Everyday Systems

Hi I bought the book and have almost finished reading it. I am on my first week and am enjoying my S days, and I've been faithful to stick with the N days as the book indicates. I'm excited and the plan makes total sense to me and it's interesting I've noticed other people in the cafeteria that get diet drinks or like half a lunch and I think what the heck! I enjoy my food and am working on limiting the stuff I should, like cake and ice cream because I live in AZ and it's been so HOT.
looking forward to talking more with you guys
Jan

Welcome!

Hello, fellow-newbie! We started at the same time and my book just arrived today, Jan! I am also excited!

Welcome!

Welcome! Best wishes for continued success. And remember we are here for you, with all the ups and downs of a lifestyle change....

Welcome!

Welcome!

This is my first S weekend and the 4th of July was on Thur. My eating has been ok but I love sweets so I had 2 pc of cake on Thu, 2 servings of ice cream yesterday(it was 94!) and donuts today(Sun). I haven't had very satisfying food today but I still feel terrible about this! The book says the first month is hard and I'd like to see my cake donut ice cream whatever to be one instead of 2! But I did not screw up M-W and F at all.

Music Lover,
You are right on track then. No worries. . . just because you had TWO servings of those items is no reason to panic. Just think what you might have had on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday if you hadn't been on No S! It will all even out. As others will, I'm sure, chime in, getting your habits down for the first few weeks or months or even longer is the most important thing.

Certainly much later on, you may want to reign in your S days a little, but that will come after you've got your habits down pat! Part of the beauty of No S is that you don't need to "feel terrible" about anything on S days!

Welcome!

musiclvr02 wrote:This is my first S weekend and the 4th of July was on Thur. My eating has been ok but I love sweets so I had 2 pc of cake on Thu, 2 servings of ice cream yesterday(it was 94!) and donuts today(Sun). I haven't had very satisfying food today but I still feel terrible about this! The book says the first month is hard and I'd like to see my cake donut ice cream whatever to be one instead of 2! But I did not screw up M-W and F at all.

I don't think that's bad at all. I agree with LA_Loser. I look at what you've done as a dessert with each lunch and dinner and I often have a small dessert with those meals.

The book says the first month is hard, but I think most of us would agree that it's hard much longer than a month.

thanks so much for the encouragement! Yes you are right, and a goal is to get my servings to be 1 instead of 2.

How was it like for you when you started this plan?

I don't mean to be mean but it not realistic at all for you to want to eat only one serving of sweet on your very first weekend! If you look at the long termers, we adjusted over periods of months and years, not weeks. But the good news is, that is still better than the alternative which is to have it be easy for awhile and then fail, fail, fail for months and years.

I ate whole pounds of chocolate plus other junk on my S days for a long time. It's been over three years, I continue to eat less, and I've lost weight every year.

Reinhard practiced this for FOUR YEARS before he ever put it up on the web. He does say he pretty much had the structure down fast, but he doesn't say his weekends were sober very soon, nor that he ate only moderate meals very soon.

You're just getting going!

I gently suggest you be more concerned with what you're doing three to six months from now; it's not necessary to be watching that closely in the beginning except to keep to N days as strictly as possible. It's like opening the over door to see how the cake is baking.

You're going to succeed if you keep hanging in there and don't look for the problems to be over in a few weeks. In the meantime, you can still get on with the rest of your life- whatever it's going to be when you DO get this down- while you learn.

WElcome to the family!

musiclvr02 wrote:thanks so much for the encouragement! Yes you are right, and a goal is to get my servings to be 1 instead of 2.

How was it like for you when you started this plan?

I still wouldn't worry about 2 servings daily -- at least not for a long time.

My S days were worse than yours initially and I think it took about a year for them to settle down. I think you'll find that's pretty common.

No sense in being so strict with yourself. This is your reward for doing well during the week. Who rewards themselves while saying "I'm horrible! This is horrible! What I'm doing is horrible!" I had...well, no ice cream because my husband ate it all , but I'm eating kit kats (yay!) and had some red licorice (yay) and crepes yesterday with nutella. Delicious!
I'm...3 weeks in since I started again I think? When my husband and I did this together like 4 years ago, The first s-weekends were really wild But they normalized quickly.
If, after a few months, yours are still* just weekend sweets benders or whatever, then you might want to be concerned you have a problem other than weight.

