1. Start each meal with a soup and/or salad and/or fruit.
2. Follow the 50/50 plate method for your meals, filling half your plate (by visual volume) with non-starchy vegetables and 50% (by visual volume) with minimally processed starches. Choose fruit for dessert.
3. Greatly reduce or eliminate added sugars and added salts. This includes gourmet sugars and salts, too. If either is troublesome for you, you can eliminate them.
4. Eliminate all animal foods (dairy, meat, eggs, fish, seafood).
5. Eliminate all higher fat plant foods (i.e., nuts, seeds, avocados, tofu, soy). I'm still putting soy milk in my tea and on oatmeal, and a little flaxseed.
6. Eliminate any added oil.
7. Eliminate all higher calorie-dense foods including flour products (i.e., bread, bagels, muffins, crackers, dry cereals, cookies, cakes), puffed cereals, air-popped popcorn and dried fruit. All good except ate a few prunes one day.
8. Don't drink your calories (especially from juices & sugar-sweetened beverages).
9. Follow these principles, eating whenever you are hungry until you are comfortably full. Don't starve yourself and don't stuff yourself.
10. Avoid being sedentary and aim for at least 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise daily (i.e., brisk walking). I missed 2 or 3 days of exercise.
Mark Cooper wrote:Artista - It sounds like your inability to access your account was probably a result of the website & forum changeover, Nancy. I can imagine being "locked out" felt very frustrating. During that time, do you feel like you drifted because you were reassessing the goals you choose to pursue, or was it more a situation of irritation and discouragement exhausting personal resources that might otherwise be applied to managing behavior? What is most important is to get directly back on track after a lapse, which you appear to have done. Keep that up!
Great question, Mark. I think it was more the first, I was reassessing the goals I chose to pursue. That first week of MWL was harder than I thought it would be and at the end of it I hadn’t lost any weight and that discouraged me. I was hungrier on MWL than I usually am and ended up eating more food than usual do trying to deal with the hunger. I didn't really like the way that made me feel. Seems like I remember from before when I followed MWL for an extended period of time that I eventually adjusted to it and wasn't hungry all the time. As far as how this week went, there is room for improvement. I'm still having trouble doing without soy milk in my tea and on oatmeal, also a little flaxseed with oats in the morning. I'm working on those last few pounds so the amount of wiggle room in how closely I follow MWL is about nil, and so I'm going to keep working on nailing down all ten of the guidelines.