Everyday Systems

OK, here's an account of the red failures and non-weekend S-days in my habitcal to date. My memory is a little rusty for the first ones, but I'll do my best (fortunately there haven't been a whole lot). If I do happen to remember at some point, I'll update this post. And going forward, I'll describe...

I guess my response is, as a general rule: If you aim for virtue, you'll get pleasure. If you aim for pleasure, you'll get neither. And if you aim AGAINST pleasure (a lot of people confuse this for virtue) you'll REALLY get neither. Are there exceptions to this? Sure, at least seemingly. If you are ...

lostone, Welcome! "No snacks" is the hardest rule for most people -- but it's also the most important ( 90% of the increase in daily caloric intake for American men and 112% for women since 1976 has come from snacks ). And though snacking is initially difficult to give up because we're so used it it...

Hi Janice, Here are the two pages I wrote about glass ceiling. You can find a links to discussions from these pages: http://everydaysystems.com/podcast/episode.php?id=8 http://www.everydaysystems.com/glassceiling/ You'll notice some slight discrepancies between these two documents (example, the podc...

Welcome Savena!

Don't worry, this is the right place (and even if it weren't, no one would give you a hard time about it).

I like your image -- it captures what it feels like.

Reinhard

florafloraflora,

I'm very happy to hear this!

Good luck going forward and keep us posted,

Reinhard

Cayenne, Winsonwolf, Thank you for posting these moves. Now that I've got the no-s book out and the habitcal works reasonably well, I can finally focus on expanding the shovelglove movements page. I'm going to trawl through the boards and find any movement that gets mentioned several times (or looks...

I think I'm going to revive this thread and use it to explain any failures in my habitcal. Simpler and maybe even better than adding some "free text note" function to the habitcal, as I'd been planning. Stay tuned...

Reinhard

A lot to respond to here! I'll have to cherry pick for now: theburger: Regarding "custom," I see this as analogous to habit, except on a social rather than an individual scale. Customs or traditions are the habits of societies. Just like individual habits, they can be good or bad, and they are not i...

I would say that the relationship issue is the most important. Invest some serious consideration/work/discussion in it now, or the pain is only going to get worse later. See a counselor together. Lay your issues on the table. Show him that you're willing to give this a lot of effort. Even great rela...

Carole, I'm very happy that no-s has inspired you to such success. And thank you for posting about it here. I would like to point out for others that vanilla no-s doesn't require absolutely giving up all added sugar -- though that clearly can be an effective strategy if, like Carole, you're able to ...

Just noticed a nice little traffic spike and it seems to be due to a guardian article referencing the ideas in this podcast:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story ... 28,00.html

Reinhard

lomolover, I'd be careful about using the word "addiction." It sort of suggests that the situation is hopeless. I would guess that "really bad habit" is at least as accurate a term for your current condition, and a lot more useful: because not only can habits change, but you can use the power of hab...

I think the big difference between good individualising and bad over complicating is that most of the good stuff you've added is optional: intelligent defaults, patterns. They're also all positive: not "thou shalt not" but "try this first." ("thou shalt not"s are necessary, but expensive, it's best ...

How fortunate you are that the no-s founder himself is a born and bred New Yorker! Unfortunately the founder was rather young and broke for most of his career there, so I'm not really in a position to speak about fine dining in NYC ... but I can help with this: when I think New York, I think pizza. ...

NineMinuteNap, Thanks for these suggestions and bug/reports! 1. I fixed the underscore tags not saving problem (I think other problems people have reported can be traced back to this). 2. I made all tags selected by default when you used the "Edit" link from the main habitcal page. If you want to li...

Welcome, TerJan58. I don't have any personal experience with this issue, but I can tell you something that will increase your metabolism: exercise. It's important for everyone to fit regular exercise into your routine in conjunction with diet, but it might be especially so for you. Best wishes and k...

Nice idea! Even if you only use it sometimes, it might be helpful to keep you in line. I would be careful about obsessing too much over plate size, though. The far more important issue is frequency, and if big plates help you accomplish that, amen to 'em. Calories from meals have stayed the same for...

Congratulations! Don't rush in terms of getting your rep count back to normal. You don't want to risk injury, and it's fine if it takes many weeks or even months. It's better, even, because you spread that satisfying feeling of progress over a longer time. How heavy was your previous hammer? Reinhard

Deb, Sorry things have been tricky, but I think you're right to respond by narrowing down your focus. Exercise is important, but maybe it's not possible to fit in right this minute... Another idea is to maybe is to track a generic "exercise" habit on the habitcal rather than any particular kind of e...

bopque,

Thank you for de-lurking and sharing your success. I'm very happy you made it past those initial false starts and that now slow and stead no-s is doing the trick for you.