*What you've described doesn't sound like a bender. Don't worry.

This was my first S-weekend, too -- I had two little pieces of pie and a pint of Ben & Jerry's, spread out over the two days and only after healthy meals. Kind of a splurge -- but it wasn't half a gallon or half a pie . . . I feel completely rewarded and content! Next week I might leave out the pie (it wasn't that good), but -- as you say, it's hot! -- ice cream is definitely still on the menu. I figure if this is for the rest of my life, I'd better enjoy it!

jw wrote: Next week I might leave out the pie (it wasn't that good), but -- as you say, it's hot! -- ice cream is definitely still on the menu. I figure if this is for the rest of my life, I'd better enjoy it!

Something many of us have done is to improve the quality of our treats. I'm a cookie monster. I bake just about every cookie I eat. There are only a few exceptions, usually because I don't have the right equipment to make a certain cookie.

This is from Food Rules by Michael Pollan:

Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking a soda now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them everyday. The french fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes -- and cleaning up the mess. If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them -- chances are good it won't be every day.

Wosnes I agree. The more I cook the less appealing that bag of factory made cookies is. Maybe you will still eat the whole pan of home made cookies on the weekend, but they will have been less prevalent and a lot harder to produce. The side effect is that you are less and less likely to reach for that easy bag of factory cookies and hold out for the better tasting home made ones, in the process consuming less over all.

I guess Michael Pollan didn't know my grandmother. She cooked everything (except bread, I think) from scratch and was obese. But I understand his point. Industrial cake mixes and cookie dough were two of my downfall foods, but I didn't fare much better with homemade. I still love Von's chocolate drop cookies, and don't want to learn to make them myself. I spend most of my cooking time on stuff I can't find commercially, such as cooked rye berries and brown rice. Maybe if I had someone to bake for- most of my friends are adult women who don't want cookies around any more than I do. I've dropped baking anything except Trader Joe's whole wheat biscuits. But I'll eat others' efforts!

In the beginning, and that can be anywhere from a few weeks to several months, eat what you're used to; just eat it at meal time. If you're inspired, try fresher, less industrial, more freggies, etc. I used to purposely eat non-homemade) pizza or the like on N days just so that I didn't feel I was saving all the junk for the weekend.

leafy_greens wrote:Wosnes I agree. The more I cook the less appealing that bag of factory made cookies is. Maybe you will still eat the whole pan of home made cookies on the weekend, but they will have been less prevalent and a lot harder to produce. The side effect is that you are less and less likely to reach for that easy bag of factory cookies and hold out for the better tasting home made ones, in the process consuming less over all.

The more I cook the less appealing all kinds of factory-made food is, including most restaurant food. It just doesn't taste good. The times I don't feel like cooking or don't have a lot of time, I'd rather have scrambled eggs or an omelet or leftovers than most anything I can get from a package or a restaurant.

I want to stress that you don't have to start this way, unless you've already been veering towards higher quality foods. No S-ers do tend to gravitate towards better food, and many expressing themselves here are pro's at this point, but if you impose it on yourself too soon, it can just seem like you're on a diet, and the rebellion factor will kick in. If it is already how you eat many of your meals, and No S is just helping you cut out the extras, that's a different story.

good rule of thumb, wosnes! I do cook almost everything from scratch -- have even been known to do chocolate bark from cocoa powder rather than keep candy in the house -- but if I am going for portion control, even a half recipe of most baked desserts is too much right now. Not to mention heating up the house in the summer!

Just before I started No S, I started craving and overeating manufactured stuff like wheat thins, pizza, even McD's -- that was my cue that I really had to get things under control! I added potatoes in to the No S diet (so-called "evil" food) and I've been much happier since.

and oolala, I am a little like your grandma! love to cook, great foods, healthy ingredients -- but lots of them! Because I am tall, I can carry a lot of weight before it becomes noticeable; because I was always thin, I had no habits of restraint; and because I was always hungry on low-carb, I learned to graze and graze. The result is I am now at 230 lbs, it is noticeable, and I have no good habits of moderation to fall back on!

Welcome! Don't stress too much about the quality of your S foods to begin with. As the weeks, months go by you'll probably find yourself gravitating to more healthy S foods. On some S days what I crave the most is often a big bowl of fruit or a plain full-fat yoghurt.