Over the years I’ve managed to create several blogs. Some I kept up to date, others I completely forgot about. On the brink of a new year I decided to simplify my life in that aspect and consolidate all the blogs I have into one. I’ve moved the content of all of them into a single new one, located at http://hepabolu.nl/. New info will go into that blog.

The 30 days of the habit tracking are over. I’m still not sure whether it was a success or a failure. The weight loss I aimed at didn’t happen. In fact I’m now 1kg heavier than I was before starting this habit.

I also noticed that I really miss sitting down in front of the TV with some snacks. It’s the quickest and easiest way to relax a bit between all the tasks I do. By setting the time of not eating at 20.30h I basically deprived myself of all this. At some days I even had some crisps early in the day, just to not strike the day off as a failure. Wrong outcome. So I decided that I’ll stick to this habit but I’m allowed to make one exception in the weekend. Not during weekdays (except Friday) and only one time a week. That’s probably easier to keep.

Now for the new habit: I want to do more physical movement but I’m going to write down a more measurable goal. One that I can easier say I’ve reached or not. More in a later post.

It’s been a while since I last posted my statistics. With a few holidays running together here I suddenly had a whole week off. Time to relax and catch up on the backlog at home. Relaxing also meant that tracking my habit was forgotten. It had immediate effects: one day we started dinner after 20.30h. Does that count as failure or success? Another day I totally forgot about the habit and had some snacks after 20.30h. The day after I stepped in the ‘I-might-as-well’ trap: I might as well give in and have a bag of crisps.

Usually this last action would make me give up all together, but this time I decided that I might as well get back on the wagon and try again. By looking at my tracking calendar I found that the number of successes still outnumber the failures. Something I wouldn’t have known when I hadn’t tracked my progress.

I also realised, with the end of the 30 days in sight (marked by a line around the 30 days), I haven’t decided when it qualify as a success. I simply started and hoped for the best. Sure, there are numerous strategies to count: total number of successes vs failures, total number of consecutive successes,  success rate in the last two weeks compared to the first two weeks. I haven’t really decided about it.

For now the stats:

Failures: 5

Partial success: 5

Success: 16

Days into the habit: 26

Total weight loss: 0.8kg

As the days passes and one success followed another I already thought this would end as a smooth ride. Today I realised even such a simple thing has it hard moments. Normally I would ‘celebrate’ the coming weekend by vegging out on the couch. TV on, bag of crisps at hand. Today the ‘natural’ urge came up and I already started looking around for food to eat, when I noticed the clock. Too late. I now had to make a conscious decision: eat something or go for a success. I settled on a third option: I delayed the decision by doing some more work and then some more. Now it’s time for bed and no use to start eating. Winning by self deception.

It’s been a week since I last posted my habit statistics. I’ve been on a long weekend of origami folding and during the weekend I noticed how important tracking is to stick to your habit.

Until last Wednesday I was doing fine and not eating after 20.30h was becoming normal. I decided that I didn’t need to bring my tracking calendar, since I could easily remember that I would have 4 successes in a row. The origami weekend started on Thursday and Thursday evening flew by while meeting old and new friends.

On Friday evening somebody put a bar of chocolate on the table and invited all of us to take some. Without thinking I did and since it was good I ate more. Suddenly I realised that it was way past 20.30h and that I had failed at keeping my habit. The days before I conciously checked my watch before deciding I could eat something, but this was the old reflex kicking in. The same happened on Saturday evening. I was offered pastry and ate without thinking.

So how does tracking help? Well, had I tracked my successes and failures on my calendar the effort would be more in the forefront of my mind and I would have thought twice before eating after 20.30h.

Log:

Failures: 4

Partial success: 2

Success: 7

Days into the habit: 13

Total weight loss: 1.8kg 

Hooray! Three successes in a row. Just a short post now otherwise I lose motivation for the real important tasks I need to accomplish today.

Log:

Failure: 1
Partial success: 2
Success: 3
Days into the habit: 6

Total weight loss: 0.8 kg

I know it sounds premature, but with yesterday’s success I have more success than failures. I felt bad yesterday, no energy. Don’t know why but it’s one of those days that I would grab a bag of crisps and try to eat the misery away. Not that it would help. Yesterday I decided that instead I would just do some ironing. I was fed up with the sight of that pile of clothes on the couch and the ironing board blocking the way. I promised myself I didn’t have to do all of it, but it would be great if I could finish it so the board could be put away. You can probably guess that it didn’t take half as much time as I anticipated.

That felt good, so good that I could sit down on the couch and start pampering my hands instead of running to the kitchen. And then I went to bed early and that was that. Success day no 2.

Log:

Failures: 1

Partial success: 2

Success: 2

Days into the habit: 5

Total weight loss: 0.8 kg

A weekend without the kids is a good time to spend some quality time together as a couple. Ours was a simple date with dinner in a restaurant and a movie afterwards.

I was determined to get a success yesterday and the restaurant sure helped. The meal was gorgeous and I must have eaten a bit too much. Anyway, preventing myself from eating after 20.30u became a no-brainer, because I couldn’t stand even the thought of food. Yay!

Log:

Failure: 1
Partial success: 2
Succes: 1
Days into the habit: 4

Total weight loss: 0.8 kg

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.

Ok, so I failed yesterday. I guess I need to learn it the hard way. While getting the groceries I came across a new flavor of crisps. I’m a sucker for testing new things, so I had to buy it. My grown-up side told me that it would most probably result in breaking my own rule and failing, but the child side came up with all kinds of excuses and I gave in and bought it.

We got home after 21.00h, so trying the stuff out would certainly break the rule, but I couldn’t resist. I filled a bowl (rather than just eat from the bag) and discovered that I really do prefer my favorite. What a waste! I broke my own rule and didn’t even enjoy it.

Today I decided that I needed to get rid of the bag, to prevent myself from breaking the rule again tonight. So I used it for lunch. Being brought up that good (as in still editable) food shouldn’t be thrown out, I couldn’t get myself to put the bag in the trash can. Hmm, I probably need to redefine my idea of good and include a notion of healthy.

Anyway, here’s the log. I’m including the weight loss now as an extra push for the better. I don’t think losing 1.1kg can be contributed to three days of trying to lose weight, but it’s nice to put it up anyway. The goal is to lose 5kg or more.

Failure: 1
Partial success: 2
Success: 0
Days into the habit: 3

Total weight loss: 1.1kg