Advice for a Newb?

[Zoid]

Hi,

So today is day 1.

I'm 26 and have been dieting since junior high. I'm a snacker. I've done well on Weight Watchers in the past only do gain it back. I tried my fitness pal last year and am 3lb down from when I started. Its progress, but I think its mostly from starting exercise since I only tracked my food maybe for 10 days total. Its too much work to figure out how many calories you've eaten, the exact portion sizes for everything, and what you can eat with the calories you have left for the day. Talk about stress!

I had a friend who told me about No Es a few years ago. I joined the forum back then (hence the feb 2011 join date), but never started no es. I balked at the idea of not tracking what you are eating and not being able to snack. But she looks amazing and I'm up another pants size since then. I know that its time for a change in my life.

I've worked very hard to make exercise a regular routine (with much support from my loving husband) and I replaced my daily diet coke with flavored seltzer water. Now I need to get my eating under control. I want to start having kids soon and want to have some good habits in place before that happens.

So any advice for making it through the first few months?

[BrightAngel]

welcome
No S is a very basic and accomodating plan,
and many of us choose to incorporate other ideas and methods with it.

Some people choose to eat "real" food only;
Some people work to "balance" the types of food they put on their plates;
Some people ... like me...
choose to continue counting calories by tracking food in a computer software journal;
Some people have "S events" on S days SOMETIMES instead of 2 day Binges.

Stick with it, and over time, you will find what works for you.

[Nicest of the Damned]

So any advice for making it through the first few months?

It's common and normal to hit a rough patch about 2-4 weeks in. Initial enthusiasm will get you through the first week or so. After the first month, you start to establish habits, so you don't have to think so much about doing No S. But between those times, it can get rough.

Use the HabitCal, or something similar (you could use a paper calendar, if you prefer). I didn't like the idea of the HabitCal at first, and didn't use it. Then I started, and it started working better for me. The HabitCal serves two purposes. It makes you feel more accountable for your failures, and it can remind you of past successes if you're feeling discouraged.

You will have red days. There are two kinds of No S'ers who have never had red days: newbies who haven't had their first one yet, and liars. Just because you have a red day, or even several red days, doesn't mean this isn't going to work for you, or that you're a failure, or that you can't do this. It means you're just like everybody else who has ever tried No S. The world will continue spinning after you have a red day. The sun will still rise the next day. You won't be banned from this board for having a red day.

Unless you have a medical condition where you have to avoid or limit certain foods (like diabetes or a food allergy), and this condition has been diagnosed by a medical professional licensed in your state (self-diagnosed conditions do not count), don't worry at first about what you're eating, other than avoiding sweets on N days. Worry first about the "how much", and leave the "what" for later. You can be eating mostly healthy foods, but if you're eating too much of them, you will still be overweight. I know this from personal experience. The primary food in the diet of sumo wrestlers is a stew called chankonabe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chankonabe

It's a fairly healthy stew. The reason why sumo wrestlers get so fat eating it is, they eat it in vast quantities. You eat too much of pretty much anything, you're going to be overweight. Conversely, a nutrition professor lost 27 pounds on a diet of mostly junk food a few years ago:


http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/tw ... index.html

The thing is, he didn't eat huge amounts of this junk food. The quantity of food you eat does matter, and it is important to get used to eating food in reasonable quantities. Most Americans do not eat reasonable quantities of food, which is at least part of why so many of us are overweight.

You might feel some negative emotions. I resented the hell out of not being able to eat until I felt full at meals, even though I knew, intellectually, that eating until I felt full would result in feeling overstuffed later. I felt afraid about not being able to eat during the day and had to reassure myself that there really was food and that I would be getting it later. You might feel some very strong negative emotions if you have been using food as a coping strategy for these emotions. Everybody feels negative emotions sometimes, and they don't last forever.

Watch out for the extinction burst:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/07/07/ ... ion-burst/

It's possible that you will have a catastrophic failure at some point. This is just part of how habits die. You can't even blame human nature for this, we see it in other animals, too. It's a final, desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to keep getting the reward of large quantities of high-calorie food. If this happens to you, or when any kind of failure at No S happens to you, just mark it and move on.

Don't deny yourself S days in the future because of a failure. That doesn't work. That turns No S into eating whatever you feel like but promising to eat better in the future. If that worked for weight loss, there would be a lot fewer overweight people than there are. There is no way to make up for a failure, but you shouldn't beat yourself up over it. You can spend a little time figuring out why it happened and how you might keep from having it happen again, but don't obsess, and don't try to punish yourself.