Reinhard

Brandon, Congratulation on the results! And on getting *most* of the habit down. Since you can get results on 3 meals plus a snack, maybe consider legitimizing that after dinner snack and calling it a meal. That way you get both the results and the satisfying feeling of being in control. If you real...

Welcome back, mimi.

Don't beat yourself up. Hey, at least you're still down from where you started, even if only a little. That sure beats the status quo of gaining.

Congratulations on your two wonderful excuses!

Reinhard

Welcome, Thalia! Sadly, google adwords upped the cost for "gluttony" (wasn't worth it do them with just one person paying so little, I guess), so I've had to take that one down. Pity -- it was my favorite. I'm glad the "french women" ad is working, though. I haven't actually read the book, but from ...

Seems like there are still some stragglers out there with bad cookies, so I'm going to make this discussion "sticky" again. I'll also post more explicit browser specific instructions on how to remove your bad cookies in a bit. I'd just about finished composing a detailed howto when my "uncrashable" ...

In other words, is moderation really just a kind of mildness or mediocrity? Are moderate people boring? I like people who have big appetites for life, who are not worried about those things. In some cases, you might be right. But I think they are the exception. A good analogy is poetry. Appetite is...

But I Like the Way Sugar Makes Me Feel....... Me too! Especially on S-days. I enjoy sugar so much more now that I eat less of it. Just like I enjoy alcoholic beverages more now that I no longer drink to excess . Because even just in terms of pleasure, moderation beats the spicy trash of excess hand...

florafloraflora, I'm so sorry to hear that S-days are such a problem for you, but there are some positive aspects to your situation as well which I think you can build on: 1. your N-day habit is solid. That is huge. It seems to at least have kept you from gaining, which is something. And you've had ...

Nice! You could probably simulate these workouts with 2 one-handed hammers. I've been thinking about testing out a one handed hammer workout for ages now... but it's been difficult to motivate since I'm so satisfied with my current two handed one. [Indian club swinging] was a featured Olympic sport ...

Eh, I'd add it to No-S, not replace. Just asking myself "Am I enjoying this?" is a powerful question. Yes! Absolutely. Sorry, I didn't mean to sound as if I was "accusing" you of replacing. :-) As a supplement, it's a great idea. In fact, I think the basic no-s structure helps set you up for this: ...

Reason tells me that moderation is best, but my desires tell me that there is a world of fine dining to be had, and that eating with gusto is the better way. I don't actually think pleasure and moderation are opposites -- if you are moderate at the right level of granularity. If you always ate mode...

I made this discussion sticky as a first baby step towards marketing the thing. As soon as we get a cover on amazon I'll also post a link on the No S home page (the cover design actually does exist, and looks pretty nice, I think).

Welcome back! I'm actually very impressed that you made yourself fill in all that red. And I think it can be a help. Instead of letting it drag you down, think that all you have to do is pull off one green day to see a striking change -- an inspiringly attainable goal. Another idea is every day writ...

While it does feel strange to put a kid on a "diet," the No-S rules are close enough to traditional normalcy that it might not be a bad idea. I wouldn't force the issue, but you can go a long way just by providing a positive structure: your good example, preparing 3 meals a day, and keeping a snack/...

Ah, I thought it was you (but didn't know if you wanted your cover blown). :-) The advanced knowledge about nutrition and calories seems to me mostly dispensable and even dangerous -- it distracts us from the far more pressing problem of obvious excess. It also distracts us from enjoyment. Michael P...

I haven't had time to probe more deeply, but it sounds like a perfect fit for S-days. But I would prioritize "eat when it's time to eat" on N-days, just to play it safe (it's a little too close to the nice sounding but notoriously unreliable "eat when you're hungry"). You can fit plenty of joy into ...

Good for y'all. Soft drinks are a big deal. A bigger deal, calorically speaking, than any other single food item: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050618/food.asp The drinks represented 14 percent of these adults' total daily energy intake. "For the nutrition world, that's an extremely high val...

Never. I don't count, I don't guesstimate. I just eat three meals a day. Now I do make sure to eat a rough balance of foods -- animal products, fruits, vegetables, grains. But that's far simpler and pretty much accords with what I want to eat anyway. Unless you are very ill or a professional athlete...

