Interesting mod: accumulating failure-proof S-days

[reinhard]

Kathleen is practicing a really interesting No-s diet modification that I thought was worth promoting from the relative obscurity of the 21 club day thread:

http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic ... 7999#47999

I customized the diet a bit, calling it The No Hassle Diet. I made a few little changes and one big change. The big change is that I accumulate Special Days at a rate of two per month. They can be used anytime. They all must be used before an N Day can be called a failure. That means that I won't be just one bite away from a failure. Instead, I have a buffer of the accumulated Special Days. To me, the need to have a record of 100% success in following the diet is so important that I needed to figure out how to have a buffer.

It's a bit of extra tracking, but not much. And it's a paradigm familiar to cubicle slaves everywhere: kind of like accumulating vacation days at your job. "The HR No-S Diet."

Thank you Kathleen for sharing this interesting idea! I hope it continues to work for you (and perhaps others).

Reinhard

[resting52]

Kathleen, Reinhard,

I'm confused about:

"They all must be used before an N Day can be called a failure. That means that I won't be just one bite away from a failure. Instead, I have a buffer of the accumulated Special Days."

Do you mean that you plan these special days or that you see a failure day in the making and turn it into a special day?

Resting

[Kathleen]

resting52,

What I mean is that I can plan the Special Day or can use the Special Days for what would have been an N Day failure.

I started this accumulation of Special Days on September 15th, the week after I started The No S Diet -- which started with four failures on N Days.

Starting on September 15th, I had 2 Special Days (earned for the month of September) which I could use however I wanted. I didn't use any Special Days from September 15th through 30th.

On October 1, I earned another 2 Special Days, for a total of 4 Special Days to be used however I want.

On October 1, I had planned to take my kids to TCBY just for a treat to celebrate my son earning Star rank in Scouts. The only reason for this treat to be on Wednesday was there are discounts on TCBY cones on Wednesdays. I had the freedom to simply use 1 of the Special Days. On October 1, after I took the kids to TCBY, my allocation of Special Days went down to 3.

Now I have 3 Special Days. If I go to the grocery store today and I decide to have a taste test, that is not a Failure. Instead, I use one of my remaining Special Days, bringing the total down to 2.

Part of why I like this idea is that I don't want to be one bite -- or one grocery store taste test -- away from an N Day failure. I cannot tell you the number of diets that failed because of grocery store taste tests. When I'd see a grocery store taste test, I'd just cringe at the thought of all those failed diets. Now I know I have the choice to use a Special Day if I see a grocery store taste test that I really want to try.

Another part of the reason why I am accumulating Special Days is that it may not always be convenient to have a Special Day on what would be defined as a Special Day. For example, my 50th birthday is coming up on October 23rd. That would be pre-defined in The No S Diet as a Special Day. Here's what is happening on that day:

- By 7 AM, I am driving my 14 year old daughter and 12 year old son to school so that my son can be in jazz band practice at 7 AM.
- By 8 AM, I am getting the other two elementary school children to school.
- From 8 AM until about lunch, I am going to work -- my second day of work.
- At 2:40 PM, I am picking up the two elementary school children.
- At 3:15 PM, I am bringing the 9 year old to a flute lesson that lasts until 4 PM.
- At 6 PM, I am bringing my son to Scouts.
- At 8:30 PM, I am picking up my son from Scouts.
- At 9 PM, my husband will get home from a business trip.

As far as I'm concerned, the actual birthday can be an N Day, since I'd like to have my birthday cake with my husband!

Also, I spent a lot of time reading blogs on this diet, and it seems to me that people are constantly debating -- is this a Special Day or not? Should I be eating the pie that my sister in law baked from scratch because we were visiting from out of town? If I eat the pie, can I define the day as a Special Day since I'm on vacation and out of town, or should I define the day as an N Day failure? There's no debate with this approach. You use a Special Day allocation, or you don't.

