Everyday Systems: nosdiet: message 1294 of 3212

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Hi Lee,

I'm happy to hear you're still with us... got a little
nervous when your posts dropped off.

The best encouragement I can give is just to remind
you how close, even after fallings off and dubious
S-days, you or anyone is to forming this new habit. It
may be a marathon rather than a sprint, but once you
get past that first little hump, you can largely
coast. So just concentrate on getting to that hump. If
you fall off again before you make it, no big deal,
you've lost days, maybe a couple weeks, that's it. Get
right back on. Once little point of clarification: the
hump (as I've somewhat arbitrarily defined it) is
after three weeks strict, not three weeks since first
attempt. So if you fall off, reset the clock, but take
comfort that the clock is short.

You mentioned some scale related freak outs. Obsessive
scale watching seems to me the output end of the same
mentality behind calorie accounting. Sure it makes
sense, on a descriptive, scientific level, but: 

1) you don't have the equipment to measure accurately.
Consumer scales are woefully inadequate, and even if
you have a medical grade scale at home, there are all
kinds of other factors, food and water in your gut,
muscle being heavier than fat, etc. that are
critically important but difficult to measure.

2) even if you did, you don't have the time to keep
track of all this stuff. Are you really going to stick
it all in excel and calculate moving averages and what
not? 

3) even if you did, you don't have the vulcan
detachment that would be required to impartially
analyze all this stuff. Even scientists have trouble
with this. Ever heard this quote "statistics are a
form of wish fulfillment?" In the case of diet, I'll
add "nightmare fulfillment." Plateaus and
insignificant upticks will throw you.

I know what you're afraid of. That without the scale
you have nothing, that your powers of self deception
will have free reign. I have two things to say to
this: 

1) weighing yourself once in a while, as a sanity
check, to keep you honest, is fine. But I'd say once a
week, tops, and take the numbers with a large grain of
kosher salt. Once a month is better. I didn't step on
a scale until I was 2 months into no-s.

2) the real goal is to be able to get a sense of how
you are doing by how you look and feel, just as you're
learning to get a gut sense of how much food you're
consuming by funneling it all through discreet, well
observed channels. Hard? Yes. Mushy? Yes. But also
necessary.

Best of luck, and keep on keeping us posted,

Reinhard