Congratulations, and thanks for posting. The no s diet is a lot like traditional common sense -- just formulated a little more explicitly. And while lot can be done with bare common sense and willpower ("not eating like a pig" and moving around a bit), I think the explicit rules are very helpful whe...

Welcome, theburgher! I'm very interested in this subject myself, though not very knowledgeable. I look forward to learning more from you! But I don't think it has to be choice between indiscriminate gluttony and spare asceticism. My experience has been that I enjoy food and eating much more with the...

Hi Rich, Congratulations on sticking with it and thanks for this detailed report! To respond to a few of your observations: 1. I've got these too. Not very pronounced ones, like I do above my palms right below each finger, but they're there. The thumbs do a lot of stabilizing, I think, which can res...

Congratulations! Glad you're able to take the bouncing scale numbers in stride. No-s can be slow going, but it's good going, so just hang in there, enjoy, and in time I'm sure the scale will fall in line. In the meantime, as you said, there is something satisfying in the consciousness that we're not...

I think secretly people like to believe that it takes more time to get fit than it really does, because it's a reproach to them for not doing it ("you can't even spare 14 minutes a weekday???").

Thanks for spreading the word though! Maybe it'll sink in after a while.

Reinhard[/i]

...keep getting worse.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 155540.htm

I've got to get that book released already...

Reinhard

walking to Home Depot to pick up a sledge on Sunday Beautiful! As long as you weren't snacking on sweets while you walked :-) I'm very much a social eater. Because most social eating is at meals, I find that no-s actually works better in social situations than most other diets... Was there anything...

Great! I'm glad you like/understand the idea. I don't think I'm going to be able to get to it this week (drowning in vacation backlog at work/dealing with copyedited nosdiet manuscript), but I'll dive in as soon as I'm able. I keep refining it in the back of my mind and I think it should be pretty n...

Congratulations! It takes a while, but it does come. The biggest problem with excessive weekends is not the calories, but the discouragement. Resolve not to let them get to you. From a more positive angle, making your S-day treats "contained and purposeful" a you did is a big help -- and a big pleas...

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/fd ... es_seconds

Note that there are some significant caveats:

"Seconds may not be suitable for everyone," von Eschenbach said. "Especially those who suffer from heart disease, those at risk for diabetes, people trying to lose weight, and women."

Very nice! Thank you. I should probably take a look at that book at some point to properly understand what I'm doing

So glad I moved my videos to youtube to make blog use like this possible.

Reinhard

Very cool. I've seen stuff about this guy floating around before. But I've never seen anything about how strong his HAIR was! I'm just grateful mine's still (mostly) intact :-). One of these days, once I've maxed out my insurance policy and have done everything worth doing in life, maybe I'll see wh...

Welcome! Sorry for the very delayed response, but I was on vacation and offline last week. No soda is not a small thing. Depending on your weight, and your exercise, it might even be enough. (If not, there are a few more esses I could suggest :-)) The other little changes you describe (walking up yo...

Hi Shawn, It looks like a nice app, but I think I'm going to stick with the habitcal . I'm very fond of the habitcal's simple , scalable color coding, and while there is a social element (you can see how others are doing for your tags, and graphical summaries will make that even easier) it's very un...

OK, I'm back! It's probably going to take me a few days to catch up on all the posts and emails, but don't worry, I'll get around to it. I did a first pass to eliminate spam and was relieved to find much less than I'd feared. As for my personal everyday systems compliance on vacation, my wife insist...

Brandon, That's a great idea. The habitcal isn't quite 'social' enough as things stand. I should also make the urls work by username instead of id so you don't have to rely on these weird ids if you're typing it in. I'll have to be a little careful not to trash the bulletin board software in the pro...

Welcome, Jocelyn! 1. actively treat yourself to something nice on S-days 2. otherwise basically stick to meals 3. don't sweat it if you don't quite manage to pull off #2, especially in the beginning. N-days are the important thing. Focus on that. The only thing you should be concerned about on S-day...

I'm not quite sure why, but breakfast seems to be the meal that gives people the most headaches. Here are some previous discussions with breakfast ideas: Breakfast in general: http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=230 Breakfast protein: http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=720 And h...

From a publicity point of view, I love to see people spreading the word! Thank you! But from a personal motivation point of view, I think there can be a risk. Psychologically, for a lot of people (including myself), talking can be a substitute for doing. What's the point of actually doing something ...

For a long overdue vacation. So don't be alarmed/offended if I don't respond to your posts during that time. My good friend Jody has volunteered (well, been conscripted) to keep an eye on the sites, but that's not going to extend much beyond pulling the plug if someone starts posting terrorist kiddy...

tapper47,

Sorry about the back... but glad the habitcal is helping. HG gives good advice: take as many sick S-days as you need.

