Wobbly Wobbly Weightless # 2

Hellooooo, and welcome to my next wobbly wobbly weightless post, where you’ll find inspiration to wibble and wobble and perhaps weight lose as well.

I have joined Noom. ‘How exciting!’ I hear you exclaim, ‘What is Noom?’ Well, I’m glad you asked!

Noon is a psychology based weightless program which I tripped over when reading FaceBook a few weeks ago. It was offering two weeks free, so I thought why not? I’ve nothing to lose (except for the weight of course).

So I signed up, weighed in, started logging my food and weighted (sorry couldn’t resist 😂) waited for the barrage of rules and regulations.

Y’know the ones. The dos and do nots of the program.

Only they didn’t come.

They gave me a personal trainer, told me to keep logging and weighing and set my reading to ten minutes per day.

So each morning, I get up, ablute, caffeinate and settle down to read my Noom notes.

Over that first week, there wasn’t a rule in sight. So, how does one lose weight without rules? Good question…

By designing my ‘Big Picture’ apparently.

A Big picture incorporates your goal, your why and how your life will be different. Here’s mine:

Lose 100 pounds, so I can be healthy enough to adopt, so that my life can be full of the incredible blessing of children.

Next, I was introduced to colour coded food. Here, we go, I thought to myself, here are the dos and do nots.

Except, once again, there wasn’t any at all.

Green foods are foods which satiate, orange foods satiate less and red foods satiate least. Red tends to have higher calorie density but are not necessarily unhealthy.

So lots of green, not many red? Only, no.

Well, yes, but not necessarily right away.

I just needed to keep logging. In keeping logs of my food, I can start to see patterns. For example, too many red foods. Then I can look for orange or green alternatives. Likewise, if too many orange foods were the problem, I could look for green alternatives. I’ve changed my semi-skimmed milk to skimmed and full fat cheese to low fat. Two small changes. I hardly notice the difference. In doing so I have changed an orange to a green and a red to an orange.

Happy days!

There is no pressure to do anything. You do it in your own time, in your own way.

Noom is all about teaching, because the results come from the learning and understanding why your weight is an issue in the first place.

It’s the psychology of food.

And you all know I love me a bit of psychology.

So far, I’ve learnt all about motivation (or lack there of) and tips to keep it high; habit formation and tips to increase the formation of a difficult habit by pairing it with a healthy habit already in place (so cool!); thought distortion and different type of eaters.

It will come as no surprise that my own thought distortion is ‘all or nothing’ eating. I am, unfortunately, an all or nothing kind of girl. Which is great when considering home schooling or loving my family. Both of which I throw myself into with unbounded passion and both of which I seem able to maintain. But the all or nothing attitude does not serve me well in other areas of my life, like cleaning the home, gardening or, it seems, food.

I have so much more to share…things like my inner elephant, rewarding myself, reinforcing my wins and keystone habits. Everything is based on research papers (which I love # Nerd) and everything really makes sense.

So, on this weightless program which has no rules and regulations, no limits or forbidden food, have I managed to lose any weight?

Yes.

But not much.

I’m down four pounds in three weeks.

Compared to if I had begun at Weight Watchers or Slimming World, this is very low. But after three weeks on any ‘diet’ I am usually bored, demotivated and plotting ways to circumnavigate the rule book.

Right now, I’m not even near to losing interest. I haven’t lost much weight, but perhaps in a month’s time I will have lost another four pounds. And maybe, just maybe, I still won’t be bored.

Slow and steady…

…which is very un-Claire-like…

…which is perhaps why it might be successful…

…maybe.