepish

I still don't always manage to resist office treats but, one of the things that I noticed when I started No S was that my (slim) colleagues would routinely turn down birthday cakes/etc (except when hungry or as a special treat) and that everyone else got used to that and didn't really pressure them ...

sheepish

I think it's worth trying to work out why you have these late afternoon crashes.

Are you just not eating enough food at lunch, in terms of volume?

Are you not eating the right type of food at lunch? (not enough carbs, not enough fat, not enough protein, these can all be the case for different ...

sheepish

I found this useful too.

I think I struggle to come up with alternative rewards, though, I very much still gravitate towards food/alcohol as reward for a hard day.. What do other people reward themselves with?

sheepish

I did an school exchange years ago with a French school and this was what stunned me the most. All of us English kids were absolutely flabbergasted to be sat down at a proper table with proper cutlery, multiple courses, etc, etc.

There was a table, ages ago, published in the British press of how ...

sheepish

Apart from anything else, pizza isn't necessarily that unhealthy. I either make it from scratch or buy high quality pizza from a supermarket and I don't think a plateful of either of those is ever more than 800 calories, max, which is fine.

sheepish

I think that weighing yourself is an accurate measure of progress only if you do it like every 2 weeks. I mean I know one night I weighed myself and I was 136, and the next morning when I woke up I was 148, and I hadn't eaten anything b/t the weigh ins, I just slept, I hadn't eaten anything wierd ...

sheepish

I think that weighing yourself is an accurate measure of progress only if you do it like every 2 weeks. I mean I know one night I weighed myself and I was 136, and the next morning when I woke up I was 148, and I hadn't eaten anything b/t the weigh ins, I just slept, I hadn't eaten anything wierd ...

sheepish

I would guess that it's a combination of things:

Some salt retention

Are you, umm, sorry, no polite way of asking this.. a bit constipated? I eat very healthily most of the time and find that when I don't for a day or two, I have this issue.

And, yes, that was a lot of food so you likely have ...

sheepish

Depends what you count as a "mod" - I'm 5'3 and I've realised that three meals a day just leads to me maintaining my weight but two meals a day with a weekly 24 hour fast leads to weight loss. But vanilla No S doesn't tell you how many meals a day to eat so what I do is technically not a ...

sheepish

Unless you agree with him that the area is dangerous or think that he has the right to dictate your actions, I would not do things like take a self defence class or walk indoors or get a treadmillor a rape alarm. All that does is signal that you'll change what you do to placate him and bow to his ...

sheepish

I have polycystic ovary syndrome as well and I too found that I didn't really lose weight to begin with on No S. What I've done is: change my number of meals a day to 2 from 3 (usually lunch and dinner but sometimes breakfast and dinner and, much less frequently, breakfast and lunch) and add in a ...

sheepish

Mine aren't technically "mods" because there's no rule on number of meals but, after six months or so of eating three meals a day and not seeing any weight loss, I've switched to two meals a day most days and a 24 hour fast once a week. I don't weigh - just measure by clothing - and I certainly feel ...

sheepish

I think you owe it to him to hear his concerns but, having heard them, you get to decide whether you think they are a good reason not to walk by yourself. It isn't up to him to "let you" do anything, you're an adult who can make her own decisions about her own personal safety.

sheepish

I'd do a bit of both. There are probably some of your old clothes that don't look too bad baggy - flowing skirts, say - that you can keep wearing but you probably do need to replace some of them. Plus it's a nice reward for doing as well as you have - even if they end up being too big for you in a ...

sheepish

If I'm drinking the milk on its own, I like it whole, just tastes so much better! But I prefer semi-skimmed for tea. I'll use both for cooking, depends on exactly what I'm cooking.

I'm always surprised that milk is such a popular drink in the US - I don't know exactly what is done to it in the US ...

sheepish

The bit about satisfaction is really interesting. I've seen other research that has indicated that eating a variety of things at a meal makes you more satisfied and leaves you less hungry than eating the same number of calories worth of the same food. It certainly works for me - I can have quite a ...

sheepish

I think salt can be a bit demonised. I love salt so I'm a bit biased but I've been told several times by my doctor that my blood pressure is very low and that I could do with a bit more salt.

sheepish

Regarding breakfast, my anecdotal experience is that people roughly divide into two categories - those who eat less across the course of the day if they eat breakfast and find that it "sets them up for the day" and those who eat more if they eat breakfast and find that breakfast just wakes up their ...

sheepish

Often my friends will plate meals for guests rather than allowing them to help themselves but I have made huge strides in not always finishing what's on my plate. The real issue for me with three course meals is that any sweet - even if it would have fit on a plate with my other food - is a failure ...

sheepish

I'm curious about how many people found the 21 day thing to be true for them.

For me, I've been No Sing for around seven months and I still don't feel like the habit is really solid. After around 21 days, I had managed to make it reflex to decline office snacks/treats and after around a couple of ...

sheepish

I've always interpreted religious use of it as a way to purposely make people suffer in sympathy with trials of a revered one, to downplay the importance of the body rather than the spirit, and to engender greater gratitude for the gift of food. I'm very willing for it to have other advantages as ...

sheepish

When I first started with intermittent fasting (Eat Stop Eat 24 hr fasts with zero calories consumed during the fasting period), I made the mistake of overdoing it-I was doing three 24hr fasts per week-Mon,Wed,Fri.I was basically becoming too obsessed with it-the whole point of Brad Pilon's ...

sheepish

Coming from a Hindu background, like paprad, I'm familiar with fasting. There are various types of fasts that I grew up with and did for religious reasons:

Just fruit and potatoes
Just one meal
Just fruit
Just liquids (but not things like soup, just standard drinks)
Just water

I always enjoyed ...

sheepish

I sometimes have this issue. What I do is I err on the side of too little and, then, if I am genuinely hungry still, I allow myself to have something extra that would have fit on my plate. This only works because I have reasonably good self awareness - I know when I'm full and just want another bite ...

sheepish

I think it might be worth rethinking the timing of your meals. If you absolutely can't eat lunch at a more normal lunch time (12.30-2ish, in my opinion!), maybe you could have breakfast later than usual (10 or so) and then have lunch at more like 3 and then dinner at 8?

