Food budgetting

I've been reading recent posts from both Lynn at Escape from Obesity about her monthly calorie budget and Diana at Scale Junkie about her weekly zigzag eating and the more I think about it, this is pretty much what I have been doing for some time. And you know what? It works.

Proof? After the holiday weight gain and one or two 'dodgy' days since, I've pulled myself back to being sensible, and made up a bit for the various excesses. I'm now down to 73.5kg and that feels good.

Unlike Lynn and Diana (both of whom I admire enormously) I didn't sit down and make a carefully reasoned decision to follow this approach, it simply seems a logical thing to do, so that's what I've somehow slotted into doing. That probably says a lot about the two ladies that they both think so much more carefully about this whole process than I do, but I guess I'm too grey-haired to change about me that too.

The general idea is this - if you eat 'so much' on Monday and think that was too much, then cut down on Tuesday. If you know that on Saturday it'll be hard to keep the food intake to a reasonable level, then take it easy for a couple of days beforehand. OK, I know that's not exactly the approach Diana is taking, but it's pretty close. Overall, in a week or a month (or whatever timescale you use) you'll consume on average the number of calories that is right for your sustained weight loss. It's that phrase 'on average' that's the key. Easy, huh? Do the sums.

It certainly makes a whole lot more sense to my mind than the slavish insistence that 'I can eat only X calories today' approach, with all the attendant dangers of beating yourself up desperately when you find you've ingested some 30, or 50, or even 500 calories more in a given day than you are 'allowed' to do. Let's face it, we are almost always better at handing ourselves brickbats than bouquets!

A bit of flexibility, and recognising that we are all capable of making healthy, adult decisions? Yep, that works for me. We are all intelligent people, just people with accumulated flab that we are working to shift. We do not need to follow a horribly prescriptive regime to reach our goals - after all, we are the ones who make the daily choices and we are the people in control of our own waistlines. This concept probably won't make the best-seller diet books list, but what the hell - I don't read them anyway.

As I've said before, the blog posts from the two ladies are great and I really admire them both, for their honesty about the trials and tribulations they face (and which we all share from time to time) and for keeping on keeping on. So, a final thought to share - pooh on those people who tell Lynn that her way isn't a good one (stupid? I don't think so!), and a message to them both - good on ya, gals!