Everyday Systems

I've been doing No S for about a month now. I haven't lost a whole lot of weight, but I've been mostly successful up until now, and I've been pretty happy with how I've been doing.

This weekend, though, I'm running into a "problem" with S days....

This week I had two failures. Thursday's failure was pretty moderate-- 1/2 a sandwitch (should have had a glass of milk) when I got hungry before dinner. Friday was excessive. I just lost it and, though I didn't exactly binge, my No S habits went out of the window.

What I'm finding is that I feel guilty about this and am having a hard time allowing myself to have an S day. And as a backlash to the guilt I just went wild and had way too many S's all at once. I can see now that keeping N days pure is the only way to wholeheartedly relax and enjoy the weekends. Must remember this for next time...

Guilt sucks and so often we apply it to the oddest things.

Okay, you overate and let yourself down. Yeah, it sucks and all. But your goodness as a person just isn't attached to your eating habits. If you've been unkind, lied, hurt someone, or any of that, fair enough. That's appropriate guilt.

But it probably isn't helpful to apply feelings of inadequacy to half a confounded sandwich.

Enjoy your S-day. If your belief system is such that gluttony is a sin, okay. Your belief system probably also has ways to approach sin, too. Do them and move on.

If your belief system DOESN'T consider gluttony a sin, then just move on. It'll be okay.

There is nothing that says that we HAVE to stuff ourselves on S days or even do anything different than on N days. Reinhard said the slogan is supposed to include "and SOMETIMES on S days." It probably wouldn't be prudent to restrain your eating because you feel guilty. That sets it up that you can slide on N days and then make up for it on a Saturday. Nyet! But, if you are feeling full and not much like snacking or eating much more than you would on an N day, go with that. It sounds like that's how a lot of the long-timers are on weekends anyway. It's the underlying attitude that counts. We're going for that take-it-or-leave-it mentality. Breezy.