Everyday Systems

I am doing no s have been since before Christmas, and I am still not losing, I am staying the same! I have introduced exercise this week yesterday I played badminton for an hour and every day I do around 30 minutes fast workout that gets my heart racing.

But still the scales don't budge!

Yesterday I ate some bacon 2 rashers on two crumpets
Tuna and cucumber mayo on white bread and crisps
chicken breast, pasta salad with mayo and cheese and salad
lots of water, tea, 1 coffee

This doesnt seem too much to me, but still no weight loss, and my clothes do not fit me! This is getting disheartening.

Hi huggit,

No matter what diet plan you follow, including NoS, losing weight is all about reducing calories. Unfortunately, if you're not losing weight, you're still consuming more calories than your body needs.

NoS provides a wonderful "automatic" calorie-reducing framework by limiting your eating events to three meals a day. If you still find after some time that you're not losing weight, it helps to take an honest look at the make-up of your meals to see what you can do to help the process along.

Mayo, cheese, and starch-heavy carbs may be the culprit for you. It is very easy to really load up on them (which equals lots of excess "hidden" calories) without exceeding one plate and/or one serving. Maybe try limiting the quantities of these items for a time to see if the scales start moving downward.

Hope this helps!

I always take heart from Linda's story of not losing much weight the first year and then the second, focusing on lighter plates and losing quite a bit.

I am losing quite slowly as well-- maybe four pounds this first month. But it is down, and that definitely helps with motivation.

A moderate approach like No S is only going to trim a few hundred calories a day. A couple hundred calories is dead easy to eat-- say an ounce of cheese and a handful of raisins. Or I suppose cheesecake on the weekends The good news about that is if you walk two miles a day, there's 200 calories, right? Or if you count 1 serving of potato chips instead of eyeballing two, and walk 1 mile, that would do it too.

I feel ya. Some of the younger or more metabolically active folk may drop fairly quickly on this regime. Personally I am 50, perimenopausal and hypothyroid-- and let's face it, I've never had a great metabolism. I figure it's worth it for the greater enjoyment of food, the healthy boundaries, improved blood sugar, and all those good things. To lose weight I will still have to eat more vegetable-y things and increase my activity.

Take heart! If you're like me, you were gaining, so just halting that trend is good.

I am a short, middle-aged yo-yo dieter.

The sweet spot for me to lose weight at anything but a glacial pace on No-S seems to be about an hour a day of exercise.

But that's not as horrible as it might seem at first. I can do the whole hour at once, or I can break it up and that doesn't matter. So lots of little brisk walks or one big swim and it doesn't matter. But I do need to get in that hour

Larkspur wrote:I always take heart from Linda's story of not losing much weight the first year and then the second, focusing on lighter plates and losing quite a bit.

I do too! Her story reminds me that I can be mindful of what changes I'm really ready for, rather than trying to "force" change to happen now.

I'm sorry you're not losing. I think it's been a long enough trial that if you feel like tweaking some things, you could. Possibilities:

1-plate size. If you are using a large plate, try a medium sized plate instead. I mostly use a medium size, except for special dinners.

2-drinks--if you use cream and sugar in your coffee and/or tea, you might check whether you are drinking more calories than you realize. (I recently realized that I was getting 300-400 calories a day on days when I had 3 large mugs of coffee. That's certainly enough to offset lower calories in meals and stall progress.)

3-plate composition. You might aim for slightly smaller portions of the same thing and add more fruit/veggies to your plates. For example, instead of a whole sandwich and crisps, you might do half a sandwich, a smaller serving of crisps, and an apple or orange. Experiment and see what might work for you. If you are putting your salad on a side plate, do a smaller dinner plate so that theoretically, both could fit on one regular plate.

4--this one is harder and won't work for some, but try to pay attention to whether you feel stuffed or just comfortably full after meals. If you notice you feel stuffed at times, let that help guide you to smaller plates/servings. I tend to lose during months when I am mostly just comfortably full after meals, but don't during months when I'm stuffed or a bit uncomfortable after eating a lot of meals.

Hang in there!

huggit wrote:Tuna and cucumber mayo on white bread and crisps
chicken breast, pasta salad with mayo and cheese and salad

I find not piling plates too high, combined with eating a fair amount of roasted (lower carb) veggies, fruit, and adding an extra salad here and there are good strategies. Rice and pasta are hard, as a single serving size of either just doesn't fill me up very well.
That said, it might be good to give the process time, and just get the meal structure firmly in place before trying to change your plate composition. You just want to avoid doing that too soon and feeling overly restricted.

Did you make some changes this week? How tall are you? Are you in the overweight range or higher? or lower?

I don't know if it's my imagination, but I seem to do better when I am not eating baked flour items more than once a day and sometimes none. But i'm kind of a weirdo, who took a cooking class decades ago where the mainstay was whole grains. I whittled down the flour items over several years because i still liked them, but now that I eat less, I work them in less often, too. I do aim at 1.5 cups of grain (red cargo rice and rye berries these days) spread out over the day most days. But that's a big change for most people and theoretically should not be necessary. But I also get in 25-40 grams of fiber most days now.

Do you get legitimately hungry between any meals?

Hey huggit,

You wll lose. Do not despair!