Finally, one failure does not doom this diet, but -- again -- in reading blogs, I noticed that many people reported one failure, then several, and then stopped checking in. Why? Did they recover or not? I think that any failures weaken the whole system of this diet, which is to build habits so that you aren't even thinking about food except at mealtime on N Days. My approach with building Special Day balances isn't failure-proof, but it is failure-resistant. I have 3 Special Days at this point. I cannot fail on an N Day until I have used up all the Special Days, which means the first time I would report a failure is on Wednesday, after not following N Day guidelines on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday. It's a perception on my part that I am 100% successful as long as I have enough Special Days to cover occasional lapses when I see a really good taste test at the grocery store. I'm not going over a cliff into failure if I succumb. I'm just using one Special Day allocation.

If I followed The No S Diet way of determining Special Days, I'd be turning down pie on visits to in-laws, wolfing down food -- and birthday cake -- on a birthday that is too packed with activities for me to enjoy the cake, and "walking on eggshells" with the perception that I am "one bite" away from failure on N Days. My preference would be to use the Special Days when they are convenient for me to use and when it would be socially awkward not to use them. My preference is to avoid any failures if at all possible. Reinhard has a guideline of about two Special Days per month in his book, and that seems very flexible to me.

I start work in two weeks, so I've had an awful lot of time to think about this diet. My family is very skeptical it will work. They've seen too many diets go up in flames. I've lost 6.2 pounds in 32 days, going from 215 pounds to 208.8 pounds. I feel the weight loss, but no one else notices it. Time will tell, but I am feeling confident that this diet will work because each week it is getting easier.

Kathleen

PS. My sister-in-law is a really good cook. Whenever I'm at her house, I want to eat what she's made. That means that N Days visiting her are very likely to become Special Days! I have incentive to build Special Day balances for any Special Days that are spent with her and her family.

[resting52]

Thank you for clarifying your tweak! I'm going to adopt it!

Do you track it on a habitcal?

Resting

[Kathleen]

resting52,

That' s great that you are going to try the accumulation of two Special Days per month! It certainly seems like an easier approach to me because there is no need to debate about whether or not some event qualifies the day as a Special Day. I love the entire rest of the diet. I spent a year focused on dieting and just in August came to the conclusion that having meals and avoiding snacks would be an appropriate way to go. I don't think I would have come up with the idea of weekend Special Days with "unconditional permission to eat" (a concept I got from the book Intuitive Eating) on those days. I had already understood the need for "unconditional permission to eat" before I read The No S Diet, but I hadn't figured out how to have that permission and to lose weight!

Habitcal doesn't work for me, so I don't use it. I'm more of a verbal person than a visual person. I have my blog and there I have the dates with SUCCESS and then the number of available Special Days in parentheses after it. I like distinguishing between S Days and N Days using colors. Royal blue is my favorite color, so I decided to make that the color for S Days!

http://everydaysystems.com/bb/viewtopic ... 7&start=50

I've had the wonderful opportunity to actually focus on this diet as my highest priority for the last month. My children are in school, and I am starting work on October 22. I don't have much to do except supervise pumpkin-cutting by a 7 year old and a 9 year old!

What's very encouraging about this diet is that it seems to be getting easier each week. I am not concerning myself at all with what I do on S Days. Last Sunday, on the drive from a grocery store to a Kinko's, I managed to inhale about 1,100 calories of caramel corn. My one and only focus is on keeping N Days GREEN, and I'm doing that.

Over time, we'll see how much weight I'll lose, but I'm very encouraged that my weight is down from 215 pounds to 208.8 pounds in 32 days.

Kathleen

[Merry]

Gee...it never occurred to me to worry about whether an event or day "qualified" as an NWS day by the standards laid out (the rebel in me that says rules are made to be changed, LOL!). I'm taking one tomorrow because my mom is visiting & we're going to an apple orchard & I know we'll be getting apple cider donuts. (Yeah, I'm taking a NWS day on a weekend, I know! That's because Tuesdays & Fridays are my S days. Ok, no one listen to me, LOL!) I think I'm following the intention, if not the letter, of the diet.