Don't add mods to No S in the first month (better yet, the first three months), unless you really can't follow vanilla No S (which is No S without any mods). No extra rules in the beginning. No smaller plates, no "half the plate should be vegetables" rule, unless you've been doing those things before you started No S. There's a tendency to try to fix everything you don't like about your diet or lifestyle at once. Fight this. If you try to fix everything at once, it won't work. You've got some amount of willpower (which can increase over time, but gradually). If you spread it too thin, trying to make too many changes, you end up accomplishing none of them. Get to the point where the No S rules are habits, then you can consider mods, if you want to.

You're going to feel hungry sometimes. But feeling hungry is not the end of the world. It's not the sign of your metabolism screeching to a halt, the way some diets would have you think. Think about it- feeling hungry is almost certainly not the worst you have ever felt. This will get better over time as you get used to eating less at meals and not snacking. There are people who would like you to think that being hungry is a red emergency alert, something that you have to Do Something About Right Now. A lot of these people sell snack foods. I wonder why someone who sells snack foods would want you to think feeling hungry is a bad thing, hmmm?

Don't worry about what happens on your S days at first. It's normal to overeat on S days at first. What will happen eventually is that you will get used to not eating snacks, seconds, and sweets, and you will find it just not occurring to you to do those things on S days. But the time to have that happen is measured in months or years, not in weeks.

Don't compare how you're eating on No S to some Platonic ideal of how you think you should be eating. That will just leave you discouraged. Plus, you never managed to eat according to that ideal (or never managed to do it for very long), so it's not a realistic goal. The right comparison to make is between how you're eating now and how you were eating before you started No S. Any improvement over your previous eating habits is progress.

Set yourself up for success. Don't keep food around where you spend time during the day. The kitchen should be a place for preparing meals, eating meals, and cleaning up after meals, not for other activities. Don't keep stashes of snack foods in the living room, bedroom, or office. If you see food, it will make you want to eat it. Make sure you're spending most of your time where you can't see food, if this is at all possible.

Don't buy big packages of snack foods or sweets, unless you have a big family or are having a party. Don't shop for your snack foods or sweets at Costco or Sam's Club. You don't need lots of those things, so a lot of them for not much money is not a good deal for you. When you buy them, buy the smallest package you can get.

Plan your S days, or at least most of your S days, in advance. Don't decide on the fly that today is an S day. If you do that, you'll end up having mostly S days, and you won't lose weight. S days aren't just because you feel like having a treat today. They're for weekends, holidays, and social obligations.

[mulliganagain]

I just wanted to say hi! We have something in common- I have a "false" start date too. I joined the site a long time ago, but only really joined a week ago!

Thank you for posting, and thank you to everyone who's posting in response... there's some great advice in these boards, and I look forward to reading everyone's words of wisdom!

[eschano]

Welcome zoid.

Nicest of the Damned: this very thoughtful post is amazing and should be up there with KCCC's "Phases of NoS"- sticky thread!!

[Zoid]

Thanks everyone!

[Nicest of the Damned]

S days are not earned. They are given. You can't get more S days if you exercise, or something like that. They are also not a reward- you shouldn't give yourself another S day because you got that promotion at work. You should celebrate things like that, yes, but if you feel a need to do that in a way that is not compatible with an N day, you should wait for an S day to celebrate. (If this won't work logistically, that's where social obligation S days come in, but that kind of thing shouldn't be happening too often) They are also not a coping strategy- you don't get an S day because you're feeling depressed, or because it took you an hour to drive home from work, or because the kids were monsters. If you do this kind of thing, you'll end up with too many S days, and you won't lose weight.

I won't say you should never exchange S days (take your S days one week on days other than Saturday and Sunday), but weekend N days should be a rare thing, if they happen at all. Like a couple of times a year, max. I do this if Yom Kippur (a fast day in the Jewish calendar) falls on Saturday- I take the S day on the Friday before, and Saturday is an N day. The danger here is the same as losing an S day because you had a red day- you end up eating what you want and promising to eat better someday in the future, and that doesn't result in weight loss.

Other people are probably not watching what you are and aren't eating as closely as you think they are. You can say no thanks when someone offers you sweets, or a snack. You can tell them you're not hungry, if you don't want to get into a discussion of No S or diets with them.

One of the great things about No S is that you don't have to tell people about it if you don't want to. It's not as obvious as some other diets. This is useful if there is someone in your life who might not be as supportive as you'd like. Or if you know someone who will turn any discussion of diets into a sermon on why their latest diet is the best diet for everybody. Or if you just think diets are a boring topic of conversation. Your doctor(s) should probably know, especially if you have a health condition, but other than that, you don't have to tell anybody you don't want to. Of course, if you want to tell everybody you talk to, you can do that, too. It's up to you.

