Sixth year
Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:52 pm
Greetinigs, NoSers!
I'm very late for my NoS anniversary update, this year. It's been quite a busy month.
When last seen, I had regained 10 of the 20 pounds I lost in my first year of NoS (followed by a good three years of maintenance):
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic ... ht=#151807
My plan of just vaguely trying to do better, in acknowledgement of the fact that I'm now over five years older than when I started ... has not worked out. I normally don't weigh myself at all, but I've done it several times in the past week, and I'm now somewhere between 14 and 18 pounds (depending on the day) above my lowest weight. Which means that some days I'm nearly back up to where my weight was when I started, six years ago.
I said last time that I am difficult to daunt, and this remains true. The positives I'm focusing on:
1. I've got well established eating habits that aren't difficult to maintain and prevent me from going too crazy. This another "year on habit", and I agree with Reinhard that this is an important metric.
2. How solid are my NoS habits? Part of the reason I'm posting late is that I just spent four weeks at an intensive workshop where they provided us with snacks, morning and afternoon, every weekday, including freshly baked cookies and danishes. How many times did I have one of those sweets? Zero. Not once, the whole time. Three meals a day, on weekdays, that's what I do. I felt inordinately proud of myself for this, because those cookies smelled *good*.
3. There is no way I'd still weigh what I did six years ago, if I'd stayed on the trajectory I was on back then! It's hypothetical, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that I'd be a good 20 pounds heavier by now, if I hadn't started doing NoS.
But at the same time, I do need to do something more active, if I'm going to whittle myself back down to my first-year low. What I've decided to do may shock those who've known my position on scales, on these boards over the years, but here it is: I'm going to start weighing myself regularly. My nifty new phone makes it easy to enter a new data point any old time, and it'll show me running averages and all that sort of thing. I know myself well enough to recognize that I respond well to the task of making a number change gradually over time (I do this with average calories per day of exercise, for example), and if my weight is the number I want to change, I'm just going to have to start keeping track of it.
This is what I did during my very first year too, come to think of it. I took regular weight measurements, and had fun learning some mathematical tricks for smoothing out noisy data using a moving average, and all that. It's just that after a couple of years it started to seem pointless, and even actively counter-productive: my weight was always (nearly) the same, so why bother obsessing over it all the time? But now it seems like I need to establish a "new normal" in terms of portion sizes and S day patterns, and for that I'm going to need to spend some time keeping track of the relationship between what I eat and how much I weigh.
My hope is that a year from now I'll be settled into a new, lower-weight equilibrium, and I can go back to weighing myself once a year.
Best of luck to everyone on your NoS journeys! I can definitely say that it's made a long-term, sustainable difference to my eating habits, and I'm sure it's made me much healthier than I would otherwise be.
I'm very late for my NoS anniversary update, this year. It's been quite a busy month.
When last seen, I had regained 10 of the 20 pounds I lost in my first year of NoS (followed by a good three years of maintenance):
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic ... ht=#151807
My plan of just vaguely trying to do better, in acknowledgement of the fact that I'm now over five years older than when I started ... has not worked out. I normally don't weigh myself at all, but I've done it several times in the past week, and I'm now somewhere between 14 and 18 pounds (depending on the day) above my lowest weight. Which means that some days I'm nearly back up to where my weight was when I started, six years ago.
I said last time that I am difficult to daunt, and this remains true. The positives I'm focusing on:
1. I've got well established eating habits that aren't difficult to maintain and prevent me from going too crazy. This another "year on habit", and I agree with Reinhard that this is an important metric.
2. How solid are my NoS habits? Part of the reason I'm posting late is that I just spent four weeks at an intensive workshop where they provided us with snacks, morning and afternoon, every weekday, including freshly baked cookies and danishes. How many times did I have one of those sweets? Zero. Not once, the whole time. Three meals a day, on weekdays, that's what I do. I felt inordinately proud of myself for this, because those cookies smelled *good*.
3. There is no way I'd still weigh what I did six years ago, if I'd stayed on the trajectory I was on back then! It's hypothetical, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that I'd be a good 20 pounds heavier by now, if I hadn't started doing NoS.
But at the same time, I do need to do something more active, if I'm going to whittle myself back down to my first-year low. What I've decided to do may shock those who've known my position on scales, on these boards over the years, but here it is: I'm going to start weighing myself regularly. My nifty new phone makes it easy to enter a new data point any old time, and it'll show me running averages and all that sort of thing. I know myself well enough to recognize that I respond well to the task of making a number change gradually over time (I do this with average calories per day of exercise, for example), and if my weight is the number I want to change, I'm just going to have to start keeping track of it.
This is what I did during my very first year too, come to think of it. I took regular weight measurements, and had fun learning some mathematical tricks for smoothing out noisy data using a moving average, and all that. It's just that after a couple of years it started to seem pointless, and even actively counter-productive: my weight was always (nearly) the same, so why bother obsessing over it all the time? But now it seems like I need to establish a "new normal" in terms of portion sizes and S day patterns, and for that I'm going to need to spend some time keeping track of the relationship between what I eat and how much I weigh.
My hope is that a year from now I'll be settled into a new, lower-weight equilibrium, and I can go back to weighing myself once a year.
Best of luck to everyone on your NoS journeys! I can definitely say that it's made a long-term, sustainable difference to my eating habits, and I'm sure it's made me much healthier than I would otherwise be.