Hi Team Time & Adherence,
Hope that everyone had a wonderful week! All was good here except that we had some of the “unhealthy for all” air quality for three days --- smelled like burning plastic. Pickleball moved indoors for those days, and I cut my walks down to 1 per day.
1 Start each meal with a soup and/or salad and/or fruit.
Sometimes. 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.
Yes. Another week with the same meals and no sign of boredom – so continuing with them! 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.
Yes. Reduced, not eliminated. 4 Eliminate all animal foods (dairy, meat, eggs, fish, seafood).
Yes. 5 Eliminate all higher fat plant foods (i.e., nuts, seeds, avocados, tofu, soy).
Yes. 6 Eliminate any added oil.
Yes. 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).
Yes. 8 Don’t drink your calories especially from juices & sugar-sweetened beverages).
Yes. 9 Follow these principles, eating whenever you are hungry until you are comfortably full. Don't starve yourself and don't stuff yourself.
Yes. No stuffing and no starving. 10 Avoid being sedentary and aim for at least 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise daily (i.e., brisk walking).
Mostly - 6 /7. Took a rest day – got a bit bruised and scraped up – almost all healed. Lesson learned – don’t run backwards on the pickleball court – it should be pivot, shuffle, shuffle… Victories, comments, concerns, questions:
Mark Hope you are enjoying amazing travels! Thanks for your comments last week --- made me realize that I still have a way to go around this positive self-talk thing --- and I do wholeheartedly agree that learning, reflection, and taking appropriate action is a “win”.
Wildgoose! Thanks for helping us this week!
Bambi – How exciting to be so close to retirement! Glad to hear that your husband has joined you and wishing him well with his health.
Rebecka I completely relate to what you said about goals and how our minds can play tricks on us --- like if success metric is based on weeks then why not just have "all of the food" in a week when a point is already marked “no”… I actually still mostly write down the food that I eat (not quantity) in a notebook and I put a sad face for anything non-compliant… Every time that I stop recording, seems that it is easy for me to forget. Luckily, I mostly eat the same things so I can just put “Y” for see yesterday…
Eric That’s great how you have improved by focusing more on #9!!
Trinity Congrats on your week!
Waving a big HI to everyone who hasn’t checked in yet!!!
Following are my comments to Mark’s questions last week on Jeff’s long-term adherence thread. Below is focusing on the initial question itself as opposed to reacting to the podcast. Looking forward to other views and Jeff’s upcoming comments in that thread.
How would you respond to that listener's question?Yes, food has its tentacles in everything in our culture --- it pervades our interactions with people (making it unusual to connect without food). Furthermore, seemingly random places and things can (and will) trigger cravings / challenges – sometimes from out of nowhere. I completely agree that it can seem overwhelming when trying to implement a healthy diet and contending with the overall environment that doesn’t support healthy behaviors.
Nevertheless, I do view this as a challenge that CAN be overcome with patience, prioritization, practice, positivity, and persistence.
I think that mindset is critical to success --- “can-do” vs. “this is too hard” --- due to the risk that a negative outlook may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What do you think is a sound approach? I believe that using a framework focused on building health-promoting behaviors as opposed to outcome (as we do in this group) with a periodic assessment of results, analysis of changes needed in approach, and implementation of any such changes is an effective approach. Such a framework supports overall objective to build and embed sustainable healthy behaviors and habits.
In what ways have you addressed these challenges in the course of your own experience? What has worked and what hasn't? Has worked:
* Eat recommended foods when hungry
*Keep program simple (as per McD / JeffN guidance)
* Maintain clean environment to support healthy behaviors (to the degree that I can)
* Execute on strategies to deal with noise in environment (i.e., do not walk around in the broader world hungry with no compliant snack, consider noncompliant tempting stuff “not food for me”, steer clear of food tables at parties, bring compliant dish to share to gatherings, do not linger in WFM baked goods section, do not open the cabinet with the peanuts, etc.)
* Plan / visualize how to deal proactively with upcoming challenges
* Love what I eat – eat what I love (compliant stuff!)
* Assess and review progress including options to better handle any lapses and test them out – if they don’t work, try… try again with another approach, ask for help if you run out of ideas
* Frame change as a learning experience – using mistakes to analyze approach for improvements / alternative action to test (to be evaluated and adjusted as needed)
* Leverage positive self-talk and various self-care strategies
* Engage with support networks (like this group)
Has not worked:
* Attending event hungry
* Relying on host(ess) to serve compliant food
* Leveraging food to deal with emotions
* Thinking I can stop at “a little bit” of non-compliant food
* Looking in pantry after dinner
* Striving for perfection
*Feeling discouraged or mad at myself for struggling
* Not trying a different approach when current one isn’t working
* Getting mad at the scale / outcome
With that… wishing
everyone a great weekend and
Happy 4th of July to those in the states.
Cheers,
Stephanie