BambiS — Great to see all those "yeses"! Congratulations on the great week. Don't worry, keep your focus on the behavior and the weight loss results will come. A week of the weight staying the same is not necessarily a bad thing. Since you had a "nice loss" last week, your body may just be adjusting. Onward to next week!
Rebecka22 — 10 out of 10, good job! Do you have a strategy for dealing with summertime cravings? I find that when I have more time on my hands, it's easy to drift into thoughts of food (particularly off-plan food), even when I'm not really hungry. Your idea for doing some mental work ahead of time is a good one. Be prepared
before the cravings hit. Enjoy your well-deserved summer break!
Artista — 6/7 on #10, one meal off on #1, perfect on the rest -- Nice! Raw veggies can work well as a preload for me too. The weight "gain" could be due to any of several temporary factors: higher sodium/salt intake than usual, a particularly heavy meal (even a compliant one) the day before weighing, etc., etc. The important thing, as you noted, is the overall trend, which is still downward. Remember, exercise is only one part of the overall picture for weight loss. In itself, it doesn't contribute significantly to a drop in weight, but it does, as you pointed out, contribute to overall fitness and well being. Jeff has done an excellent in-depth discussion about the
Exercise Paradox that may be of interest.
squealcat — Welcome back, and I'm glad you made it through the wedding successfully. You've had trouble in the past when the siren song of Facebook recipes and other programs have lured you into temptation. I 100% agree with your strategy for keeping it simple and engaging in other activities to keep away from online distraction. Automating eating can be like automating walking. Get really good at preparing a few compliant things that you really like, so you can practically make them in your sleep. Prep as much in advance as you can. Put eating on auto-pilot. You may miss the variety, but tell yourself you're doing an experiment to see if you can get back on track and in a good groove. Variety can come later.
Gimmelean — I get the "conscientious no's" and know that you're trying to keep them to a minimum. Not letting one "no" turn into the rest of the day of "no's" or a weekend of "no's" that you will try to fix on Monday (and you know how lousy you'll feel by then, physically and emotionally!) is important, so I'm glad you pointed it out. Good for you to avoid those bombshells at the catered event, and to feel better about your success than disappointed about missing out. I got a chuckle about Jeff's "secret test" -- as, I'm sure, did he.
VegSeekingFit — Only one slip and one day off exercise is still an outstanding report! And you tweaked your remediation plan right away to compensate, which is exactly what you should be doing. Assess, evaluate, plan, act -- to "head off non-compliant episodes." That's the whole idea, and you have it down well. By the way, if a non-exercise day when it's raining and when you had a lunch appointment is "slothful," then I'd better change my name from Wildgoose to Wildsloth
.
Noella — That's why they call it the pleasure trap, unfortunately. And it got you. It's happened to all of us, and you're doing the right thing in renewing your commitment to get right out of the trap and back on track.
My June focus is to decouple the idea of social interaction from its attachment to food; to try to focus on what I want out of a social engagement: connection, compassion and comradeship, not a meal.
I couldn't have said it better. It's hard to do, but a very worthy goal. My strategies for that include keeping a compliant glass of ice water or sparkling water in my hand and never sit close to a bowl of anything tempting. How about you -- have you come up with any useful ideas to help you toward your goal?
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At this point, Mark would make a summary and interject some cogent observations and words of wisdom. I don't know how good I am at those, but I see a theme here.
It's summertime (at least in this hemisphere), and social activities are increasing. Our lives may be less structured, too. People are in and out of our environment, and things may not be as "clean," food-wise, as we'd like them to be. Schedules can get hectic, and more things are out of our individual control.
Most of you have discussed how important planning is in overcoming these obstacles. I totally agree. The more you plan, the fewer problems you will have. And any problems you do have can be useful too -- to lead to more strategies and better planning for the next time. This does get easier. The constant, tiring focus on food and behavior becomes more and more automatic as time goes on. Time and adherence, remember?
Here's my Goose Story for the week. There is a tie-in, I promise...
I am on Day 15 of Month 1 of 18 months (at least) of Invisalign treatment. For those of you not familiar with this, Invisalign is a brand of removable plastic orthodontic aligners that will move my teeth and adjust my bite. They're an alternative to conventional braces. My dentist gave me a choice -- fix a badly misaligned bite with orthodontics or have every tooth in my mouth crowned. I reluctantly went off to the orthodontist, and here I am with Invisalign.
The important part of this story for our purposes is that with Invisalign, you have to be very disciplined about the amount of time you wear them. You can't eat or drink anything but water with them in, and you have to clean your mouth and the aligners carefully every time you remove them to eat and then put them back in. You must wear them at least 22 hours per day, so total time out for eating, brushing, flossing and aligner cleaning can't exceed 2 hours in a day.
So how do I deal with MWL eating, particularly the idea of Checklist Point #9? Eating whenever I am hungry might not be quite so easy with Invisalign.
This new way of life has put my focus on eating and dental hygiene. It's tiring to have to concentrate so much on food and teeth and these little plastic trays that I have in my mouth for 22 hours a day. Just as tiring as it was when I started the McDougall program and MWL. I want to be perfect, and I get frustrated with myself when I'm not perfect. I read every blog and social media post I can find to get more and more ideas (yes, Marilyn, I understand your quandary). And I want to throw up my wings in frustration sometimes.
Enter the planning process. Just like we're all doing here. I can plan around my orthodontics the way we all plan around issues in our lives. I like a schedule of 2 meals a day. So, I can plan for brunch and an evening meal. Plan on enough to eat so I won't get hungry, but don't stuff myself (still working on that one). No snacks (totally not worth it!), no liquid calories (not a problem with Checklist Point #8). Avoid or minimize eating out (believe me, taking out my aligners in a restaurant is not something I want to do). Have the right kind of foods ready and available. Use familiar ways of cooking that I can reproduce flawlessly and automatically (no tasting anything with the aligners in, so no strange new recipes!).
I can do this. Even in a couple of weeks, the behaviors are getting to be more automatic. I make choices and plan ahead. I learn from mistakes (there are plenty of them). I learn when circumstances are likely to change and adapt my eating accordingly (there are times when my teeth hurt, thus raw veggies won't work, so I eat soup instead). It's getting better for me.
MWL is a habit. I don't fall out of compliance very often, and when I do, I know how to get right back in the groove. MWL with Invisalign is going to get to be equally habitual -- with time and adherence. I'm hoping for the same good results with my teeth as I have had with weight loss and management, using the same behaviors and strategies that work for us in this group.
Hope all of you have a wonderful and successful week. Thank you for your patience in Mark's absence.
Goose
Mostly. I had one slip (usual suspect) and paired it with #7. Have tweaked a bit my remediation plan here and am now actually plating a night time snack just in case to head this off. For instance, after dinner I decide what would be my snack - usually mug of soup OR potato slices and fruit. I would only eat the snack if hungry. Otherwise, will be part of next day's meal. 
Salt and sugar were a challenge this week. I overindulged in both.
