Fourth year
Posted: Sun Jul 07, 2013 1:51 am
Hi everyone,
Well, here we are again: my No S anniversary. I started on July 6, 2009. If you want to see previous annual posts, here they are:
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=122076
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=7816
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=6595
Another year of maintenance to report. No further losses, but no major gains, either, and I've stuck to the habit like a very sticky thing stuck to another even stickier thing. (The only casualty has been my ability to formulate similes.)
No S continues to be just the way I eat, embedded firmly into the fabric of my existence. I was thinking the other day that it's interesting how comfortable my family is with the concept, by now: they aren't shy about eating a cake or something right in front of me, on a Tuesday. They know full well that's it's not going to cause me to suddenly eat sweets on an N day, and it's not some sort of lash-me-to-the-mast siren song that I need to resist like torture. If it's a Tuesday, I don't eat sweets, it's not even a question. Someone else eating sweets has nothing to do with it. (Late in the week, we'll sometimes make a point to put something aside for the weekend, so I can taste it later.)
I'm gradually trying to get the rest of the family to incorporate some No S principles into their eating, especially what I consider the real secret: not eating *randomly*. That's the central problem that No S fixes, for me. I used to have no idea when I was eating, or how much, because it happened at random times all day.
There are a couple of pieces of good news about maintenance: 1) I can keep this up indefinitely, and I see no reason not to; and 2) just by staying where I am, I'm gradually moving into a lower percentile of the population, as the average weight for my age goes up. I'm about to enter my thirty-teens (a term for ages 43-49, that I may have invented myself, I'm not sure), and the percentile ranges creep up every year: I think I've gone from 51st to 49th percentile over the past couple of years, just by staying at the same weight rather than getting heavier!
Sorry I haven't been around on the forums more often, but it's been a pretty busy year. And I think I'm experiencing what I've sometimes seen other people say just before they've cut way back on posting: I just don't spend any time thinking about how I eat, any more, so posting about it online doesn't really occur to me as something to do. Once in a while I feel guilty about not getting back in there to try to offer help and encouragement to those just starting out, and I'm going to try to remember to do that from time to time. But at first, posting here was a big part of the process: I was doing this immensely hard thing, rewriting my eating habits, and talking about it was very helpful. (It sounded so simple on paper but as we all know, it's actually a very steep climb for those first (say) six months!) Posting frequently was a kind of therapy: I needed to talk about it a lot, to discuss things with other people, as a way to keep going and keep myself on track. Now, though, maintaining No S is as hard as maintaining the habit of brushing my teeth.
Oh, and there is one habit change to report: I had, for years, been implementing a mod where I took my S days on Friday and Sunday. It worked well for me, but around the start of this calendar year I went back to the "canonical" pattern of having S days on Saturday and Sunday. I started having regular social events on Saturdays, ones where I wanted to have the option of S-ing, so the Friday-and-Sunday mod no longer fit the pattern of my life as well as it had when Saturdays were mostly shopping and errand days. So I changed it back to the canonical version. No problem, though it took my a couple of weeks to get used to having five days between S days again, rather than four. But it was no big deal, and certainly no problem at all compared to setting up the habit in the first place!
Thanks for being such a great community, and I can't emphasize enough how much everyone here helped me when I was first getting started. I'm a big No S evangelist, though my number of converts is still hovering at a single one. I do think that if more people adopted the principles of No S, we North Americans could get our out-of-control eating to be much more moderate.
Well, here we are again: my No S anniversary. I started on July 6, 2009. If you want to see previous annual posts, here they are:
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=122076
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=7816
http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=6595
Another year of maintenance to report. No further losses, but no major gains, either, and I've stuck to the habit like a very sticky thing stuck to another even stickier thing. (The only casualty has been my ability to formulate similes.)
No S continues to be just the way I eat, embedded firmly into the fabric of my existence. I was thinking the other day that it's interesting how comfortable my family is with the concept, by now: they aren't shy about eating a cake or something right in front of me, on a Tuesday. They know full well that's it's not going to cause me to suddenly eat sweets on an N day, and it's not some sort of lash-me-to-the-mast siren song that I need to resist like torture. If it's a Tuesday, I don't eat sweets, it's not even a question. Someone else eating sweets has nothing to do with it. (Late in the week, we'll sometimes make a point to put something aside for the weekend, so I can taste it later.)
I'm gradually trying to get the rest of the family to incorporate some No S principles into their eating, especially what I consider the real secret: not eating *randomly*. That's the central problem that No S fixes, for me. I used to have no idea when I was eating, or how much, because it happened at random times all day.
There are a couple of pieces of good news about maintenance: 1) I can keep this up indefinitely, and I see no reason not to; and 2) just by staying where I am, I'm gradually moving into a lower percentile of the population, as the average weight for my age goes up. I'm about to enter my thirty-teens (a term for ages 43-49, that I may have invented myself, I'm not sure), and the percentile ranges creep up every year: I think I've gone from 51st to 49th percentile over the past couple of years, just by staying at the same weight rather than getting heavier!
Sorry I haven't been around on the forums more often, but it's been a pretty busy year. And I think I'm experiencing what I've sometimes seen other people say just before they've cut way back on posting: I just don't spend any time thinking about how I eat, any more, so posting about it online doesn't really occur to me as something to do. Once in a while I feel guilty about not getting back in there to try to offer help and encouragement to those just starting out, and I'm going to try to remember to do that from time to time. But at first, posting here was a big part of the process: I was doing this immensely hard thing, rewriting my eating habits, and talking about it was very helpful. (It sounded so simple on paper but as we all know, it's actually a very steep climb for those first (say) six months!) Posting frequently was a kind of therapy: I needed to talk about it a lot, to discuss things with other people, as a way to keep going and keep myself on track. Now, though, maintaining No S is as hard as maintaining the habit of brushing my teeth.
Oh, and there is one habit change to report: I had, for years, been implementing a mod where I took my S days on Friday and Sunday. It worked well for me, but around the start of this calendar year I went back to the "canonical" pattern of having S days on Saturday and Sunday. I started having regular social events on Saturdays, ones where I wanted to have the option of S-ing, so the Friday-and-Sunday mod no longer fit the pattern of my life as well as it had when Saturdays were mostly shopping and errand days. So I changed it back to the canonical version. No problem, though it took my a couple of weeks to get used to having five days between S days again, rather than four. But it was no big deal, and certainly no problem at all compared to setting up the habit in the first place!
Thanks for being such a great community, and I can't emphasize enough how much everyone here helped me when I was first getting started. I'm a big No S evangelist, though my number of converts is still hovering at a single one. I do think that if more people adopted the principles of No S, we North Americans could get our out-of-control eating to be much more moderate.