Adjusting the plan

After the failure of last night I decided to reread, more thoroughly this time, the post at Zenhabits. This time I read the comments too, since they often give more information and/or put the post in perspective. I decided that it would be time to adjust my plan. Some elements described in the Zenhabits post are missing. I really want this habit to succeed because I want to use it as a step up to create more good habits.

Revised plan

Goal: By 9 May I no longer eat food after 20.30h. I don’t want it any more and I can resist the urges. Drinks of any kind are allowed.

Plan: I’m going to achieve this by not giving in to the urge. Instead I will do some home work that keeps my hands busy, or I’ll simply start pampering my hands and nails. When I’m too tempted to have something, I can have a few small toasts. At parties these are usually around, although most of the parties I attend these days are over by 21.00h or even earlier, so not much temptation there.

Reward: I haven’t even thought about a reward. I haven’t made up my mind whether this should be something physical (i.e. some ‘thing’ I can purchase) or food (in full contradiction to the habit) or something else (like the fact that I’ve lost weight or the pride of achieving my goal). Food is out of the question, and something spiritual won’t be motivating enough to get me going, so it has to be something physical. My latest crave is a Bag-in-Bag Organizer, so I might as well opt for that one and decide on the actual purchase on the end date.

Motivation: I have two reasons for doing this. One is simply to start losing weight without dieting and the other is prepping myself for more drastic changes in my life.

Obstacles and triggers: Hunger and parties are probably the largest obstacles and TV is a major trigger. What I can do to overcome these is, as described before, getting my hands busy to avoid grabbing snacks. I don’t want the grease of the crisps to transfer from my hands to anything else, so keeping my hands busy with something that requires clean hands is a useful diversion.

Logging: Although I’ll post the success and failure rates here, they are not in my face. Reading through the comments of the Zenhabits post I came across a post of ScrambleJam using the Compact Calendar I found only a few weeks ago. Strangely enough I immediately recognized it as a good tool for tracking the occurrence of my headaches, but I never thought of using it to track the progress on this habit.  I’m going to print it right now, dig up my colorful pens and start the tracking.