Everyday Systems

If you read the Shovelglove forum, you might recognize me - I'm the Navy guy who does Shovelglove on the flight deck of my cruiser-class ship on deployment.

I'm up to twenty-two days of compliance with the Shovelglove plan (only green and yellow on my HabitCal for those days), but I hadn't had any success with doing No S at the same time. That is, I had twenty-one straight days of red and yellow on the No S portion of my HabitCal for that same period of time. I guess I hadn't built up enough general-purpose willpower yet, but now I have.

I've got two green squares on my No S HabitCal, and the tricks that have made it work for me are:

• Drink lots of water - I read a book, Your Body's Many Cries for Water in which the author, Dr. Batmanghelidj, describes how he treated many diseases in impoverished India simply by having the patients drink adequate amounts of water. Included in the list of "diseases" was overweight. That's right, people lost weight just by drinking plenty of water. Here's how I'm making this a habit - I set an interval timer on my wristwatch for one hour. Every hour, when it goes off, I head to the kitchen and down three eight-ounce glasses of water. At meals, I don't have anything to drink, because water can dilute the gastric juices and impair digestion.
  
  Eat a full plate at meals - I didn't heed this advice for twenty-one days, and I failed because of it. I have had a huge snacking habit, and would invariably make it an entire day without eating sweets or snacks, only to head to the kitchen after dinner because I "needed" a snack. Now, I feel satiated in between meals, and even the after-dinner period is not a problem. Between this and drinking plenty of water, I feel full most of the time. Later on, I'll taper off on the food I eat at each meal, but for now, I need the crutch of a heaping plate of food.

So, that's how I'm making this work for me. Your mileage may vary, but I think it's solid advice. I should mention, too, that my wife and I successfully did a few months of No S about six months ago, and I had no problem with it. I'd just fallen off the wagon, and being alone on deployment led to me eating to pass the time.

Nice job, Sean, and I agree with you on both counts!

(I also tend to not drink with meals because it causes a little acid reflux--sorry, TMI).

Congratulations, Sean!

No-s is not quite as conspicuous as on-deck shovelglove, but it does present challenges of it's own.

I think you have put your finger on the two biggest practical steps to achieving weekday success. I don't have an explicit drinking schedule, but I pretty much always have a black coffee between breakfast and lunch, and another between lunch and dinner, and a large glass of water with lunch that lingers into the afternoon.

Big plates are important training wheels for building the habit. And I don't think you'll ever need to *consciously* reduce them -- the looks you get from other people and awkward explanations ("uh, I'm on a diet") will gradually whittle them down to size.

Reinhard