Unable to start

[Kapluska]

I know No S for 2 years and know it is IT. But I seem not to be able to stick to it for more than a week in a row. A week here a week there but no more. I completely eat my life away, all occasions are good. I keep telling myself OK I can always start later. Not yet. Not now. Now I want to eat.
But my self-esteem is diminishing each day I don´t controll my eating. Am I waiting for serious health problems to start? At times I am so motivated and decided, a few days later I barely care.
However, it helped me realise that my biggest problem is not eating too much itself, but that I was unable to prepare my meals in advance which results in grabbing the first thing available. The real problem is my non-existent capability to preview, plan, think in advance and prepare anything. Day-to-day, moment-to-moment living. I am hoping that No S will help me to change this. ONE DAY

[Nicest of the Damned]

The real problem is my non-existent capability to preview, plan, think in advance and prepare anything. Day-to-day, moment-to-moment living. I am hoping that No S will help me to change this. ONE DAY

{{{hugs}}}

I have this, too. When I was working, I ate out almost every day, because I'm not organized enough to plan to pack lunches.

I'm succeeding (mostly) at No-S, though.

Try to fix your eating problem. Leave the larger problem of not being able to plan be, at least for the time being. It might help to focus on something smaller for the moment. Success, even at something small, is motivating.

Try making it harder to slip off your diet.

Don't buy a lot of sweets or snack foods. Just about everybody in developed countries today would be better off if they ate fewer sweet and salty snack foods. It's easier if you only have to exercise willpower while you're grocery shopping than having to exercise it all the time at home.

Don't make extra of whatever you're cooking, so you'll have leftovers for another meal. That's great for some people, but a lot of us will eat more if there's more available (see Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating for many examples).

Don't spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Make it inconvenient to get a snack.

Don't keep dishes of candy or other snack foods handy in other parts of the house. I can't have candy dishes, because I can polish off an entire candy dish while watching a one-hour TV show. It doesn't even matter if it's not even candy I particularly like, I'll still eat it. I'm not alone in this, either. Brian Wansink's group gave movie-goers buckets of free stale popcorn. Most of them ate at least some of it, because it was there.

Don't eat anything right out of the package. Always put it in a bowl or on a plate first. That way, if you do slip up and eat between meals, at least you're less likely to eat an entire bag of chips.

[Sienna]

I have this, too. When I was working, I ate out almost every day, because I'm not organized enough to plan to pack lunches.

Yeah, I have that issue too. One thing that has helped me is to keep a bunch of go to lunches under my desk at work. So I have a healthy-ish default if I don't pack one. Generally I buy a big pack of soup at the wholesale club and sometimes a few of those Healthy Choice/Marie Calendar fresh meals. Because they have to be cooked, there is no fear of snacking, but it saves me from going out to eat so much.

Even at home, I try to keep myself stocked with go-to healthy-ish meals. Sure frozen meals may not be fantastic for me - but to me it was better than deciding to have a handful of cookies for dinner or ordering (and polishing off) a large pizza.

Another issue I personally had with other diets I tried before NoS was this bizarre mentality that diet success was a weekly thing. So if I wanted to start a diet, I would start on Monday - even if it was Wednesday and I found a diet I wanted to try. So I would get all my "good eating" out of the way before the deprivation started on Monday. And then, if I ever had a slip up, I would think I had "failed" the week - and since I'd already failed a little, why bother? And I'd eat like crap until the next Monday. One thing that really spoke to me when I read about the NoS diet was the part where Reinhard addresses screwing up. The concept of just say "I screwed up" and try not to screw up again seems so simple now, and yet it is a concept I just had never grasped before.

Good luck going forward. You can do this

[DaveMc]

If not now, when? If not you, who?

It's always hard to get started. Perhaps ask yourself: will it get easier as time goes by, or harder? I find that starting only gets harder, the more you put it off, personally.

