Chocolate No S
Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2010 11:07 pm
I call my variation chocolate NoS. It is vanilla NoS with a little bit of extra sweetness to it. It begins, of course, with basic NoS –no snacks, no sweets, no seconds. This plan of eating makes a lot of sense because that is how we used to eat before the snack food revolution, and good science backs it up. No snacks, because I found when I first researched all this and was eating my six meals a day, I was hungry all the time. It seems that our bodies need those three long periods between eating – about 5,6 hours between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner and about 12 hours between dinner and breakfast – to get into fat-burning mode. Also, planning, shopping, cooking for all those meals was a real pain. In addition, adjusting from eating that way to No S’s 3 meals was very hard on me, and I never want to have to do that again, so I don’t mess it up.
No sweets- because our bodies need good nutrition to be healthy, and sweets tend to be empty calories or worse – the wrong kinds of fats and the wrong kinds of sweets that can make us obese or can lead us into diabetes. I figure if I eat no sweets for 19 meals, I can have sweets at 2 of them and be fine. No seconds because we Americans are visual eaters – when we take seconds our brains tend to trick us by minimizing in our memories how much we’ve actually consumed.
All this of course is in Reinhard Engels’ wonderful book and blog, which has transformed my life by bringing me back to sanity around food. But the real genius of the No S diet, in my opinion, is the exception clause (I’m a law student). The vanilla exception is “except sometimes on days that start with S.†Brilliant – because having the safety valve is what makes it possible to stick to what is very sensible but leaves out some of the fun in eating. Reinhard’s exception works for him because he works a regular 5-day week and socializes and relaxes on the weekend and his wife, says Reinhard, came us with the idea that he could relax the rules over the weekend and that has been very successful.
But Reinhard encourages us to take advantage of “founder’s zeal,†by inventing our own variations. I started out, of course, with vanilla No S and it was very successful for the first 5 weeks. Lost the weight I wanted to lose, discovered the joy of not having to count calories and plan in advance and just being able to put what called to me on my plate and eat it. One little wrinkle – between the No Sweets for 5 days and the single plating, I was hardly getting any dessert. But I thought I was cool with that until the 6th S weekend, when I went a bit nuts and couldn’t stop eating sweets. Didn’t blow No S, of course, and was back to the usual on Monday, except that I had gained back nearly all of what I had lost. But this time, instead of the usual repent, deprive, blow it cycle, I decided to just accept who I am, and I not only love my sweets, but it seems that some part of me buried deep somewhere keeps track of them, and in a few hours that weekend, I ate every single one I was “owed†for the past 5 weeks! So how to incorporate that into No S? I don’t work a regular schedule at all, and am working at home much of the time, including weekends. So instead of 5 N days and 2 S days, I decided to try having 3 “S†meals a week, spread out over the week – Sunday morning, Wednesday lunch, and Friday dinner.
Sunday morning tends to be very reasonable, just a change from my usual Mestermacher, eggs, and fruit. But Wednesdays, I have a dessert lunch. I drink a small whey protein shake mixed only with water, which seems to help my body manage having a dessert meal, and then eat a reasonably sized but indulgent dessert and I take seconds if need be until I feel satisfied. You would think it would be a disaster, but so far, it has worked very well. After 6 weeks of this, I got down quickly to what I wanted to weigh and I’ve stayed there without undue effort! When I want sweets during the week, I start daydreaming about what I want to make for lunch on Wednesday, and I am cool to wait until then. Friday night with my family I eat my usual one plate, but use a smaller plate (the inside of our nice stoneware dishes, not counting the rim, is 8 inches). Then I have a small dessert which I also serve my family.
But Wednesdays are only for me, even if Fridays have usually turned out to be smaller versions of Wednesday.
Three other things I do: I use 9 inch plates for almost all my meals. I eat these little 12-calorie bran crackers called “GG bran crispbread,†usually one with breakfast and one with dinner. (I don’t know that they actually control my appetite, which they claim to do, but they are a good source of bran and are very versatile so they taste good with a little cream cheese or jam or both or peanut butter or my latest – a little smear of peanut butter with some whey powder on top – or I tuck them into oatmeal or whatever sauce I am serving and they just dissolve.) And I drink all the tea and herbal tea sweetened with stevia and chew all the sugarless gum I want.
The last thing is that I have read that for women over fifty, exercise really helps to control their weight but it has to be about an hour a day. So I exercise hard – more detail in my daily report – for a good hour or so at least 6 days a week.
So far this has been really easy to follow. Last night, for example, I made a great dinner – grilled marinated London broil with mushrooms cooked in wine, plus chard and onions, salad and fresh corn, but I was craving ice cream after dinner and, to make it worse, Jess and Becky were having chocolate mousse for dessert that J had brought home from a bakery Friday night. But it was Sunday night. My first thought was just that I wouldn’t do it because I am committed to NoS, and I started thinking about Wednesday – bake cream puff shells with French vanilla ice cream and homemade hot fudge sauce? Reinhard’s good buddy Habit came to my rescue.
But then I also realized that I wasn’t hungry – I had eaten enough for dinner – I just wasn’t feeling well, and sometimes when I feel crummy I want the comfort of sweet food. But it never works- between the overeating and the guilt I would feel terrible. So I averted disaster and drank some Bengal Spice Tea with stevia and pulled out the Trident and was very grateful in the morning when I weighed myself and I am back to 115 pounds. But come Wednesday, I will thoroughly enjoy my dessert lunch!