You mention wanting to have kids. No S can be compatible with pregnancy (I stayed on vanilla No S until the last month of my pregnancy with Nicest Baby), but your OB should know about it if you're going to do that. If your OB says you should not be dieting, then that of course trumps anything you might read on the internet. I also went off No S for the first two months after she was born, to make sure I would have enough milk. I have found No S compatible with pregnancy, breast-feeding, and new motherhood, but YMMV.

[Minkymoo]

Awesome advice Nicest of the Damned! I will be copy & pasting this onto my phone notebook for reference.

[Nicest of the Damned]

If you don't have any kind of metabolic problem, and you're overweight, it is not possible for you to starve to death in one day, or even to do any serious damage to yourself by not eating for a few hours. Several religions have fasting as a religious practice. If that really were harmful to the average person, that practice would have died out long ago. Not eating between meals is not going to hurt you.

If you do have a metabolic disorder that is affected by your diet, ask someone who is licensed to practice medicine in your state or province what you should do. I am not licensed to practice medicine anywhere in the world, so I am not qualified to give medical advice.

One of the wonderful things about No S is that it is compatible with just about any food restrictions due to allergies, religion, culture, ethics, or even just pickiness. I'm a picky eater who keeps kosher, and I do No S. It even works for me during Passover (if you are familiar with Ashkenazic Passover dietary restrictions, you know this is quite a feat). I don't know of any religious or ethical dietary restrictions that No S wouldn't be compatible with. You're a vegetarian or a vegan? You're Jewish or Muslim and don't eat pork? Or you're Catholic and don't eat meat on Fridays during Lent? No problem. Though again, I'm not a rabbi, priest, or minister of any religion. You hate Brussels sprouts? Or you don't think a salad qualifies as a meal? Or it's not a meal to you if it doesn't include potatoes? No problem. I won't say there's no problem if you have a deadly allergy to peanuts or shellfish, since you know all too well there is, but No S isn't going to present any more problems for you because of a food allergy.

There is no food that you can never eat again on No S. If it's a sweet, you can eat it on an S day. You are never more than five days away from being allowed to eat anything you want.

Lots of things can masquerade as hunger. Boredom, loneliness, anger, frustration, sadness, stress, anxiety, depression, and thirst, just to name a few.

[surfersuz]

Nicest of the Damned that is really really great advice! I really enjoyed the article on the extinction burst. I'm interested in reading more of his work.

[vmsurbat]

Welcome! NoS is about sanity and moderation. You are going to love it; I do!

Since Nicest wonderfully covered so much territory, I'll add just two more things:

1. Retrain your thinking
2. Make your meals satisfying.

Since this is my standard advice for newbies (and the two most significant factors in my NoS weightloss), I've written about these two things before. Forgive the cut n paste from previous posts, but I still find them helpful.


1. Retrain your thinking
While reading a number of different posts lately, I've found myself wanting to write the same bit of advice (as a reasonably successful NoSer) to a myriad of different situations. Namely, that along with building NoS habits, many of us need to retrain our minds about how we think/interact with food.

Reinhard actually does address this, especially in his book, but the "thoughts to think" are tucked here and there and everywhere. When I first received the book, I read from it *every* day for the first 2 months because I really needed to get right thinking in my head. And it helped tremendously--I had a ready arsenal of "thought power" to keep me on track with my NoS habits when life situations would threaten to throw me off.

I think that anyone trying NoS already thinks that the three habit-building rules make sense, and history has shown they work for most people in most cultures. NoS "eating" is a tried-and-tested "real life" way to eat. So the biggest trial isn't (for most) "how to eat" (3 meals, no snacks) or the "what to eat" (anything not primarily made up of sugar), but rather the biggest trial in *sticking* to NoS is fighting diet-head.

Therefore, I ****highly**** recommend reading the sticky-post at the top of the board entitled: No S Catch Phrase Glossary (add yours!) which is chockful of everyone's collected wisdom in beating "diet"head.

I need to have pithy statements (one=done; more=sore, Mark-it-and-move-on), and vivid pictures (car crashes, dripping faucets) spring INSTANTLY to mind to fight the siren call of sweets, seconds, snacks. (If you read the sticky, you will better understand the above allusions.)

However, I also realize that I did not come from a yo-yo dieting background (just sadly and slowly gained weight over the years), and I can imagine (even though I didn't experience it) that "wrong-thinking" habits that could build up and need additional fighting weapons.

I recently stumbled across a very interesting webpage that seems to address the thinking part of dieting w/o prescribing the actual diet. *Much* of what I read would be of great benefit to anyone who wants to get a better handle on the "mind" aspects of following NoS for life.

At this link, you can read an excerpt from the book:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/17873556/ ... y_health//
(Note: I didn't watch the video, only read the excerpt)

and googling "Beck diet solution" will bring lots of other hits. But the above site with the chapter excerpt was most intriguing...

