The Rules...

I am not a big fan of the word rules, but rules for my eating is what is working for me right now. I keep referring to my "eating plan" because I know I cannot do a diet, any diet, for an entire week not to mention a full year. So I have come up with these "rules." I can follow rules. I obviously cannot follow meal plans, point counts, good/bad food charts so I'm goin' with rules. Here they are so far:


1. No sharp foods. I include in this, any chips, popcorn, crackers or crunchy cookies. I have decided raw vegetables are not actually sharp.

2. No dairy. This was HUGE for me. I LOVE milk and all its luscious counterparts - cheese, yogurt, ice cream - but for now they are gone. And the word luscious will never be applied to a calcium supplement - just choked on one today!

3. Never eat more than the size of your closed fist in a sitting. I learned that if you close your fist it becomes the same size as your stomach. I found this revolutionary. It gets rid of all that portion control stuff and fills you up at the same time.

4. No horrible food. Brownies are bad for me, but High Fructose Corn Syrup, trans fats, fake sugar in all it's forms and their ilk are a special kind of unhealthy. The HFCS is hard to avoid and at some point I'm going to have to go cold turkey on "sugarless" gum, but other than that I steer clear of the really nasty stuff.

5. If I am hungry - I eat. I try and make the best choices I can and they sometimes are rather unconventional, (cucumbers dipped in garlic hummus for example), but I am not going to spend the next year starving.

So those are my food rules. I am very open to adding to them if I learn something new, but for now they are working. I'm pretty sure at some point I'll have to start calorie counting too, but for now I am getting really good at these and do not want to get overly fancy with myself.

Any tips or rules of your own you would like to share are always welcome.