Hi! If you're living in the northeast right now I'll imagine that you're either crazily digging yourself out for work or still in your pj's when you read this. Hopefully like me, you're the latter. I should turn this into the Virginia Snow of 2010 blog because I just can't stop talking about it! We are expecting MORE snow tomorrow and even more this weekend. What's that?
I can sense spring is coming, far off in the distance. I have a weird habit of being able to smell and sense the coming seasons and then craving them. I do this a lot with fall and now I can feel spring. It's coming. Maybe not till May, but it's coming!
I'm hoping that Michael Pollan's new book Food Rules arrives in the mail today (along with season 3,4,5,6 of Lost) so that I can get ready for Lent! Fatbridesmaid got me in the mood to participate in Lent this year. What am I giving up? Processed/convenience foods. This means, buying food without packaging and labels. Making my own bread, eating only local or organic meat/produce/dairy. Basically making everything from scratch. And only eating sweats if they are made by a real person (not in a factory), on the weekends or on special occasions.
Which leads me to the No S Diet. That sounds gimmicky. While reading the reviews of Food Rules on Amazon, I saw mention of something called the No S Diet which piqued my curiosity. After a quick google search I came to the official No S Diet website. And holy moly, I loved every word! This couldn't be more anti-diet, dieting if it tried.
I read and reread, I emailed, I read the discussion boards and thought "I'll try that!" because you know me, I'll pretty much try anything once. What is the no S diet? Easy...
No sweets
No Snacks
No Seconds
Except for days that start with S or special occasions.
I had a lot of questions at first like- how big should my plate be? What should be on my plate? And then I realized that my brain was asking all of the confusing yet obviously answerable questons from my dieting past.
No sweets. What does that mean? Anything that gets most of it's calories from sugar. Anything that is obviously dessert. This doesn't mean NO SUGAR it means...no desserts. Sugar in oatmeal, coffee etc. is fine. Save desserts for the weekend or special occasion and preferably ones that are not processed.
No snacks. This means eating three meals a day. When I first read this I thought "well I don't snack". And then I really thought about it and yes, indeed I do snack. I just never think of it as snacking. A snack is anything you eat outside of a meal.
No seconds. Eat what is on your plate and that's it. He mentioned at first people tend to put way too much on their plate or too little until they realize that A) this meal needs to tide me over until the next one and B) this meal is not for stuffing myself. If you think about eating in front of other people and putting all of the food on your plate the first time, chances are you would realize this is a lot of food. But, instead we go back and it looks like less for to us and everyone else.
There are no other rules. No food rules, no nutrtion rules, no counting calories. I think this is scary for people (myself included) we like structure, we like being told what is "bad" and "good". We are scared to trust ourselves, our hunger or knowing what we even want to eat. Do any of us really know what we like to eat anymore?
My favorite quotes from the website?
make you sick.
Most diets today can be divided into two categories:
- Pseudoscientific forbidden foods diets that pretend that you can go on being a glutton as long as you confine your gluttony to a particular class of foods while completely excluding others (no agreement on what these particular kinds of foods are, of course).
- Diets that require you to be a full time calorie accountant.
The forbidden foods diets are patent nonsense. They contradict one another, go in and out of fashion every ten years, and never seem to gather any serious scientific support. You won't stick with one of these because not being able to eat whole categories of food is a real drag. At the outset, it might seem worth it to trade pasta for unlimited steaks (or vice versa), but it gets old fast. And it might even
not any delicious thing. No pleasure is denied, just unobtrusively delayed and contained. Served up on the platter of limited opportunity, each pleasure becomes even more enjoyable than it was before.
Because it is simple, sustainable, and you aren't really depriving yourself of anything. You don't have to sacrifice anything -- not time, not health, not
There are no magic potions and there are no poisons. You are targeting just the culprit, just the bad habit of overeating itself.
Ask yourself if you can imagine staying on a particular diet for the rest of your life. If not, don't bother starting, it's a waste of time and will.
It's not the carrots, it's the carrot cake (etc.). More to the point, it's youeating so damn much of the carrot cake. People refuse to look at the obvious suspects because the implications are so unflattering to themselves -- that they simply eat too much and that there is no "stab in the back" substance to blame. The forbidden food diets pander to this suicidal vanity. They are not just harmless (if unmaintainable) games. They are dangerous distractions. They are blinkers. They keep you from seeing and confronting the real problem. This isn't "murder she wrote." It's not the mousy schoolmarm whom no one suspected who winds up having "dunnit." It's a brazen attack in broad daylight. Take a look in the mirror. The guilty party is staring right at you.
That said, I find that having a limited number of limited quantity meals makes me take them more seriously, both from a gastronomic and a nutritional point of view. Pretty much every meal I eat is delicious or healthy or both.
The no S diet isn't for overthinking, and he suggests taking 21 days to get accustom to eating this way. I like that this plan eliminates everything that makes me obese. The option to overeat.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not fat from the meals I choose to eat. I'm not fat from a nice plate of really delicious food. I'm fat because I eat too many seconds. I'm fat from eating too much in private (snacking) and I'm fat from too many calorie dense sweets.
I'm giving it a try! I have a really hard time tracking what I eat and posting it, mostly because I'm lazy, and I won't require that I do this unless I want to. I do know that this helps me to stay accountable, but also know that I sometimes get drained from dieting advice. Either way, I'll keep you posted!
Oh and this is coming in the mail too...more on that later.





















