I’ve come up with a plan for this phase of my dieting that I think is pretty much guaranteed to work if I stick with it long enough. It’s simple too. Just stay busy.
I don’t mean mentally busy either. I can work like a race horse all day sitting in front of the computer and eat 10,000 calories without ever remembering I’ve taken a bite. That’s what gets me into situations where I have to go on diets. I eat when my mind is doing something else, and I don’t keep up with how much is going down.
Staying physically busy is a whole different ballgame. I’m sure I could manage to eat and vacuum at the same time, but I probably won’t. I probably won’t eat and weed the flower beds at the same time either. That’s just a little too messy even for me.
I admit I didn’t come up with this plan so much as it came up with me. I’ve been busy the past couple of days, and it suddenly just struck me that I had also not been snacking or even missing snacking.
I know from my experience with dieting last summer that the first couple of weeks on a diet are the hardest. That’s when you think about food all the time, and you feel unbearably hungry all the time. That’s when you have dreams about things you ate at Dairy Queen twenty years ago.
This time, though, I’ve managed to avoid feeling distressed by my diet simply by staying too busy to think about it. I highly recommend this approach.
Yesterday, I helped my parents put up the corn from their garden. Today, I cleaned out an overgrown flower bed and filled it in with mulch. Now, not only am I not particularly hungry, I’m also too tired to care whether I eat anything or not. Plus, caloriecount.about.com tells me that weeding burns up to 367 calories per hour. This is a win, win, win for me, and the yard looks better too.
I still haven’t decided if I’m going to follow a particular diet plan this time. Today I had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch. I plan to eat a plate of garden vegetables for supper. That’s not necessarily a plan. I’m not telling myself there are foods I can’t have. I’m not feeling deprived. I’m just eating things that are easy to portion size and things I happen to already have on hand.
Soon enough the mental jobs I have to do will take over again from the physical jobs, and I’ll have to come up with a way to discipline myself into exercise, but for now tackling home projects works. Ask me about this again in a few weeks, and I hope I’ll tell you that’s what I did on my summer vacation.
