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?