Week I: Written in Stone

The rules for this challenge are extremely simple: If you put it in your mouth, write it down.

A fitness trainer will typically ask a client to note their food intake for an entire week. Here you are just recording your consumption for five days. The idea is just to document, not alter, your behavior or add a goal of eating less than usual. Of course you could cheat and NOT write down everything that you eat or drink. Ridiculous as that sounds, people do it. Here, in Never on Sundays, you have no one to whom you must report. This is for your eyes only, but notice if and when you're tempted to omit one of your food items.

How much information you want to write down is up to you. This is your adventure. Make it as fun and as easy as you can. That means carrying a little notebook with a pen or an electronic recording device at all times Monday through Friday. The minimum information is commonly three things: content, quantity and hour. Notice not only the food choices that you make, but your attitude when you write them down.

Most important, observe how knowing that you're going to write it down alters your food choices. Does the  food diary impact your eating behavior through the weekend as well?

"If you observe well, your own heart will answer." - R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz

Make it Real:
The "Make it Real" section of each week's challenges offers you an opportunity to identify potential pitfalls in your attempts to meet the challenge and omit the diet where appropriate or change it to fit your life. We want to set you up for an experience of success, and if that means reducing the challenge, or tailoring it to your life and schedule, then so be it. Just do it ahead of time. The important thing is to prepare for obstacles in advance. Avoiding self-sabotage and feelings of failure is key. No throwing up your hands and abandoning the effort because you couldn't follow a specific diet rule at one meal.

Look at each week's challenge and think about your meals that week. If you can see that compliance with any specific direction is unlikely or extremely difficult for certain meals or for specific, special occasion days (i.e. "I cannot be writing in my food diary at luncheons with my Board of Directors.") then take those meals out of the challenge. ("Okay,  I can still log my breakfasts, snacks and dinners.")

When you forget your food diary, write the information on a napkin and log it in your journal later.

Food for Thought:
The "Food for Thought" section of each challenge is intended to make you think beyond the immediate eating behavior task so that you can realize lifestyle changes. Writing about the experience of mastering your eating will keep you focused on it, hopefully even over the weekend when you are no longer tasked with the challenge. Your answers can be posted here. They will be read by other weight loss participants as helpful comments.

For the purpose of this challenge, the desire to hide your behavior (i.e. not logging your wine consumption in your food diary) or the guilt you associate with it, is much more informative and important than whatever it is you've eaten. After all, it's only five days of food but a lifetime of habits.

Are you rushed and annoyed while writing in your food diary, or excited and hopeful? Do you scrawl the details as though you shouldn't be bothered, or do you print proudly?

How many meals or hours of added awareness do you enjoy before you lose the wakefulness engendered by journaling?

Welcome

"Michael, this is not the body that we hired," one ballet company director scolded me, "You are under contract and I expect your extra weight gone by the end of the month. Are we clear?" Today I'm in another career reliant upon a sleek public image. A fitness trainer must look the part of the service he sells; it is a vocation for the young and sexy. Sometime around age 45 I found myself wrestling with the same body fat annoyances as my clients. A man with a business called Volition Fitness cannot just blame his love handles on a taste for cabernet and call it a day. Temperance is essential.

"No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now." - Alan Watts

Let's begin with acceptance. No, not resignation to a dissatisfying body size, but rather acceptance of the fact that nothing lasts forever, that the pattern of our diet attempts is cyclical and repetitive. It's the same for most people. So what? If that's the way it works then let's make the best of it, even have fun with it. The trick to sustained effort, until and beyond our goal, is keeping our endeavors fresh and creative. There is no final, diet quick fix, just a fascination with and exploration of our behavior.

This program is called Never on Sunday because we only commit to diet challenges during the week. Our weekends are about freedom and discovery. On Saturday and Sunday we eat when and whatever we want and see if the focus we held during the prior week alters our behavior even after the effort. Twelve (three month's worth) of weekly strategies follows. No one is suggesting that any of these diets will be sufficient calorie reduction to lower our weight or size. Indeed, the point is that diets don't work because they are not sustainable; but diets DO have value as reminders. If we play it right, a diet, silly as it is, can be a useful prompt. We're in this for the long haul, seeking a way to adjust our whole point of view when it comes to food.

If you'd like to gain the support of other participants in this program, feel free to comment on this post. Perhaps sharing your experience will contribute to the success of someone else.