First year
Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 1:14 pm
Hi all, I'm just about to reach my one-year anniversary on NoS (it's actually tomorrow, I think). In honour of the occasion, I've been weighing myself for the past week (normally I don't use the scale, or at least not regularly). The numbers I've been seeing have been bouncing around in the 200 to 203 range (pounds). A year ago, those numbers would have been in the 220 to 223 range, so I've lost something like 20 pounds over the last year!
This gets me back to the weight I was before our two kids were born ... I'm male, but I still put on weight after the kids, with too much unhealthy eating and grabbing quick high-energy snacks while they were babies, which set up very bad habits and led my weight to drift inexorably upwards. Portion size was never my problem, it was the other two S's: snacking, and sweets. In fact, snacking *on* sweets: I'd got into the terrible habit of eating chocolate bars in the afternoon, telling myself that I needed the sugar boost to keep going. Turns out, I don't.
For BMI fans, I'm 185 cm (just shy of 6' 1"), which puts my current BMI around 26.5. My doctor has gained my undying admiration by actually looking at me as an individual rather than a stat, and in my annual physical a couple months ago, told me that she thought I'd be too thin at a BMI below 25, so I should aim for 25 to 27. I'll stick with NoS and see where I land ... I weighed about 185 lbs in high school, but then again, I was doing vigorous martial arts training three or four times a week, so I may never get back there. I was stable for many years, post-high school, at my current weight, so I'm pretty pleased to have shed the excess of the past decade. At the same time, while I haven't actually dropped a belt size, I've gone from my clothes feeling like they were getting too tight, to now feeling like a need a belt for a lot of them. This is my main method of keeping track of how I'm doing.
NoS is a *perfect* match to my personal psychology: simple, effective, and unobtrusive, just as advertised. I took to it right away, and was lucky enough to have it stick the first time I started. I still use the HabitCal, but nothing interesting ever happens there: I now just fill it in a month at a time, in advance, as a way of "declaring" which days I'm going to count as S-days, and I never need to touch it after that. Now, if a day is an N-day, I just don't eat sweets or snacks - it's as automatic as getting up in the morning.
I'm doing one "mod": I take Fridays and Sundays as S-days, and Saturday as an N-day. It just works out better for me in a number of ways: I like having the option to schedule group lunch outings at work on a Friday, and thus being able to eat in an S-day way at such outings; and since Saturdays are mostly shopping/chore days for us and family gatherings are inevitably on Sundays, it's no problem to do an N-day on Saturdays. I also like having the S-days broken up, I was finding two in a row a bit too much for me: I appreciate them more, and I'm more moderate, when they're separated by a back-to-normal day. (The downside is that HabitCal thinks that I'm having a constant stream of non-weekend S days, and shakes its head sadly at me in terms of its "medal" rating, but I've learned to ignore this.)
Thanks, Reinhard, for coming up with and publishing this great idea, and thanks to all the folks on this forum who were so helpful when I was starting out. If I can be helpful to anyone else, it seems the least I can do.
I plan to keep eating this way for the rest of my days!
Cheers,
Dave
This gets me back to the weight I was before our two kids were born ... I'm male, but I still put on weight after the kids, with too much unhealthy eating and grabbing quick high-energy snacks while they were babies, which set up very bad habits and led my weight to drift inexorably upwards. Portion size was never my problem, it was the other two S's: snacking, and sweets. In fact, snacking *on* sweets: I'd got into the terrible habit of eating chocolate bars in the afternoon, telling myself that I needed the sugar boost to keep going. Turns out, I don't.
For BMI fans, I'm 185 cm (just shy of 6' 1"), which puts my current BMI around 26.5. My doctor has gained my undying admiration by actually looking at me as an individual rather than a stat, and in my annual physical a couple months ago, told me that she thought I'd be too thin at a BMI below 25, so I should aim for 25 to 27. I'll stick with NoS and see where I land ... I weighed about 185 lbs in high school, but then again, I was doing vigorous martial arts training three or four times a week, so I may never get back there. I was stable for many years, post-high school, at my current weight, so I'm pretty pleased to have shed the excess of the past decade. At the same time, while I haven't actually dropped a belt size, I've gone from my clothes feeling like they were getting too tight, to now feeling like a need a belt for a lot of them. This is my main method of keeping track of how I'm doing.
NoS is a *perfect* match to my personal psychology: simple, effective, and unobtrusive, just as advertised. I took to it right away, and was lucky enough to have it stick the first time I started. I still use the HabitCal, but nothing interesting ever happens there: I now just fill it in a month at a time, in advance, as a way of "declaring" which days I'm going to count as S-days, and I never need to touch it after that. Now, if a day is an N-day, I just don't eat sweets or snacks - it's as automatic as getting up in the morning.
I'm doing one "mod": I take Fridays and Sundays as S-days, and Saturday as an N-day. It just works out better for me in a number of ways: I like having the option to schedule group lunch outings at work on a Friday, and thus being able to eat in an S-day way at such outings; and since Saturdays are mostly shopping/chore days for us and family gatherings are inevitably on Sundays, it's no problem to do an N-day on Saturdays. I also like having the S-days broken up, I was finding two in a row a bit too much for me: I appreciate them more, and I'm more moderate, when they're separated by a back-to-normal day. (The downside is that HabitCal thinks that I'm having a constant stream of non-weekend S days, and shakes its head sadly at me in terms of its "medal" rating, but I've learned to ignore this.)
Thanks, Reinhard, for coming up with and publishing this great idea, and thanks to all the folks on this forum who were so helpful when I was starting out. If I can be helpful to anyone else, it seems the least I can do.
I plan to keep eating this way for the rest of my days!
Cheers,
Dave
The "snack" ethic, strong as it is for adults, is like iron for kids for some reason. People are convinced that kids need snacks to grow and boy do they get them (and boy do they grow). Even I, the anti-snack guru, can't quite resist indulging them. I've tried, however, to minimize their snacking, and spin the snacking they do as meals. Hobbit-style "second breakfast" is a favorite term in our house (we're all big Tolkein fans).