Merry

[Kathleen]

Merry,

Some people do seem to worry, based on their blogs, but people are different. As for me, I think my problem would have been creating S Days, like taking my kids to TCBY to celebrate my son making Star Scout rank. Now I have a limit on the number of S Days I can create!

I'm glad Reinhard encourages mods.

Kathleen

[winnie96]

Kathleen: Thanks for sharing your idea about the accumulation of two special days per month. I had decided to try it, and it has already helped.

Yesterday, I was just starving and ran amok for lunch in the deli section of my grocery store: chicken Caesar sandwich loaded with mayo, coleslaw for two, and a bucket of beef & bean chili. Way too much food ... it did fit on one plate, (the chili container had a small diameter), but I felt terrible afterward, both physically (just stuffed!) and mentally.

An event like this would formerly have meant that I'd blown it again and might as well spend the rest of October having snacks, seconds, and sweets at McDonald's.

Well, that didn't happen this time. (For one thing, I realized that there wasn't anything "wrong" with sandwich-coleslaw-soup for lunch: I just didn't need so much of it). But it truly helped to know that I could use one my Special Days and didn't have to fill in a red day.

So I just got back on the horse, so to speak, had a regular dinner, and am back on track. No bargaining with future meals, no skipping meals to "make up", no giving up and going wild -- and time to reflect calmly on what happened ... I had eaten breakfast at 5 am, was out running around all day until 4 pm, and just got too hungry. Lots of options for next time: eat breakfast later, take a lunch, stop for lunch, etc. It's much easier to learn from experience when you're not all freaked from a mishap.

So ... thanks for listening, and thanks again for sharing your ideas. It sounds like you have put a lot of thought into making the Special Day concept work with No-S, and for me, anyway, it certainly does!

[Kathleen]

winnie96,

That's great! I know all about a diet ending with what my husband has called a "feeding frenzy." I kept a journal for a year just on weight loss, and it helped me to realize that -- at least for me -- it is imperative to avoid failures. Building a balance of Special Days to be used whenever I want makes this diet failure-resistant.

What's nice also is that, if I am tempted by something as trivial as taste tests at a grocery store, I can stand there and tell myself that I can choose to use one of those Special Days that I have banked. It is my choice. I then can ask myself, "Is it worth it?" If it is, I'll use a Special Day. If it isn't, I won't. I'm not standing in front of a taste test at a grocery store feeling like I could descend into a "feeding frenzy" if I give in and have one taste test of a chip with dip. Instead, the worst that could happen is I will waste a Special Day on something that wasn't all that tasty.

My life has really been affected by my eating, especially in the past year. My children have erratic eating habits, and no wonder. My husband is not too happy with my increase in weight. Here is an excerpt from my journal on August 25, 2008: "Tom was telling me this morning that he had trouble sleeping because I kept pushing him against the side of the tent. He said, “You’re at least a yard wider than you should be.†It’s hard for him. I’m the perennial optimist in thinking my current diet will end my weight problem, whereas he keeps repeating, “There’s only one way to lose weight: eat less, exercise more.†I proposed that we go to a family restaurant when I get down to the starting weight of the peanut cluster diet (205 pounds on 12/15/07). He said he’d take the whole family to the most expensive restaurant in town because “it’s not going to happen†I don’t get mad because I understand."

Now that I've actually lost some weight, he's still quite skeptical. I'm still almost 10 pounds higher than I was a year ago. I hope that, by next summer, it will be very evident that I've lost weight. I need patience. This diet does take time, but the weight loss is permanent, and maintaining a lower weight is not a herculean effort as it is with other diets. I need patience. I need to accept that my S Days will be days when I eat a lot. This is my body's way of gradually becoming adjusted to a lower set point. All the research I did is helping me to understand why this diet works for the long haul.

Kathleen

[Merry]

Kathleen, I hope your hubbie gets to take the whole family to that restaurant!! I love how you are making things work, thanks for sharing about all of your struggles with it. I too have been encouraged that this could be a good, long-term change for me--and while I'm not seeing pounds just "melt off," I'm seeing slow progress & keep telling myself that slow is ok. It took time to get where I am, and I'm making healthy choices for today & my future.

