zoid wrote: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.