Everyday Systems

Thank you Reinhard! I started No-S on May 4, 2009. At six feet tall, and age 39, I was 263 pounds. Last night, a few days ahead of schedule, I weighed 199, roughly what I weighed as an undergraduate 20 years ago. My waist size has gone from 42 to 36. I feel great, look like myself again, and am excited to keep going on to a new goal. Not ready for beefcake photos yet, but hope the chart below might be interesting and helpful.

I'm doing (almost entirely) vanilla No-S. My only minor mods are a somewhat flexible approach to virtual plating, a single fortune cookie at the end of our family's traditional Friday night Chinese meal, and accepting the occasional tiny "sharing" bite of a snack from my five-year-old son. To my great astonishment, it's been fairly easy having a nearly perfect record on N-days. The "wall around the law" works for me. S-days are still a bit of a challenge, but nothing too crazy. Because of this, I don't use the HabitCal, but have found charting my weight very useful.

I'd say that changing my eating habits accounts for 80% of my weight loss. The other 20% is exercise. I lift weights twice a week, walk four miles home from work twice a week, and sometimes ride a stationary bike for 14-20 minutes. I enjoy working out, but with two jobs and two kids, I don't always get to it. Good enough is good enough though. As long as I manage a couple times a week, I don't anticipate having trouble maintaining the exercise habit.

Best of all, my relationship with food has changed. Last night, after leaving the gym, I briefly considered "celebrating" by stopping by McDonalds or the late night doughnut shop. After thinking for 30 seconds, I realized that McDonalds food really doesn't appeal to me anymore, even as a treat. Good doughnuts do, but I'll wait for the weekend.

Congratulations! You've lost an amazing amount of weight, but even more importantly you've built the habits needed to maintain a healthy weight for a lifetime. Your family must be very proud of you. Thanks for sharing your inspiring testimonial.

Very incredible! Good for you! It really helps us to see when others post back on here about their success. That's one thing about No S vs. other diets, No S teaches us to do it on our own for life (so we may never hear back from many of the successful) where most other diets require much more thought and effort. Thank you so much for this reminder. It charges us!

Go vanilla!

Congratulations! Thanks so much for your testimonial. It inspires me to keep at it.

Happy Shrinking!

Congratulations! Good for you!

Bookman,

Congratulations! Another guru-beating success story! (I lost only ~40 pounds -- how I sometimes wish I'd started heavier )

And thanks for posting the chart. As a former scientific visualization programmer, I love this kind of stuff.

Your "qualitative" comments are very interesting, too. It's great to hear that plain vanilla no-s was sufficient for you to achieve this striking success, that you haven't had much trouble with N-days, and that you've deeply gotten the fundamental appeal of no-s: bad "bad" stuff just isn't worth it and good "bad" stuff can "wait for the weekend."

Reinhard

Congratulations, Bookman Old Style! That is really impressive, and the graph is super.

Way to go on your tremendous success and thank you for sharing your inspirational testimonial!!!!

Fantastic Bookman!!! Congratulations and well done!!!
Wonderful to read your post and very inspirational!!!
I'm glad you're really focused on new healthy habits, that's absolutely terrific!!!
Thanks for posting this inspiring news!!!
Debs

awesome progress, cheers!

on a personal note, what did you use and how did you make your chart? I love the 1 lb a week and 2 lb a week bars!

Aw, shucks. Thanks for all the kind words, everyone. I found the Excel chart template here

http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/ ... chart.html

It's currently the top result when Googling "weight loss chart." I used the customizable one about halfway down the page. A teensy bit of familiarity with Excel is helpful for tweaking, but not very much.

Very inspiring to me on day 2!

Congratulations, Bookman Old Style! This is a wonderful accomplishment, and I love the chart. I am on a plateau right now, and it is so reassuring to see one in the middle of your chart (roughly the beginning of November - beginning of January), and then see additional weight loss. Was that due to the holidays? Did you change anything to get the weight loss started again?

It's great to see what a difference this has made in your life!

Thanks, Starla. I'm not positive what caused the plateau- it was discouraging at the time. I had no red days during that time. What I did have were the actual holiday days, and more chocolate, cookies and so on lying around the house to push my S-days into overindulgence.

The combination of cold weather and a pulled tricep muscle meant that my exercise was mostly vigorous stationary bike riding, versus the usual predominance of weight lifting and walking.

I kept weighing myself twice a week at the gym, but often didn't record it, since it had barely moved. Some semi-rational part of my mind blames this- that by failing to acknowledge that I was at a plateau, I perpetuated it.

Anyway, I just kept pressing on, until the scale started moving again. Good luck on breaking though. Reinhard is right- keep focussing on the habit, and the weight will take care of itself.

I love this. I especially love that you didn't have to work out like a fiend to achieve it. Not that I want to be lazy. but when I think about wanting to turn some of my heavier friends on to this, esp. one who weighs about what you weighed, I don't want him coming back saying he wouldn't be willing to work that hard. He already bikes to work. Sounds like some resistance and moderation would go a long way. But people have to be ready for the message.

Congratulations!
That is wonderful. I am new to this, but have never found something so liberating. It's helping the light go on!
I, too, struggle more on "s" days because the freedom if kinda scary!
Good luck and keep up the good work!

I have to say, Bookman, that this particular testimonial is very inspirational to me, given the fact that I am about your age (41) and almost exactly the same size as when you started (6' & 265 lbs.).

I have toyed with the idea of doing No S for a while now and think that your story may just be the thing to finally get me going.

So, thanks for your story and the inspiration!

I'm just checking testimonials, and wanted to congratulate you. Thank you for being public with it.