100 days of weight loss, days 4 & 5
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| Fri, 01-12-2007 - 2:44pm |
As a follow up to my last post about the "100 Days of Weight-loss" book I'm reading, here's advice for days 4 and 5 for those who are interested:
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Day 4: Boundaries, not diets
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If you're like most people, when you're on a diet, you try hard to follow it perfectly. Each day you strive to take in the exact number of calories, fat grams or carbohydrates allowed by the plan.
But if you slip up and eat a delicious (but forbidden) food, you figure you've blown it, so you might as well eat more. Soon you throw the entire diet out the window. This all-or-nothing approach never works because when you are off your diet, you cancel out the progress you made while you were on it.
BOUNDARIES DEFINE YOUR DIET
Like it or not, to lose weight, you have to follow some type of system. Your plan can be quite rigid and meticulous or as simple as deciding you'll eat less and increase your level of exercise. Instead of getting stuck on the word diet, learn to think of it as boundaries for your eating plan.
Picture your diet program as a road or a path. You can define the boundaries of your diet road based on the number of calories, points, or other factors you choose to follow. As you walk the road each day, your goal is to stay between the sides of the road. Unlike strict or rigid diet plans, boundaries stay flexible. They provide guidelines, but at the same time, they allow for common sense and good judgment.
During times when you're strong and focused on your diet, you move the boundaries closer together, making the road narrower. When you take a break from your program or work on maintenance, you widen the boundaries and allow more variety into your plan. But even on a really bad day, you never eliminate the road or get off it completely.
SET GUIDELINES, NOT RULES
Boundaries should give you benefits, not punishment! They should provide guidelines for you to live by, but not burden you with rules. You can define boundaries for any type of diet or weight-loss approach. Depending on your needs, you can simply adjust the edges of your plan to match where you are in life. By doing this, you'll be far more successful than if you punish yourself every time you step off the road.
TODAY
In a notebook, draw a line down the middle of the page, creating two columns.
Label one column "Narrow road," for your actual diet plan. Label the other "Wider road," for your maintenance or alternate eating plan.
Under the titles, define your eating and exercise plans for each of these roads. Then decide on ways you can be flexible with them without losing sight of the healthy road you want to follow.
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Day 5: Magic notebook
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Every night before going to sleep, Judy pulled out a spiral notebook and recorded her thoughts from the day. When she looked back over her progress during the past year, she concluded, "When I journal, I stay on track. It helps me catch the times when I'm slipping into emotional eating or getting discouraged with my efforts. Then I can make changes and correct these issues right away."
GET A "MAGIC" NOTEBOOK
For many people, recording personal thoughts or actions each day provides a lot of insight. It also serves as an outlet for emotions and struggles around weight-loss efforts. If you enjoy writing, experiment with tracking your thoughts and ideas around food and eating. Feel free to write as little as one sentence or as much as several pages.
On the other hand, if you don't find it helpful to write things down, don't force yourself to do this. But do keep a notebook handy as a quick tool for jotting down ideas about managing your eating patterns.
EAT IT ANOTHER TIME
Just because you think about a food doesn't mean you have to eat it. Whenever Jennifer got a craving for a specific food such as cheesecake, she wrote it in her notebook. She said, "By writing it down, I take it out of my head. I tell myself I don't have to think about it anymore because it's recorded and I can always return to it later."
When a food thought crosses your mind, remind yourself that you don't have to act on it. Instead, write down the name or even a description of the food, then anticipate the please of eating it sometime in the future.
Practice the skill of observing food cues, then letting them go. When you walk into a movie theater, notice the smell of popcorn, then forget about it. If it helps, record these cues in your "magic" notebook. Tell yourself, "That popcorn smells good, but I'm not going to eat it right now. I'll simply postpone it until another day."
TODAY
Whenever you think about a particular food you want, write it down in your notebook.
Plan that you'll eat it at another time. If you wish, add the amount you'll have and how often you'll fit it into your program.
Stretch the times farther apart for eating this food. You may discover that after a while, certain foods don't seem as important to you as they once did.
| Fri, 01-12-2007 - 10:34pm |
| Mon, 01-15-2007 - 3:58am |



