I just about burst out laughing when I saw boxes of this product stacked up at the entrance of Bed, Bath & Beyond.

It’s the Snuggie for dogs! Hopefully you are already aware of the Snuggie, one of the most popular infomercial products of all time. I can just imagine the marketing team sitting around the conference room brainstorming. “How can we build on the success of the Snuggie? I know! The Snuggie for dogs!”

I particularly like how the text on the box says “Keeps you warm and your paws free!” as if it is directly addressing the dog, who is presumably reading the box by your side at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I hope the dog has got a wallet too.

The Beck Diet Solution is a six-week program of cognitive therapy which aims to make you change the way you think, which in turn helps you change your behavior. Cognitive therapists believe that all actions start with thoughts. You think about scratching your head, so you scratch it. You think about eating a bowl of cereal, so you eat it. Our thoughts and behaviors are a bit more complex than that, but if you can change the way you think, it is believed that you can change the way you act.

I will be following the Beck Diet Solution for the next six weeks and blogging about it every Monday. I’m actually at the end of week two right now, but I’ll try to catch the blog up with my real time behavior in the next few weeks. The book assigns you one task a day, letting you gradually change your behaviors little by little until you’ve changed the way you think about food and exercise. Dr. Judith Beck says it’s sometimes ok to do two or possibly three days of tasks in one day, just as long as you don’t overload yourself. The book requires that you keep a journal and sometimes write on note cards as part of the program. As I said before, I’ve already got my Hallmark-approved journal ready.

Each week has a theme, and the first week’s theme is “Get Ready: Lay the Groundwork.”

Day 1 – Record the Advantages of Losing Weight

First off, I had to write a list of the reasons I want to lose weight. I’ll be reading the list at least twice a day, every day, as well as during times I feel challenged. I saved my list in Google Documents so I can access it online anywhere. I also uploaded a few pictures of myself at my thinnest to accompany the list.

This idea sounded pretty dopey to me at first, but it has been helpful to keep me focused on what I want to achieve. I’ve been visualizing the moments I want to achieve in my mind instead of just reading the list by rote. For instance, I have to weigh in at the headache clinic I visit every other month, so I visualize myself stepping on the scale there and having the nurse record a lower weight than last month.

To remind myself to read the list, I set up a calendar in Google Calendars just for reminder events. I set this task as a recurring daily event at two different times, and set each event to email me a reminder one minute before the event. I now get an email twice a day reminding me to read my list with a link to the Google Doc included.

Day 2 – Pick Two Reasonable Diets

You’re supposed to pick a primary diet and then have a backup in case the first one doesn’t suit you. I’m doing the South Beach Diet again, and I put The Zone Diet down as my backup because I like its advice about balancing your carb, protein and fat portions during meals, though measuring that out for every meal seems more complicated than I like.

Day 3 – Eat Sitting Down

Dr. Beck recommends that you only eat when sitting down because it forces you to be purposeful while you eat. A lot of dieters sabotage themselves by standing in front of the fridge taking a few nibbles of something or licking the spoon a few too many times while cooking. If you see everything you’re going to eat laid out in front of you, it gives you a better sense of how much you’re actually eating.

I’ve been doing pretty well on this one, though I grabbed a few walnuts from the cupboards to snack on while I was waiting for a meal to heat up in the microwave. I also tend to take one or two bites of food while I’m carrying it from the kitchen to my chair, which seems like borderline ok behavior, though I doubt Dr. Beck would see it that way :)

Day 4 – Give Yourself Credit

A lot of dieters have problems with negative self-talk, so on this day you’re supposed to give yourself credit for things you do right. I don’t consider myself to be a Negative Nancy or a Debbie Downer, so I skipped this day. I already give myself credit.

Day 5 – Eat Slowly and Mindfully

Ugh. This was by far the hardest day of the week. I love to scarf my food, like a human Hoover. I’ve noticed this about myself for many years, but I’ve never really worked to slow down. There was a guy at my old workplace who was the slowest eater I’d ever seen. He’d literally take twice as long to eat his lunch as I did, taking ten minutes to eat a 6 oz. yogurt cup. One day I tried to pace my eating with him, but I cracked after a minute or two. PastaQueen want food now! NOW!!

So, I’ve been sitting down and focusing on savoring every bit because I can’t eat as much as I’d like to (i.e. the entire contents of the Keebler Elves’ bakery tree). There are still some days when I find that I’ve been mindlessly eating a pear in front of the computer or crunching on carrots in front of the TV. I then have to force myself to pay more attention to the eating experience.

Day 6 – Find a Diet Coach

Accountability is important, so Dr. Beck recommends you find someone to talk to about your dieting successes and struggles. You have to check in once a week, but you can talk more than that if you wish. I found an Internet friend who agreed to be my coach. I love simple days like this!

