Some thoughts after a couple of months..
Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 11:36 am
I've been doing this for a couple of months now - some failures in the first month but now I'm almost at 21 days all green/yellow - and I wanted to note down some of my thoughts at the moment, would welcome any comments/help/etc. I gave this a go some time ago (maybe a couple of years ago?) and then things got a bit stressful in my life generally and I stopped.
Some background on me: I'm vegetarian, I am not hugely overweight - I don't weigh myself but I'd guess that I have around 20 pounds to lose to get down to a BMI of 23 or so, I've gained steadily over the last few years but especially in the last year, since moving in with my husband, I think largely due to wine and sharing meals with someone a lot larger than me, I'm 5'2 and have PCOS so it's very easy for me to gain weight, my husband is over six foot and has a much higher metabolism. I don't do weighing, I have a few items of clothing that used to fit and look good on me but which now look very tight, my goal is to fit into them comfortably again - I have taken a photo of how they look on me now and I'll take further photos every now and again to track progress. Mostly, though I think I'll be able to tell whether it's working from how I look.
What I find easy about No S -
Doesn't interfere with my life very much because I can eat anything for my meals.
Giving up the sweets during the week. I don't have much of a sweet tooth so I kinda thought that I didn't really eat sweets but I've been keeping a list of "things I didn't eat because I was doing No S" for motivational purposes and a lot of it is sweet things, things like cake/biscuits in the office/at meetings. I don't really miss this stuff, it was easy to give up.
I also love Habitcal. I work with stats and I love stats. I also love making it green!
What I find hard about No S -
The plating thing. I eat a lot of food that doesn't really lend itself to this - Gujarati (Indian) food (that's my cultural background) generally involves eating curry with bread and then hot dhal with rice and putting it all on one plate leads to the dhal getting cold before you eat it and my family would think I was totally weird! I also like and eat a lot of Lebanese style food which involves mezze - lots of small dishes on the table - and, again, that's difficult.. So, at the moment at least I'm pretty much going for asking myself the question "would it fit on a plate?" and the answer is generally yes. I think for the moment, I'm going to go with this and start tightening up on portion sizes once I've got the general habit working for me.
Fruit. I've commented about this before on here. I loooooove fruit, it's my favourite food but I find it difficult to eat as part of a meal, it's just not how I've typically eaten fruit before and it adds to my general difficulty with plating. Mostly, though I'm dealing with this by eating some fruit as part of a meal - e.g. an apple with lunch and a couple of clementines with dinner - and eating lots of lovely fruit at the weekend.
Social stuff. I find it really difficult to know what to do about things like being invited to a dinner party during the week at which the host serves three courses. At the moment, I am trying to schedule as much stuff for the weekends as possible and, if necessary, just taking an S day for something that I really want to attend but know that it will be hard to avoid eating more than one course. This does result in me taking more S days than I think is ideal, even though I tend not to go crazy with those days, I pretty much limit myself to the event. I think, ultimately, wosnes' approach of taking S events might work better for me than vanilla No S and I think it's very much within the spirit of No S, so I am considering it but probably won't until I've given vanilla No S a longer trial.
Holidays/family stuff. Related to the social stuff, really. I find it hard when we go on holiday to stick to No S properly. Recently, we went on holiday for a week and it involved a lot of seeing family/staying with family which made it hard to stick to No S without causing offence - e.g. my husband's 81 year old aunt baked for us, especially, and I would just have felt bad saying no.
What I find hard generally -
Alcohol. I think a large part of my weight gain over the last year is to do with alcohol - British social life revolves around it, I go to lots of parties and dinner parties, we often have wine with dinner at home.. and I just end up drinking quite a lot. I think I usually average about 12 glasses of something per week and often those are large glasses of wine.. Just a rough adding up of the calories tells me that that's around 3,000 calories a week. I don't think I'm likely to be able to lose weight without cutting back on it, the question really is how to go about doing that. I don't think glass ceiling would help me that much because I think my main problem is the wine that we drink with dinner at home and I very rarely have more than a couple of glasses of that anyway. I also think I'd find that easier to give up than drinking at parties which is where I drink more than a couple of glasses.. So, I'm thinking that I might go for making sure that a couple of days a week are alcohol-free. But I'm going to wait to start this until I've got the No S thing more settled as a habit. It's not at all that I'm going to France for a few days..