You might also want to think ...

sheepish

Working late is hard for me, too. I tend to deal with it by.. if I know it's likely that I'm going to work late in advance, eating breakfast at work rather than at home about an hour later than usual so that I can eat lunch later and then eat dinner later. If I don't know in advance, I tend to deal ...

sheepish

Around 3 mugs of tea a day, about a litre of water, usually an alcoholic drink or two a day too.

sheepish

What exactly is the issue? Is it just bread? Or are you also tempted by extra courses?

If it's the bread thing mainly, how about not going to restaurants that serve bread automaticaly for a while? Some restaurants just don't and there are particular cuisines that are unlikely to - e.g. Indian or ...

sheepish

I don't think being unwilling to reduce alcohol consumption to two drinks a day makes you an alcoholic. I regularly drink more than two drinks in an evening because I enjoy it. I could go without but I don't want to because it's a big part of my social life.

It is a bit of a problem for weight loss ...

sheepish

There are three types of grapefruit - red, pink and white. Where I shop, it's always labelled so that you know which you're getting - some people find the white ones too sour. I like all three types but I do like to know which I'm buying because I'm not always in the mood for the really sour white ...

sheepish

There are three types of grapefruit - red, pink and white. Where I shop, it's always labelled so that you know which you're getting - some people find the white ones too sour. I like all three types but I do like to know which I'm buying because I'm not always in the mood for the really sour white ...

sheepish

I don't weigh at all. I'm measuring progress against my clothing - it was a bit tight when I started No S (two months ago), now it's less tight. I'm aiming for it to be loose.

sheepish

I think it's worth analysing what you're eating and what makes you feel full, what doesn't.

At the moment, everyone seems to talk about protein, particularly for women with PCOS (like me) but, having analysed what I eat and when I feel most hungry, it's apparent that, for me, protein really doesn ...

sheepish

I think you should treat it as a sweet and try to restrict it only to S days. If you're still having trouble doing that after 2-3 months, maybe consider limiting yourself to 2 a week but not worrying about when you have those two? If you do then have more than 2 a week, you should mark those days as ...

sheepish

This happened to me last night. I had just gotten to my parents' house for dinner (had flown into NJ from TX and hadn't seen my family in 6 months) and my mom had whipped up a nice dinner plus dessert that she knew I loved. She made a point to say that she'd prepared the dessert especially for me ...

sheepish

The problem with three course meals at other people's houses is that they involve dessert and I find it really socially awkward to say no to.

This happened to me last night. I had just gotten to my parents' house for dinner (had flown into NJ from TX and hadn't seen my family in 6 months) and ...

sheepish

I think there's a big difference between sleeping during the day (which, I agree is usually more difficult for people) and sleeping during the morning. I've had a number of different jobs and commutes and I really feel awful if I have to get up any earlier than 8 at the earliest. It doesn't matter ...

sheepish

I'm going to address the plating and social things. For at least the first year I followed No-S, I didn't realize that there was a one-plate rule. By the time I realized it existed, I couldn't think of a reason to change what I was doing: eating one serving of whatever was being served.

The ...

sheepish

I've been doing this for a couple of months now - some failures in the first month but now I'm almost at 21 days all green/yellow - and I wanted to note down some of my thoughts at the moment, would welcome any comments/help/etc. I gave this a go some time ago (maybe a couple of years ago?) and then ...

sheepish

Something that I'm doing as well as HabitCal is keeping track of what I would have eaten but didn't eat, in order to motivate myself. E.g. If there's birthday cake at work and I would usually have eaten a slice but didn't in order to keep on No S, I write down "Tuesday - didn't eat a slice of ...

sheepish

I've been thinking about this too because one of my problems is that I go out quite a lot during the week - in particular, I quite often get invited to friends' houses for dinner and they will make a three course meal.. which is kinda awkward on No S.

At the moment, I'm doing a combination of ...

sheepish

I do one of these things: drink a glass of water, go outside (even just standing outside for a few mins but usually I go for a short walk), yoga/pilates style stretching.

sheepish

Who can blame you!

But when it comes down to it, even though it's more nutritious than straight-up sugar and a more complex carbohydrate, fructose is a fairly simple sugar, and at this rate, can you be consuming any veggies??? :)

I find the fruit thing difficult too. I adore fruit, it's my ...

sheepish

I find the fruit thing difficult too. I adore fruit, it's my favourite food, I love apples and pinapples and melon and grapes and mango and, well, basically every kind of fruit. But I do tend to eat it as a snack rather than with meals and so No S is proving a bit difficult. What I'm trying to do to ...

sheepish

This is totally anecdotal but, from my observation, people tend to divide into two categories -

Those who don't fancy food first thing in the morning and who are more than happy to go straight through to lunch without eating anything. If these people eat breakfast, they actually tend to be ...

Everyday Systems

Search found 118 matches

falling off the waggon..

Re: Floating S Days

100 successful days!

Going on holiday...

Imperfect? You can still get results

Weights and measures

How long did it take you to form the No S habit?

Some thoughts after a couple of months..