Learning to Be Thin: The First Two Weeks

On February 27, I began the "Learn to Be Thin" diet, or the LTBT diet, I guess you could call it.  I acquired all the food I needed, dug out one of my old notebooks to record my eating, and began.

It's been two weeks now, and I feel pretty good about what I've accomplished.  I didn't have too many challenges to cope with, although there were a couple:

1. Despite the diet's claim of containing enough food to prevent hunger, I did get hungry a number of times in the first week.  For that reason, I did add a bread and a fruit to the menu plan, and that helped somewhat, especially during the late afternoon, when I have six hours from lunch until dinner.  I decided, though, that doing more exercise would probably cut my appetite, so I tried to get in more walking, and it did seem to help some.
2. The challenge in the second week was the potluck "tea party" those in my work group gave to one of our members to celebrate her retirement.  Fortunately, the organizer gave an idea of what kind of foods people should bring, and I brought cheese and grapes, both foods I knew I could eat.  So I was able to formulate a plan to prevent eating everything in sight.  I must say things went quite well; although I didn't measure as carefully as I could have, I mostly ate foods on the menu plan (home made scone excepted) and avoided all the "outsider" foods such as cake and chicken salad that were offered.  And perhaps what was most surprising of all, I didn't feel as though I had to be constantly shoveling food in my mouth to have a good time. In fact, I was able to participate more in the conversation and look at the people I was sitting with, which turned out to be very relaxing.  I struggled a bit with allowing all that good food to go "to waste," but it passed after a while.

I have to admit that I did "tinker" a bit with the menu plan, although Shirley warns against it, saying that it could lead to wholesale "fooling around" and end up derailing your whole menu plan.  I took that warning to heart, and do try to monitor my response to the foods I've decided to include, despite their not being on the menu plan.

Foods I think I can handle are oatmeal, lunch meat, dried and canned fruits, peanut butter, and jelly.  I haven't detected much problem yet with them, so I'll continue until I see they're causing me trouble.

What I have noticed is what I'll call "measurement creep"; this happens when I decide I can fudge a little on the weighing or measuring of foods.  That can quickly get out of hand, and I constantly have to be vigilant lest a half-cup gradually becomes a full cup of food or a teaspoon becomes a tablespoon.

Another challenge is making sure I write everything down.  I forget now and then, though so far I've been keeping it up pretty well, even writing in the last food of the day, which is tempting to skip since it seems like it doesn't matter at that point.

I've weighed myself only twice during the two weeks, as suggested.  I didn't lose any weight the first week, but I suspect I'll make up for it the second.  What matters the most is how much control I've exhibited over the two weeks, and in that I think I've done well.

Well, that's all for now. I'll write more about how I'm doing in my next post.