Reinhard

It's probably not quite as good as a sledgehammer, but it's good enough to get started. By far the most important thing is to carve out the time and build a regular habit. You can do that with an imaginary shovelglove. So sure, give it a week or so with the shovel. If you love it but feel the need t...

The only "Reinhart" pics I have seen are the Pj's and white T that don't show much, and looking too hard for pictures of shirtless guys makes me feel a little silly. Yeah... my wife isn't so crazy about the fact that I put one there to begin with. She accepted this one as a fait accompli, but despi...

Go 1890! Very funny. Thanks for the link and for popping by again, Phayze. Hope all is well, would love to hear details (even if they veer from shovelglove orthodoxy).

Reinhard

I would be amazed if you could lose muscle doing shovelglove. With all due respect (and that's a lot, congratulations on losing all that weight!), my guess is you're misdiagnosing... I was stunned at how much weight I lost dong the nos/shovelglove combo, but I have no doubt it was all fat.

Reinhard

Hey, it's much better than not knowing you were an idiot -- which is how most of us, pre-nos, were most of the time. Just let it roll off. The less you let it upset you, the less of a problem it's going to be.

Reinhard

Hi florafloraflora, My strong suspicion is that it has to do with your plugin (or some other plugin). I'm writing this from firefox (2.0.0.6) on xp right now and it's working fine... Are there any other plugins you are using? Let me know and I'll try to reproduce your setup exactly when I get a minu...

Hi Suzella, Here are some more explicit directions, in case it's just a matter of confusion and not an actual technical issue. I see you've created two tags, 'nosdiet' and 'diet' (I assume this was intentional, that there are two slightly different diet habits you want to track? If not, highlight th...

Hi Suzella, The save button only lights up after you've ticked off some days to save. Did you do this and it still didn't light up? Please let me know if you're still stuck -- and if so, what web browser you are using. Sorry if this is confusing. The most important thing I'm going to think about for...

Thanks for this last batch of suggestions and feedback! I'm very happy that the habitcal seems to be catching on. I'll think about the suggestion of showing the previous/next months data as colored instead of grey... there are some not immediately obvious issues to consider like what if you are show...

In the book Mindless Eating, which has been mentioned a few times already on this board, the author describes a phenomenon called the "Healthy Halo Effect." He did experiments that showed when people eat food that is marketed as healthy, they feel like they can afford to eat way more -- and do. They...

Welcome back, Mimi. It's no wonder you were thrown a bit with everything that's going on. Don't blame yourself if it takes a few days to get back into the groove. I think a good way to get back into it (if you haven't already) is to make it the top priority for one day. Once you get one good day und...

Allison, I think this feeling of hopelessness is the problem. You are perfectly capable of doing this, I can see that from your initial run of green on the habitcal -- but you get so worked up about one tiny imperfection that then the whole thing doesn't seem worth it and you give up. Don't let your...

Sorry! Forget it and bounce back. It's probably going to take a few episodes like this to get the habit down. Maybe even quite a few. You have to learn how to just roll with the punches.

Best wishes getting back on your feet,

Reinhard

This is one of the very few diet books I've managed to read -- and I actually thought it was pretty excellent.

I mention a couple of interesting tidbits in this podcast:

http://everydaysystems.com/podcast/episode.php?id=29

Reinhard

Welcome! I think you'll find there are a lot of positive side effects from No-s: not just more water, but healthier, tastier food. I think you're our first correspondent in Malaysia, I'd be curious to know how No-s jives with local eating customs there. Sorry to hear about the gluttonous computer......

I usually have about 7 items per column. I do think having a more full card than not is motivating.... apart from the fact that my problem seems to be the opposite: keeping the number of tasks in each column under 10. I've pared down the routine column a bit (from 10ish to 7) because it was getting ...

Thanks for letting me know, mschalock. Other firefox users have also been emailing me that this fix works. But now I've gotten a few emails from users of other browsers that they are having problems (safari and aol browser). Both of these browsers work fine as far as I can see, but please email me i...

From a recent NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07angi.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin Itâ€™s easy to fear and despise our body fat and to see it as an unnatural, inert, pointless counterpoint to all things phat and fabulous. Yet fat tissue is not the problem here, and to castig...

Thanks all for chiming in on this issue. I think I'll leave out orange for now, both for aesthetic and anti-mushiness reasons. Adding a "nobinge" or equivalent habit if you need it seems like a good way to deal with this problem without these trade offs. Breaking down no-s into subcomponents as Pam ...