Merry

[Kathleen]

Merry,

To me, the saddest aspect of the culture of obesity is not the people who are obese. It is the people who are thin and feel like they are starving. I had a boss like that once. She couldn't go anywhere without her little bag of food.

This diet is a slow way out of obesity into a lower weight (I'm not sure how much lower) that is easily-sustainable.

My husband told me he's not sure he wants to take us out. If not, I'll be bringing the kids out to celebrate. Right now, we're enjoying apples with caramel dip. It's great to eat sweets like that and not feel guilty!

Kathleen

[winnie96]

What's nice also is that, if I am tempted by something as trivial as taste tests at a grocery store, I can stand there and tell myself that I can choose to use one of those Special Days that I have banked. It is my choice. I then can ask myself, "Is it worth it?" If it is, I'll use a Special Day. If it isn't, I won't. I'm not standing in front of a taste test at a grocery store feeling like I could descend into a "feeding frenzy" if I give in and have one taste test of a chip with dip. Instead, the worst that could happen is I will waste a Special Day on something that wasn't all that tasty.

You are so right! Choice is the main chance, and your Special Day deal affords that opportunity.

I, too, am faced with skeptics telling me this is "more of the same, it's not going to happen". But this weekend's experience was so much different, I really do believe that it is going to happen. Another reason I'm a believer is that I see a change in my overall approach to life in general. Before, the diet battle was my first and overriding concern. Now, I find, I am blending a more rational approach to eating with a more rational approach to so many other things in my life.

Again, thanks ... your thoughtful replies to me and others make me think that this is a "mod" that will stand me in good stead.

[Kathleen]

winnie96,

The beauty of this diet is that it brings orderliness to eating. Reinhard had in his book that weight problems are less of a problem in societies with "traditional structures" around eating. I thought that was a very insightful comment.

I appreciate that I am getting more orderly in other aspects of my life as I stop focusing on food round the clock. It's wonderful, isn't it?

Kathleen

[howfunisthat]

Wait a minute! Your husband can't back out of the deal now! You're doing exactly what you said you'd do....you're losing weight and getting healthier by the minute....he can't just decide to go back on his word! I think dinner out is a done-deal, because you absolutely WILL weigh less very soon. Silly man...

janie

[Kathleen]

howfunisthat,

It's actually encouraging to me that he is back-pedaling. He's starting to figure out that this diet might actually work! When we met, I weighed 132. Can you imagine? I weigh 80 pounds more than when we met. It will be many, many pounds before it is even noticeable that I have lost weight. The real reward is my little sweetheart 9 year old, who hugged me around the middle and said she can tell I'm losing weight!

Kathleen

[blueskighs]

The real reward is my little sweetheart 9 year old, who hugged me around the middle and said she can tell I'm losing weight!

What a SWEETIE!

Blueskighs

[kccc]

I appreciate that I am getting more orderly in other aspects of my life as I stop focusing on food round the clock. It's wonderful, isn't it?

Totally one of the best "side effects" of this diet, IMHO.

(Isn't it nice that the only "side effects" are positive ones?)

[CrazyCatLady]

...I know all about a diet ending with what my husband has called a "feeding frenzy."

...My husband is not too happy with my increase in weight. Here is an excerpt from my journal on August 25, 2008: "Tom was telling me this morning that he had trouble sleeping because I kept pushing him against the side of the tent. He said, “You’re at least a yard wider than you should be.†It’s hard for him. I’m the perennial optimist in thinking my current diet will end my weight problem, whereas he keeps repeating, “There’s only one way to lose weight: eat less, exercise more.†I proposed that we go to a family restaurant when I get down to the starting weight of the peanut cluster diet (205 pounds on 12/15/07). He said he’d take the whole family to the most expensive restaurant in town because “it’s not going to happen†I don’t get mad because I understand."

...Now that I've actually lost some weight, he's still quite skeptical.

Good heavens! Your hubby actually said that you are a yard wider than you should be?!? And promised a reward because he "knew" you wouldn't lose weight? I can't imagine living like that, and trying to remain positive.

