Everyday Systems

I just starting NO S after giving it a bit of a practice for the past week. I am a former Weight Watchers member who has a hard time maintaining. I am curious about how maintenance is handled on NO S. I just finished reading Reinhard's book and it appears that you don't do anything different after you have lost the weight but that seems a little confusing to me. If you keep with the NO S structure won't you continue to lose weight? Aren't there some kind of adjustments?

Nope, no adjustments, and that's exactly the point.

It is a diet in the strictest sense: Rules about how to eat.

In another way, it's kind of not. You're cleaning up your eating habits to get rid of excess eating and let your body do what it's going to do. This is NOT a good way to maintain a specified, arbitrarily-chosen low weight. Even Reinhard mentions that he lost 20 lbs initially, then lost another 20 over a period of time with a habit of exercising over an hour a day. (He reports walking about 90 minutes a day most days of the week, and does Shovelglove five days a week).

The idea is that you choose moderate habits you'll intend to sustain over the rest of your life. As any yo-yo dieter will tell you, losing the weight is easy compared to maintaining that loss. Putting the idea of the permanent habit change right up front makes a lot of sense when looked at that way.

I'm a former WW lifetime member who could NOT maintain on WW (takes more attention than I can manage as part of my regular life).

No-S IS maintenance... for a lifetime.

If you're overweight, it will lower your weight by reducing excess, but it won't take you to waif-like thinness if that's not a healthy weight for your body.

So, you won't keep losing beyond what you need to lose if you're doing basic No-S. And that's part of the trade-off... if you are overweight, you'll lose slowly because you're moving to "normal" eating, not "severely restricted" eating.

I came to No-S after several years on the McDougall Program. I was at a good weight, and maintenance on No-S was a piece of cake. Except that today is Tuesday, and we can't talk about cake. Anyway, maintenance works very well on No-S.

If you do the right amount of exercise and eat the right amount of calories to maintain a target weight, you'll get down to that weight, and you'll stay at that weight. It's not two steps.

If you can internalize the No-S rules, doing so is much easier.

Marym wrote:I just starting NO S after giving it a bit of a practice for the past week. I am a former Weight Watchers member who has a hard time maintaining. I am curious about how maintenance is handled on NO S. I just finished reading Reinhard's book and it appears that you don't do anything different after you have lost the weight but that seems a little confusing to me. If you keep with the NO S structure won't you continue to lose weight? Aren't there some kind of adjustments?

When you start on No-S you're doing exactly what you'll do to maintain. Your body will decide your ideal weight -- and it won't be too little (or too much!).

ditto everyone else. maintenance is the goal. from day one. weight loss is secondary, an afterthought. the hardest part (for me) is realizing that.