Day 7 – Arrange Your Environment

For the final day of the week, you have to arrange your environment so it’s optimal for weight loss. Basically, this meant throwing out any leftover Christmas cookies and asking my roommate to keep her junk food in her room so I wouldn’t see it. Otherwise, I already buy lots of healthy foods, and I’ve got vegetables being delivered right to my door every week, so I’m pretty good. Also, because I work from home, I don’t have to worry about arranging my workplace. The cats never run out and buy a box of Panera bagels like my old boss did.

Conclusion

Week one went pretty well. As the weeks continue, I’ll be building on the things I learned this week and checking to make sure I continue observing these behaviors as I learn new skills. I’ll keep you posted!

If you’re reading this post, congratulations! You’ve successfully followed the blog to its new home. This weekend I switched from the Movable Type blogging software to WordPress. You shouldn’t notice that many changes except for the big one: any links you have bookmarked for http://www.pastaqueen.com/halfofme/ should be updated to http://www.pastaqueen.com/blog For your convenience, any links to the old site are redirecting to their counterparts on the new site automatically, but it’s best to update your bookmarks as well. The good old http://www.pastaqueen.com/ link works the same as usual.

Attention Feed Readers!
If you read my site via the feed, make sure you are subscribed to my latest feed address: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pastaqueen

If I’ve moved everything over properly, you shouldn’t notice much of a difference on the front end, although WordPress will make things much easier for me on the back end. I’ve wanted to switch to WordPress for over a year, but didn’t want to hassle with importing 5 years of entries, converting all my templates, and redirecting all my old links properly. However, the current barrage of spam I’ve been hit with served to remind me how clunky and difficult it is to do some things in Movable Type that are embarrassingly easy in WordPress. So I packed up my database and moved!

The only real functionality change is that I’ve gotten rid of threaded comments, even though WordPress offers support for them. I found the threads a bit hard to follow. I prefer it when the latest comments are all on the bottom of the page. You can still click a “reply” link, but all is does is add an “@commenter-name” at the beginning of your comment text.

If you run into any problems with anything, email me at blog [at] pastaqueen (dot) com

I had completely forgotten this until I read DietGirl’s blog this morning, but today is my five-year fativersary! It was five years ago today that I started my big fat weight loss attempt. DietGirl and I have the same weight loss anniversary, which would seem weird if not for the millions of people who start losing weight in January.

So, it’s five years later and I’ve maintained 75% of my highest weight loss. I’m working on making that percentage higher, but for now, I’ll take it! Woot! Some people think the five-year mark is a statistically significant indicator of your likelihood to keep the weight off. A quick Google search couldn’t find any articles that stated this, so it might just be folk wisdom or a total figment of my imagination.

All I know if that there was a guy who commented on the blog about two or three years ago saying he wouldn’t buy my book until I’d kept the weight off for five years. I only remember this because the guy was a douchebag about it. I truly appreciate the support of everyone who’s bought my book, but the decision is totally yours and isn’t something you need to extort out of me. I tried to find the comment, but after fifteen minutes of combing through search results I gave up. All I remember is that the comment was phrased as if I would only be worthy of having him purchase my book if I stayed skinny (or in my case, less fat). As I said before, I am very thankful to everyone who has purchased my book. But I think whatever happens to my weight in the future is somewhat irrelevant in regards to my memoir, which is the story of what it was like to lose a lot of weight, which will remain as true now and in the future regardless of whether I lose 100 pounds or gain 100 pounds. So if you want to buy it, thanks! And if you don’t, well, ok. Just don’t be a douchebag about it, all right?

By the way, did I say I was grateful? I am grateful!

With that in mind, happy fativersary and farewell to those 150 pounds gone!

Monday night, my nausea finally went away, either on its own or because I threw everything but the kitchen sink at it. (And if I really thought the kitchen sink would have had an effect, I would have thrown that too.)

The headache clinic I go to has an in-patient program that I haven’t done, but I have heard about. Their approach is to pump you full of lots of different drugs until something breaks your headache. I decided this was a good approach to take for my nausea too, so I took every single over-the-counter remedy I’d heard of for nausea, all at once.

First, I dumped a teaspoon of ginger into my vanilla yogurt and ate it. Then I went to the Kroger pharmacy and bought Nauzene tablets which I ate in the parking lot. When they failed to work in four minutes like the box promised, I started chewing the Spearment gum I’d also bought and drove across the street to CVS where I purchased Dramamine. I tossed that back in the parking lot and drove home, where I made some peppermint tea that I’d also bought at Kroger. Then, I told my roommate everything I’d taken in case I needed to be carted off to the emergency room. Then I proceeded to chew the entire pack of gum in an hour.

And then my nausea went away! I don’t know if it was scared off by one or all of the above treatments, or if it finally petered out on its own. I don’t care. I’m just glad I don’t feel like barfing anymore because three days of that was completely, awful, though ultimately profitable for the mint industry.