A lot of people have been reporting login problems over the last week. It seems to be confined to Firefox users. What happens is you try to log in, it seems to work (no error message), but then you're not really logged in. I think I understand why this is happening and I've made a partial fix on the...

Welcome, jobo! Treating fruit as dessert (on the same plate, mind you!) is totally legitimate (and smart) no-s. Since fruit is the sweetest thing you can eat during the week, you'll no longer see them as a nutritious chore, a kind of medicine, but as something to be enjoyed in its own right. Fruit i...

Firefox it actually should work with (or at least, it does for me).

What kind of probelm were you having?

Reinhard

JanekMakowski is either extraordinarily prolific or a (polite, so far) spambot (45,000 google hits). Speak up, friend, or I'm going to delete this account...

Reinhard

Welcome back, ou812. It takes most people a few tries to really get this. Just keep on starting over. It'll take if you keep at it. One thing you might want to do to help you bounce back quickly is keep a habit calendar (either using the online habitcal or a paper one). You can start now, or keep it...

I envy you! I wish I could get away with not knowing. But I have to to keep these darn sites useful.

Reinhard

Great work, Deb. Love the way your habitcal is looking.

I received the following email last week (and permission to anonymously quote it): I am just 14 years old but I still love the shovel glove :P My dad and myself were playing catch one day and I decided to try out for my high schoolâ€™s baseball team so I wanted to get a good workout to lose some wei...

Hi MerryKat, Are you using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista? Another user has reported having a problem saving on that platform. (unfortunately I don't have access to that exact combination just yet -- xp and IE 7 is the closest I can get, and that works albeit with some annoying quirks). Reinhard

Not yet! Thanks for the nudge. I'll do it shortly. I've actually got a bunch now.

I didn't say it was IMPOSSIBLE (or that I'm not, more or less, pulling it off), just that it's (surprisingly) difficult.

Reinhard

I had the same experience a couple months ago. A coworker invited me to go jogging with him. I hadn't jogged in almost a decade and was terrified. It turns out I was able to pretty comfortably jog over two miles. After just a couple once a week jogs we hit 4 miles -- and I feel confident I could hav...

Congratulations! That's great. It's funny how brainwashed we've been by the snack industry. It seems shocking to us that we could go without snacking between meals -- despite the fact that that's precisely what the vast majority of humankind did for all of its existence until like 30 years ago. Rein...

Thanks for posting these! They all sound sensible to me. Except I'm finding "Be in charge..." to be a lot more difficult than it sounds!

Reinhard

Welcome back, MerryKat! Those sound like excellent habits to build. I hope you find the habitcal useful and look forward to seeing lots of green!

Reinhard

Thanks for the order!

I'll mention the magnet idea to my editor. I'm pretty sure the odds of it happening for the initial printing are close to nil, but if it takes off, it's an obviously good idea.

Reinhard

Great work, Deb! I'm very happy to hear it. In the past, I'd gotten a little cavalier about actually using the timer (I knew more or less how long I'd been shugging), but since baby #2 came along and I'm a sleep deprived zombie, I'm finding it enormously helpful again. I think I'm going to do a podc...

Welcome, lowkey! I figured there should be sledgehammers all over the place in china, since that's where most of them seem to be made. The chain idea isn't bad -- except it's fragile (see the 21 day club in the No S Diet Daily Check in Forum). Have you seen the HabitCal on this site? It gives you th...

Yeah, I've been amazed too at how motivating it is.

We tend to think of money and status as "real" motivators, but when it comes down to it they're just another kind of "green."

The more immediate and explicit and public the green, the more powerful.

Reinhard

I was able to get single color cards at a local mom and pop stationary store. At some point, because I was in a rush and couldn't get to this store, I did resort to a multi pack from cvs with colors I don't use for personal punchcards. They make good bookmarks. The daily cards are by far the most im...

Welcome, Meg! Tea is fine (I'm drinking a coffee right now as I write this). Don't worry about plate size for now. Once you've established the habit of no between meal eating it's easy to whittle down plate size. You probably won't even need to put much conscious effort into it -- the fact that they...

Welcome back! Good luck!

Amen to taking it easy. Remember that carving out the time is the hardest, most important part. Even if you just stand around half the 14 minutes with the sledgehammer in your hand you're making big progress in terms of habit.

Reinhard

Everyday Systems

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14 year old shovelglover loses 20 lbs in 3 months