oolala53 wrote:Why are we talking about leaving food? You get to eat all the food on your plate.
I have a bad habit of continuing to eat if there's still food on my plate, regardless of whether I'm full or not. I'm trying to train myself not to do that.
Obviously, I think it's a good idea to train yourself not to keep eating when you're not hungry, but I don't think it's a good idea to do it when you're still starting No S. You'll have some very full plates at first, and lick them for every crumb. That's normal and OK.
Once your basic No S habits are established, then you can work on secondary things like plate-stuffing. If you try to fix everything you do wrong right away, you'll be playing whack-a-mole, and you'll get overwhelmed. Work on a few bad habits at a time.
Remember, you don't have to have perfect eating habits to lose weight. You just need to have better habits than what you had before (unless you were rapidly gaining weight before). It's kind of like the joke about the two guys who see a bear. One of them runs as fast as he can, and the other says, "you're crazy, you can't outrun a bear." The first one says, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you."
ruxpin55 wrote:the worst part of my day today was at 5:55 I looked at the clock and the very last bite on my plate and I was saddened because this was the last bit I will have in about 14 hours... i felt crushed, I still feel really sad about it --- how sad is that?
I've felt that way, too. I sometimes feel that way toward dinner time on Sunday (my days start at dinner time). My S days are over and now it's five days before I can snack, have sweets, or have as much as I want at meals again, poor me. At other times, I've felt resentful that my S days are over and I have to go back to N day eating patterns. This is getting better, but it's taking its own sweet time to do so. And the change isn't always for the better- if I'm stressed about something else, the negative feelings about N days sometimes come up worse than they've been for a while.
Remember, being hungry or having a food craving outside of mealtime, or wishing that an N day were an S day, or thinking something like "I wish I could still eat as much as I want, of whatever I want, whenever I want," or even thinking, "I hate No S," is
not a failure. It's only a failure if you eat something you shouldn't, or eat when you shouldn't. There cannot be a failure that doesn't involve you eating something. You shouldn't worry too much about hunger, food cravings, or your feelings about not being able to eat more. Those are just thoughts, and they can't hurt you or make you gain weight unless you act on them.
You
do have a choice of whether to act on thoughts and feelings like that or not. You may have been defaulting to acting on them until now, but that doesn't mean there aren't other choices available.