Some background on me: I'm vegetarian, I am not hugely overweight - I don't weigh myself but I'd guess that I have around 20 pounds to lose to get down to a BMI of 23 or so, I've gained steadily over the last few years but especially in the last year, since moving in with my husband, I think largely due to wine and sharing meals with someone a lot larger than me, I'm 5'2 and have PCOS so it's very easy for me to gain weight, my husband is over six foot and has a much higher metabolism. I don't do weighing, I have a few items of clothing that used to fit and look good on me but which now look very tight, my goal is to fit into them comfortably again - I have taken a photo of how they look on me now and I'll take further photos every now and again to track progress. Mostly, though I think I'll be able to tell whether it's working from how I look.
What I find easy about No S -
Doesn't interfere with my life very much because I can eat anything for my meals.
Giving up the sweets during the week. I don't have much of a sweet tooth so I kinda thought that I didn't really eat sweets but I've been keeping a list of "things I didn't eat because I was doing No S" for motivational purposes and a lot of it is sweet things, things like cake/biscuits in the office/at meetings. I don't really miss this stuff, it was easy to give up.
I also love Habitcal. I work with stats and I love stats. I also love making it green!
What I find hard about No S -
The plating thing. I eat a lot of food that doesn't really lend itself to this - Gujarati (Indian) food (that's my cultural background) generally involves eating curry with bread and then hot dhal with rice and putting it all on one plate leads to the dhal getting cold before you eat it and my family would think I was totally weird! I also like and eat a lot of Lebanese style food which involves mezze - lots of small dishes on the table - and, again, that's difficult.. So, at the moment at least I'm pretty much going for asking myself the question "would it fit on a plate?" and the answer is generally yes. I think for the moment, I'm going to go with this and start tightening up on portion sizes once I've got the general habit working for me.
Fruit. I've commented about this before on here. I loooooove fruit, it's my favourite food but I find it difficult to eat as part of a meal, it's just not how I've typically eaten fruit before and it adds to my general difficulty with plating. Mostly, though I'm dealing with this by eating some fruit as part of a meal - e.g. an apple with lunch and a couple of clementines with dinner - and eating lots of lovely fruit at the weekend.
Social stuff. I find it really difficult to know what to do about things like being invited to a dinner party during the week at which the host serves three courses. At the moment, I am trying to schedule as much stuff for the weekends as possible and, if necessary, just taking an S day for something that I really want to attend but know that it will be hard to avoid eating more than one course. This does result in me taking more S days than I think is ideal, even though I tend not to go crazy with those days, I pretty much limit myself to the event. I think, ultimately, wosnes' approach of taking S events might work better for me than vanilla No S and I think it's very much within the spirit of No S, so I am considering it but probably won't until I've given vanilla No S a longer trial.
Holidays/family stuff. Related to the social stuff, really. I find it hard when we go on holiday to stick to No S properly. Recently, we went on holiday for a week and it involved a lot of seeing family/staying with family which made it hard to stick to No S without causing offence - e.g. my husband's 81 year old aunt baked for us, especially, and I would just have felt bad saying no.
What I find hard generally -
Alcohol. I think a large part of my weight gain over the last year is to do with alcohol - British social life revolves around it, I go to lots of parties and dinner parties, we often have wine with dinner at home.. and I just end up drinking quite a lot. I think I usually average about 12 glasses of something per week and often those are large glasses of wine.. Just a rough adding up of the calories tells me that that's around 3,000 calories a week. I don't think I'm likely to be able to lose weight without cutting back on it, the question really is how to go about doing that. I don't think glass ceiling would help me that much because I think my main problem is the wine that we drink with dinner at home and I very rarely have more than a couple of glasses of that anyway. I also think I'd find that easier to give up than drinking at parties which is where I drink more than a couple of glasses.. So, I'm thinking that I might go for making sure that a couple of days a week are alcohol-free. But I'm going to wait to start this until I've got the No S thing more settled as a habit. It's not at all that I'm going to France for a few days..