In 2008/09, I spent a school year in the US as an exchange year student and gained about 10 lb. I wanted to get back to a healthy way of eating and lose the excess weight in the process. Although I'd never been skinny, I'd never been fat either, and really didn't want to get there.
Height: 5' 2"
Starting weight: 120.6 lb
Goal weight: < 110 lb
My first N day was on September 28, 2009. I'd decided to start this the Saturday before and jumoed straight into Vanilla No S. The first day, I completely forgot I was on the plan and snacked on some candy when we took my guinea pig to the vet and then ate a handful of pretzels that were standing around at home. Habit's a powerful thing...
But this FAIL was apparently enough to enable me to have 9 months of perfect compliance. And by that, I mean no red days whatsoever. I only took five NWK S days or so during the month. I loved the plan. Eating sweets during the week felt unnatural to me. Failure just wasn't an option.
Then, sometime in summer, I spent two weeks at my aunts' house. One weekend, I went camping with my cousin and didn't really have the opportunity for any Ss. The next Wednesday, my aunt and I went to the city to do some shopping and she wanted to show me a particularly awesome ice cream shop. I didn't have to heart to say no -- but that wasn't all; I wanted the ice cream, too.
It tasted like FAILURE.
I didn't want to FAIL again, so I modified the plan, allowed myself 3 Ss a week, but no S days except for Special days.
That was my downfall.
It worked well for a couple of weeks (months?), and I lost quite a lot of more weight... I even got down to < 100 lb at one point. Then I decided to make it 6 Ss instead of 3, got used to having "something special" every day, didn't like that either, wanted to make more adjustments...
Add that to pre-finals stress and it just spells out FAIL.
I think I fell "off the wagon" in mid-december 2010. I quickly realized I needed to do Vanilla No S again, but for some reason, I couldn't get back on, even after finals were over in May. I'm a huge emotional eater; whenever something bad happens or I'm stressed out, it just makes me want to grab a chocolate bar.
Then in July, I decided I really, really needed to go back to Vanilla No S. The scale showed 120.6 lb again (what a coincidence) and I was sick of permasnacking all the time.
I started keeping a HabitCal, telling myself that even if I did mess up, I could mark it as a red in my calendar and then start again the next day. And surprisingly, it worked! Usually I'd beat myself up over every failure, especially in the earlier months of 2011 when I desperately tried to get to 21 days (and failed).
Now, my HabitCal looks like this:
There are still a lot of red days, as you can see, but it's not near as bad as before, when I had more red days than green. I'm looking forward to the next two years
Katie