Planning ahead makes things smoother, but it's not absolutely required -- if that part is putting you off, maybe don't worry about it too much. It's OK to eat whatever is at hand, as long as it's not an S. Go ahead and fill up a single plate with whatever you happen to find (except sweets!). Do that three times a day. Don't worry at all, at first, about what's on those plates: the most important thing is to get the three-meals-a-day habit firmly in place. After a while, you may find that the time you currently spend snacking can instead be spent planning for your next meal.

Or start with one S at a time: eliminate snacks, or seconds, or sweets, for a week or two. Then work on adding a second S. There are lots of ways you can "sneak up" on this, if full-scale NoS is too much for you. (But I'd still give the full plan a try, first: you might surprise yourself!)

Pick something that you think you can manage, and start doing it. Build from small successes to bigger ones. You can do this!

Best of luck!

[Nicest of the Damned]

Planning ahead makes things smoother, but it's not absolutely required -- if that part is putting you off, maybe don't worry about it too much. It's OK to eat whatever is at hand, as long as it's not an S. Go ahead and fill up a single plate with whatever you happen to find (except sweets!). Do that three times a day. Don't worry at all, at first, about what's on those plates: the most important thing is to get the three-meals-a-day habit firmly in place. After a while, you may find that the time you currently spend snacking can instead be spent planning for your next meal.

As a non-planner, No S is one of the few diets I've found that I looked at and said, "I could do this". There's no special food required. You can eat whatever you have on hand.

Don't try to fix all your bad eating habits at once, or, worse, all your bad habits, period. I've got another thread going about some neuroscience research that says people only have a finite amount of willpower available at any given time. That means that you should work on one habit at a time, not trying to fix all of them at once. You can try to plan meals better once you've got the No-S habits down. But if you try to fix everything at once, you'll probably fail.

I'm going to tell you a story. When I was in elementary school, for some reason they wanted us to have binders with folders (Trapper Keepers, if you're around my age, if you're not, never mind) instead of spiral notebooks. All 12 years I was in school, I had a very hard time keeping my binder organized. I would try, every year, but by November I'd have a whole bunch of stuff that was just stuck in there (I meant to punch holes in it so it would stay in, but I never got around to it). I had a terrible time finding anything that I hadn't accessed very recently. When I got to college, I acknowledged that I would probably never be able to keep a binder neat. So I bought spiral notebooks for my classes. End of problem. I did a lot better in college than in high school, and enjoyed it a lot more. Sometimes it's better to find a way to work around a problem, rather than beating yourself up over it.

[oolala53]

Are you really living moment-to-moment? I find it hard to believe you don't have anything to eat in your house. Do you eat every meal out? You have to buy something. It doesn't take a lot of planning just to buy low-sugar cereals. You can eat those every meal, if you have to. I buy a lot of frozen veggies and simple sauces. Sometimes I cook chicken; sometimes I buy one cooked. It''s pretty fast to cut a chunk of chicken and put it in a plastic container with some frozen vegggies and a big dollop of sauce--maybe a slice of cheese and bread to round things out. Heat that at work. Or bread, a big slice of cheese, whole pieces of carrot and celery, and an apple.

This isn't how I eat all the time because I do like to make whole grains and such, but I don't cook everything from scratch and I often cut things up. but in a pinch, I can make fast and simple work.

So you do eat out? Breakfast: egg mcmuffin. Chew very slowly. More calories than instant oatmeal but much longer lasting.
Lunch: meal salad at whatever fast food place is near by-use only half the dressing. Dinner: chicken pita sandwich, carton of milk. It's not the best food, but it's doable.

You can find a way this will work for you, but it might have to get a lot more painful.

[Nicest of the Damned]

I find it hard to believe you don't have anything to eat in your house.

If you really don't, that's easily fixed with a trip to the grocery store.

Keep stuff on hand for making healthy meals quickly, with a minimum of planning ahead. You want stuff that keeps for a long time, so you don't have to worry about it going bad. Pasta, jarred tomato sauces, and frozen vegetables are things in this category.