Well, actually, I can. My ex once told me that my butt was as big as two states. I was 15 pounds over my lowest adult weight at the time. Maybe that is why I am so offended by your hubby's comments, because I remember how much it really hurts.

[Kathleen]

CrazyCatLady,

It may sound bad, but really my weight is destroying my life. I feel sluggish. I can't fit into the sleeping bag I used when I was single.

My husband is trying to be humorous. He knows I particularly enjoy dry wit. He put up with The Peanut Cluster Diet, which was "unconditional permission to eat" and involved my buying about 20 bags of peanut clusters in the first week. Then he put up with The Hunger Satisfaction Diet in which I only ate after a hunger growl, which meant I was skipping meals with the family and then eating everything in sight.

I made a decision to research weight loss theories not realizing just how difficult a problem it is. It amazes me that some of the smartest people are working on it. Two people come to mind -- Kelly Brownell, Director of the Yale Center for Nutrition and Obesity, who wrote a book that is well-accepted and that I saw when I was at the Mayo Clinic last week. Kelly Brownell is overweight bordering on obese. The other person is Martin Seligman, a man who has written a number of books on happiness and on how happy people tend to believe that they are responsible for good things in their lives and not responsible for bad things in their lives. In one of his books, Seligman wrote that weight management is one of the few areas of his life where he has met consistent failure.

Tim Russert was a very bright man with a heart of gold -- you could see it. After he died, stories came out about how he treated other people when the cameras weren't rolling. For example, a son of another employee at the station was visiting the station and told Tim that he had lost a tooth that morning. Tim Russert pulled out a $5 bill and told the boy that the Tooth Fairy had stopped by and left another $5 for that tooth. This man was on top of the world -- happily married, excited about the election, very giving to others, and obese. He was working hard to control his weight, and he failed -- dying of a heart attack when he was in his late 50s. I think he got caught in a trap, and the conventional wisdom is that you lose weight with "portion control."

How many of us have tried "portion control"?

I saw on TV that Paul Gigot, another man I admire, has gained a lot of weight since I last saw him. Paul Gigot is Editorial Page Editor at The Wall Street Journal. I looked at him on TV in the last week and wondered if Tim Russert's death didn't inspire him to redouble his efforts to lose weight -- and the effort backfired into more weight gain.

This problem is really difficult for people to overcome, and my husband is not too happy that I have fallen into the trap of dieting and overeating. The more I have focused on this problem, the more weight I have gained. After our last child was born in 2001, I got down to 155, and I decided I wanted to return to the weight I was when I was single -- 132. The more I tried, the more I gained. Six years of failure later, I managed to top out at 216 pounds on 9/4/08.

Now, with a five pound weight loss in the last five weeks, I'm optimistic but my husband is still skeptical. I don't blame him one bit. It may take another 40 or 50 pounds of weight loss before he appreciates that, this time, the diet actually works!

By the way, I see that you have lost 20 pounds. Congratulations! I am telling myself that patience does not mean tolerance. I need to be patient as the weight comes off slowly. That does not mean that I am tolerating my obesity. It means that I am being patient as my body learns a new way of eating.

Kathleen

[CrazyCatLady]

By the way, I see that you have lost 20 pounds. Congratulations! I am telling myself that patience does not mean tolerance. I need to be patient as the weight comes off slowly. That does not mean that I am tolerating my obesity. It means that I am being patient as my body learns a new way of eating.

Kathleen

Thanks, Kathleen. I'm so glad that No S is working for you, too. It really is a comfort to have some sensible rules to apply to our eating! And I love that it is eating like my grandmother used to eat.

[Kathleen]

It is close to midnight now. I can eat right now and turn my Green N Day into a Yellow S Day, or I can wait to eat. I am not one bite away from failure. I have a choice, and that is why this is working for me!

There are fewer and fewer hours in a week when this diet is difficult for me, which is why I think I will be successful in the long haul.

Meanwhile, I practice what may on the face of it seem very silly. I wait until midnight.

Kathleen