2. Make satisfying meals

I didn't overcomplicate things. I saw the rules as boundaries, leaving me a HUGE amount of freedom within, especially when contrasted with most other diet plans with their long list of forbidden foods and specific eating times (never after 7 pm, every three hours, 18-hour "fasts", etc).

Therefore, I ate all manner of savory foods (pizza, tacos, chips) as part of my N day meals, delighting in eating such foods "normally", ie. a normal portion without guilt. I honestly enjoyed just about every Nday (and therefore wasn't desperately waiting for my Sdays to eat "what I wanted.").

However, I think while many of us long-term dieters know all about calories, general nutrition, etc., we need to broaden our understanding of what constitutes a "wise choice." I don't think it should boil down to only one thing: how many calories. And I wouldn't equate "high calories=bad". I think we need to ADD to our eating knowledge in order to make good choices: what do I want? what will satisfy me? what will balance out the meal? what will I be doing later?

One of the great things about NoS (and I've been successfully following NoS for 4+ years now) is that you can learn to view food as food--something to nourish body and soul. If one has been a "counter" for a while, food has often gotten reduced to so many calories, points, vitamins, carb grams, fat grams, fiber grams---everything and anything but "an apple", "a piece of fresh pie", "crispy taco", "yummy salad."

I started out NoS by taking small portions of non-sweet foods that I had somehow classified as "forbidden" and made them a part of my N-day meal. For example, potato chips with a sandwich. I had always denied myself chips ("They're fattening!") unless at a gathering in which case I would totally overdo it because it was my "one chance.". It is true that chips are a caloric food, but a small handful can add a delightful crunchy note to a sandwich and fruit lunch...

I wanted to learn how to eat to allow for the occasional "just right crunch" of potato chips... That is one reason why I chose to add chips to N day meals--I didn't want to wait until an S day and then feel that I could just gorge myself--not the kind of behaviour I wanted to encourage. But because I added chips to an N-day meal every so often didn't mean chips at every meal because it wasn't so much about "having chips" as about orchestrating an enjoyable meal, and it didn't mean the whole bag when I did (love that plate rule: one=done), but honestly, I've been able to enjoy a handful about once a week when it is just the thing to round out a lunch.... and lose weight.... and enjoy the process.....

So go ahead and enjoy the pizza. And ask yourself: will two pieces be the most satisfying way to fill my plate? Or would I prefer one piece and a salad? And know that at different times, you may answer that question differently....

I lost 30 pounds the first year, 10 pounds the second, 5 pounds my third and fourth year. (I'm nearing my ideal weight). I am still secretly amazed that I've lost weight eating the NoS way because it has been such an enjoyable process.

HTH and great NoS success to you!

[ironchef]

Not much to add to such awesome advice!

Just wanted to put in a plug for the podcasts. I love the podcast on Strictness (episode 13), and found it very helpful in getting the habit going early on.

If you run into S day trouble / guilt, I like the "S days gone wild" podcast (34).

In fact, I love all the podcasts. Reinhard is a clever and witty person, who is fun to listen to.

[Zoid]

Thanks to all for the really great advice! I know that my biggest issue right now is eating from boredom. I need to tell myself that I'm not hungry and to step away from the pantry. The advice about its ok to feel hungry really struck a cord and I'll be holding onto that as my mantra for now.

Its nice to find a supportive community.

[Nicest of the Damned]

Its too much work to figure out how many calories you've eaten, the exact portion sizes for everything, and what you can eat with the calories you have left for the day.

No S is great for people who are not organized enough to keep a food diary. It's also great for people who recoil at the idea of measuring or weighing portions, or who don't want to do the math to count calories. I let my inability to do those things stop me from losing weight for years. Now, with No S, I've lost weight without having to do any of those things. It's also great for introverts or busy people who don't want to go to meetings. I never tried Weight Watchers because I hate hate hate the idea of going to a meeting and telling people my weight and what I ate last week.

The three meals a day is also helpful for us disorganized types because it means there are only three meals to plan for each day. You don't have to plan five or six small meals. You don't have to pack healthy snacks if you'll be out. You can eat out, so if it's one of those days when you don't even manage to pack a brown-bag lunch, you haven't totally screwed up your diet.

I know that my biggest issue right now is eating from boredom. I need to tell myself that I'm not hungry and to step away from the pantry.

Find something to do that keeps you away from the pantry. It could be exercising, but it doesn't have to be something healthy or productive. All it really has to be is something that keeps you out of the kitchen. It could be TV, video games, sleeping, or surfing the internet, as long as you're not eating while you're doing it. Even an activity that burns no calories is progress if the status quo was consuming calories.

[eschano]

Vicki, Nicest of the Damned - such great advice for all of us! Ironchef, I completely agree that the podcasts are extremely helpful.

zoid - thanks so much for starting this thread of great advice!