We can do it Wednesday!: Fruit for Dessert Update 2

So my second week of trying to limit my dessert to fruit went much better than last week. There were two things I did this past week that made a big difference:

1) Waiting at least an hour after dinner to eat. This helped a lot. I found that immediately after dinner I always crave something sweet and delicious, like chocolate, and I think this is just out of habit. If that is the case, this is hopefully a habit I can break. Also, the problem with eating right after dinner is that my food hasn’t digested fully and I can’t accurately gauge how full I am, so I end up eating too much. If I can just power through the first hour after dinner either by going to the gym or distracting myself with TV or chores, when I eat later I’m not really craving sweet things and I eat less because I feel fuller by then.

2) Telling someone close to me about my goal – Having Zach know about my plan was a huge help. Many times I would want to eat some peanut butter out of the jar, but I’d think twice about it because I knew Zach would look at me an awkward “I know you set a goal to only eat fruit after dinner and that’s not fruit, but I’m not going to say anything because you’ll get mad at me for calling you fat” look. To avoid the awkwardness I’d just pass on the peanut butter since I realized I wasn’t really hungry anyway. I think the key is to tell someone who you’re around a lot though (so they can be there right when you’re about to stray) and who is supportive.

I’m going to continue with the fruit thing for as long as I can (mainly on weekdays though). And the one hour rule turned out to be great, so I’m going to keep that in place whether I’m planning to eat chocolate or fruit.

Since I was successful with last week’s goal, I’m feeling pretty ambitious and am going to go with a super hard goal for this week: no TV. Zach and I don’t subscribe to cable, but that doesn’t keep me from watching Hulu and Netflix like it’s my job. Last week I lost my iPad (which I mainly use as a mini TV while I’m doing chores around the house) so I figured since I don’t have the iPad drawing me to watch every single episode of strangling addicting TV series, now would be a good week to try life without TV. I’m hoping to supplement my TV watching time with book reading time and home organizing time. We’ll see how it goes.