I encourage anyone reading this to think about what it is that causes you to blow your S days, if that is happening, and about how to get what you need without overdoing the calories overall. Sweets, salty snacks, comfort foods – they’re all only food. They’re not evil in themselves and there is room for anything your soul needs if you make the space for it.
Sherry
No sweets- because our bodies need good nutrition to be healthy, and sweets tend to be empty calories or worse – the wrong kinds of fats and the wrong kinds of sweets that can make us obese or can lead us into diabetes. I figure if I eat no sweets for 19 meals, I can have sweets at 2 of them and be fine. No seconds because we Americans are visual eaters – when we take seconds our brains tend to trick us by minimizing in our memories how much we’ve actually consumed.
All this of course is in Reinhard Engels’ wonderful book and blog, which has transformed my life by bringing me back to sanity around food. But the real genius of the No S diet, in my opinion, is the exception clause (I’m a law student). The vanilla exception is “except sometimes on days that start with S.†Brilliant – because having the safety valve is what makes it possible to stick to what is very sensible but leaves out some of the fun in eating. Reinhard’s exception works for him because he works a regular 5-day week and socializes and relaxes on the weekend and his wife, says Reinhard, came us with the idea that he could relax the rules over the weekend and that has been very successful.
But Reinhard encourages us to take advantage of “founder’s zeal,†by inventing our own variations. I started out, of course, with vanilla No S and it was very successful for the first 5 weeks. Lost the weight I wanted to lose, discovered the joy of not having to count calories and plan in advance and just being able to put what called to me on my plate and eat it. One little wrinkle – between the No Sweets for 5 days and the single plating, I was hardly getting any dessert. But I thought I was cool with that until the 6th S weekend, when I went a bit nuts and couldn’t stop eating sweets. Didn’t blow No S, of course, and was back to the usual on Monday, except that I had gained back nearly all of what I had lost. But this time, instead of the usual repent, deprive, blow it cycle, I decided to just accept who I am, and I not only love my sweets, but it seems that some part of me buried deep somewhere keeps track of them, and in a few hours that weekend, I ate every single one I was “owed†for the past 5 weeks! So how to incorporate that into No S? I don’t work a regular schedule at all, and am working at home much of the time, including weekends. So instead of 5 N days and 2 S days, I decided to try having 3 “S†meals a week, spread out over the week – Sunday morning, Wednesday lunch, and Friday dinner.
Sunday morning tends to be very reasonable, just a change from my usual Mestermacher, eggs, and fruit. But Wednesdays, I have a dessert lunch. I drink a small whey protein shake mixed only with water, which seems to help my body manage having a dessert meal, and then eat a reasonably sized but indulgent dessert and I take seconds if need be until I feel satisfied. You would think it would be a disaster, but so far, it has worked very well. After 6 weeks of this, I got down quickly to what I wanted to weigh and I’ve stayed there without undue effort! When I want sweets during the week, I start daydreaming about what I want to make for lunch on Wednesday, and I am cool to wait until then. Friday night with my family I eat my usual one plate, but use a smaller plate (the inside of our nice stoneware dishes, not counting the rim, is 8 inches). Then I have a small dessert which I also serve my family.
But Wednesdays are only for me, even if Fridays have usually turned out to be smaller versions of Wednesday.
Three other things I do: I use 9 inch plates for almost all my meals. I eat these little 12-calorie bran crackers called “GG bran crispbread,†usually one with breakfast and one with dinner. (I don’t know that they actually control my appetite, which they claim to do, but they are a good source of bran and are very versatile so they taste good with a little cream cheese or jam or both or peanut butter or my latest – a little smear of peanut butter with some whey powder on top – or I tuck them into oatmeal or whatever sauce I am serving and they just dissolve.) And I drink all the tea and herbal tea sweetened with stevia and chew all the sugarless gum I want.
The last thing is that I have read that for women over fifty, exercise really helps to control their weight but it has to be about an hour a day. So I exercise hard – more detail in my daily report – for a good hour or so at least 6 days a week.
So far this has been really easy to follow. Last night, for example, I made a great dinner – grilled marinated London broil with mushrooms cooked in wine, plus chard and onions, salad and fresh corn, but I was craving ice cream after dinner and, to make it worse, Jess and Becky were having chocolate mousse for dessert that J had brought home from a bakery Friday night. But it was Sunday night. My first thought was just that I wouldn’t do it because I am committed to NoS, and I started thinking about Wednesday – bake cream puff shells with French vanilla ice cream and homemade hot fudge sauce? Reinhard’s good buddy Habit came to my rescue.
But then I also realized that I wasn’t hungry – I had eaten enough for dinner – I just wasn’t feeling well, and sometimes when I feel crummy I want the comfort of sweet food. But it never works- between the overeating and the guilt I would feel terrible. So I averted disaster and drank some Bengal Spice Tea with stevia and pulled out the Trident and was very grateful in the morning when I weighed myself and I am back to 115 pounds. But come Wednesday, I will thoroughly enjoy my dessert lunch!
I encourage anyone reading this to think about what it is that causes you to blow your S days, if that is happening, and about how to get what you need without overdoing the calories overall. Sweets, salty snacks, comfort foods – they’re all only food. They’re not evil in themselves and there is room for anything your soul needs if you make the space for it.
Sherry