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I completed Week 1 of the Well Path program! You can see Week 0 here.

Overall, the week was really successful — it involved some tiny changes that actually have me feeling very impatient to do more. (This is that dieter mindset! But I’m trying to view it as positive momentum.)

And I’m feeling really positive about the changes that I’ve made, and excited to start doing more next week.

Week 1 changes

I added in hot lemon water first thing in the morning, committed to soup for lunch, and went back to a no-screen hour every night, which I had been slipping on lately.

The hot lemon water was overall very successful. Though, there was one morning that my husband got up early and left a cup of coffee on my nightstand. I drank half of it before I remembered it should have been water first! So I drank the lemon water afterwards, forgave myself, and moved on.

The no-screen hour used to be something I lived by. Actually, blogging has been a thorn in my side with that lately! Since I have been working and trying to blog every day, it’s pushed me to the computer later and later. Pre-blogging life, I was diligently off my devices by 8:30. I’m hoping this will improve now that I’m on summer vacation — I can work on the blog during the day and return to my no-screen window.

But I did pretty well limiting screens this week by shifting my writing time to the afternoon. I still had a few late nights (for happy things! Prom, graduation, work stuff) but if I was home, I was in bed with a book, winding down, for an hour before my usual sleep time.

Soup and snacks

I did the soup thing! I ate the Smoky Vegan Corn Chowder from The First Mess all this past week, except Memorial Day. I added chickpeas to this recipe and blended them with the potatoes. I think I said this last week, but the book really doesn’t have as many vegetarian soup options as I might have liked, so that was something I kind of had to figure out on my own. I don’t mind repetitive meals as long as it’s not dinner, so I ate the same soup for lunch all week.

I also continued with the carrot cake oatmeal that I posted last week! That’s a tried and true recipe for me. This week, I decided to get really crazy and added lentils to the grain mixture. It was fine–I’ll probably cook them separately next time and smush them a little.

As far as snacks: she suggests pre-portioned snacks. This has not worked for me in the past; if it’s pre-portioned, then I can eat three and it’s still not too much, etc etc. I don’t think it’s bad advice, just not super well-suited for me. I generally just keep an apple at school–if I’m not hungry enough to eat the apple, then I’m not really that hungry.

(I guess an apple is a pre-portioned snack, in a way!)

Hunger diary

I am continuing to struggle with the hunger diary. It’s been really illustrating to me how out of touch I am with my body! I don’t really feel hunger very often, and when I do it’s sudden and intense.

Most of the time, when I am processing hunger, it’s after “the rush” (whatever that means for me that day) and feels more like coming down from stress than like actual information about my body’s fuel levels.

So, like, I’ll have no communication with my body at all for most of the school day, because it’s go-go-go, and then when there’s an actual opportunity for me to catch my breath, I’ll be overcome with a wave of hunger, whether I ate lunch already or not.

So that’s suggesting to me that that intense feeling is not hunger so much as comfort-seeking? Or something else.

Now that school is over, the rush is smaller — I have my own kids to get here, there, and everywhere, but it’s a much less frantic schedule. So I can see I have a lot of work to do with hunger cues in the next few weeks.

All-or-nothing mindset

There’s definitely a part of me that’s itching for more in this plan.

And I know that’s exactly why it’s laid out the way it’s laid out! It’s supposed to prevent this all-or-nothing mindset from taking over (aka the “screw it, I messed up a little so let’s order a pizza” mindset).

I know that if I was responsible for all of the bits of the plan right away, I would have blown it by now. I had a really unusually busy week! But that all-or-nothing mindset is in the back of my head like, “come onnnnn this is going to take forever”.

Or like, “Just skip to the last week and do it all and you’ll get your results faster.”

Just like it said, “Fasting 16:8 is going to take too long, just do 20:4” until we crashed and burned, and like it said “Limiting junk is going to take too long, just do veggies and protein shakes for a month and lose it all quickly”.

I grew up in a really disordered eating household, but I bet this mindset is familiar to a lot of people.

So, I’ve mostly held back from those “next step” activities to try to change my behavior patterns. The exception to that has been the dry brushing, because that’s already a part of my dry skin routine (though admittedly not one that I stick to super well during the winter!).

So committing myself to this moderation is, I think, healthy in its own right. And also, it’s helping me focus on the parts of the process that are a little less tangible, like the hunger visualizations and the hunger diary. It would be really easy to lose sight of those if there were more little jobs to be paying attention to.

Now — on to week 2!