The end!

Well, phases 1-4 of the diet are now finished, according to the official regimen. Today I move into phase 5, where my habits are supposedly all broken and the pounds will carry on falling off until I get down to my healthy weight, as long as I keep using the tools given in the book to spot those habits and squash them until they're gone for good.

I still feel a bit of a cheat though. I kind of miss the structure that the first phases gave to my life and made me feel like I was achieving things. I'm not sure I've achieved the weight loss that I'd hoped for. I should be 4 - 8 pounds lighter by now, and I'm going to weigh myself tomorrow to see how I match up to the official prediction.

I have had some email correspondence from one of the NDD staff team regarding the online version of the No Diet Diet, and they say that the programme is a bit better developed for stage 5 of the diet there, because presumably they have more space to explain it, and I also get access to trained and experienced NDD people for help when things go wrong, or to ask questions. I think I might try it and see because there have been points where I wasn't sure whether I was doing it right.

Although I feel much better about my life, I can still see habits that I'm stuck in and I still feel a bit powerless to change them.

But here are some really positive things that have come out so far:

• I feel full up quicker than before - or rather, have learned to spot when I am truly hungry and when I am merely bored or thirsty;
  
• I don't get chocolate cravings any more;
• I don't feel the need to have a Diet Coke so often (unless I'm at work, when it's still an ingrained habit sadly);
• I've learned to recognise a lot of habits and have found them easier to knobble than I would otherwise;
• I don't feel forlorn and tempted at the same time when seeing photos of delicious and (formerly) 'naughty' food in magazines or in advertisements. It's just food to me now, rather than some kind of religious taboo;
• The desserts that gave me awesome guilty pleasure before (eg chocolate fudge cake) seem less tempting, even over-rich, and in some cases a bit disgusting;
• My ability to leave food when I feel full, rather than Finishing My Plate Like a Good Girl, has increased. Left-overs no longer induce guilt; rather, they are a satisfying achievement.

So, all this is great! I must continue to relish and live out these new things.

Hopefully tomorrow I will report back to you with some concrete statistics.
Oh yes - my weight - that.

Day Twenty-eight

Today was a bit of a disaster. The only day where I actually didn't really even try.

However, in the circumstances, it was really very difficult to fulfil the proposed task. Given that Dave and I were on holiday alone, it was quite hard to act with 'social intelligence' and do something for the local community, learn about a social issue close to my heart, or plant a tree, etc.

Excuses aside! I just didn't do it. I was enjoying the relaxation time away from all the things that bother me daily about what's wrong with the world, etc.

One thing the day did do, however, was to bring to my attention a serious gap in all the things I do to try and save the world. I already talk about it enough; Dave and I don't run a car; we have a green energy supplier; we recycle; we buy organic; we carbon-neutralise our flights; we give to charity; we use energy-saving bulbs; we buy second-hand from Ebay and charity shops a lot, and all those good middle-class mini-efforts. But I don't do volunteer work much. You know, the grassroots stuff. Getting my hands dirty. OK - I do sound and vision engineering for my church from time to time, I'll help staff an event or clean up afterwards when it's needed or whatever. But, again, it's all very safe, very middle-class, very secondary. Or so it feels.

I know it now. I've rarely given proper practical help outside the cosy little bubble that is my life. Apart from maybe one or two things:

• One visit to a rehabilitation centre for alcoholics and heroin addicts in Russia
• Taking in a homeless friend
• Lending money or giving things to hard-up students and other friends

The Russian thing, at least, was pretty life-changing. So, 2 small resolutions:

• to ask my mate Alan about doing some environmental volunteer work;
• to save up the money for the flights to go and visit a friend who's doing very important exciting and scary things in China, with - maybe - some IT skills to offer.

There!

Day Twenty-seven

I have to admit, things didn't go so well today. Dave and I went on holiday to Avignon in Provence, and I was so distracted with the packing and travelling, I didn't have time to check out what the day's mission was supposed to be. So once I got to read it, I had a few hours to put it into practice.

The task was to act with emotional intelligence - noticing and naming the emotions I, and other people I encounter, were feeling.

Now, I'm really bad at this stuff. My first reaction when I encounter an emotion I don't enjoy too much is to stifle it straight away and hope that it never comes back. I do the same with other people - if somebody else is beset by grief or whatever, I want to do everything I can immediately to make it go away. One of the (surprisingly) few negative habits that boarding school left me with, I guess. It does run in the family a bit anyway.

So I made a start, and realised that most of the emotions I feel, I can't really name properly. It felt like I was starting to pull the cork out of a whole bottle of packed, wriggling woodlice.

I don't think just one task or one day is going to solve the whole deal. At least I know it's something I need to work on.

Day Twenty-six

Today's thought-dimenson was 'conscience'. This means listening to and acting on what my conscience tells me, rather than feeling the guilt and doing the wrong thing anyway.

Somewhat depressingly, despite my faith, I seem to do this a lot. Sometimes I have problems with my conscience because it tells me to feel bad about things that I don't think are truly bad, and that is more to do with my self-esteem and various hang-ups than it is about what's really right and wrong. Like, not giving money to beggars. My conscience goes TWING TWING! whenever I pass a homeless person on the street, but I know that actually dispensing the cash does nothing to help them properly, so I save all the pennies that I would have given and then write a nice cheque to a homeless charity instead. Which is much better, even if it's only because of the fact that Gordon Brown has to give an extra 24p for every donation I make.

Cue Simpsons quote:

"Bart: I thought I'd be jumping for joy the day Skinner got fired. Now all I have is this weird hot feeling in the back of my head.
Lisa: That's guilt. You feel guilty because your stunt wound up costing a man his job
Bart: I guess it is guilt. [scratches his head; a small spider bites him repeatedly there]"

Anyhow, enough of the rambling self-justification!

I am getting better at sorting out when my consicence is giving me false guilt or true guilt. And there was one situation I encountered today which had engendered a lot of true guilt for a while. So I attempted to put it right. It didn't feel as satisfying as I thought it would... because ->augh<- I still felt guilty about the time which had elapsed between the situation cropping up and me rectifying it.

At least I did my task, anyway. I guess this conscience thing isn't going to go right all of a sudden. Maybe if I do it systematically - obeying my conscience straight away when I know it's right, and ignoring it when I know it's being tainted by my self-image - then slowly it will learn to stop with the silly false stuff.