It’s been a while since I posted on the subject of my diet. However I am pleased to say that it is still going well and this morning I weighed in at 17 lbs less than my starting weight at the beginning of the year.
The diet has been going much more smoothly than it did last year, when it collapsed largely as a result of holidays. I think this improvement is due to two lessons that I have learned:
- Cheating. There is always a tendency to cheat on any diet. With my diet the result is the introduction of more rules than necessary - which of course leads to more cheating! The solution I have found is to have a rule that if I cheat during a day I am not allowed to weight myself the next day. I have to add one more rule anyway. This rule is surprisingly effective, because it stops me from cheating when I think I can get away with it.
- Holidays. Holidays and diets don’t mix! There is nothing worse than trying to keep to a diet while holidaying in some gastronomic paradise. In my case last year it was Italy and Canada. The trouble was that I didn’t have any rule about what to do on holiday with the result that the diet collapsed and I never succeeded in picking it up again. Anyway my rule is now that I make no attempt to keep to the diet on holiday (defined as anything more than three days away from home). When I get home, I weigh myself the following morning and start the diet again from scratch.
One thing I have noticed again as a result of the diet is that I
need much less food than before. This is due to the slowing of my metabolism. Most diet critics get very upset about this, but for the life of me I can’t follow their logic on this point. Surely having a slow metabolism is the equivalent of having a car that does 50 miles to the gallon rather than one that does 30 miles to the gallon. All other things being equal why would one want a car with higher fuel consumption? In the same way, in these days when we are all worried about rising food prices and shortages, why would one want to need to eat more food? It doesn’t make sense!
(Full details of the diet I have been following are given in my article Can I Improve on the “No S” Diet.)
Related:
Other posts about dieting
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