The MAX for the MINimum

As of today I'm down again. Not my lowest ever, but close to it and without "starvation" the day before. I have a good feeling about this week, even though I did overdo it at the party this weekend (yes, new photos!), making this a MAX week.

In the comments on my last post, I was asked to go over my "MIN" and "MAX" weeks again. The irony is that I haven't really practiced this in a while, and am just now getting back into it, because of the season.

The whole thing started when I noticed that I had some weeks where circumstances meant that I had to use all of my allotted pts: dailies, weeklies and activities. Then I would try to "make up" for it the week after or so. I generally lost on the weeks when I ate more, provided I didn't do it two weeks in a row, so I came up with a plan.

I created three types of "weeks": MIN, MOD, and MAX. The MIN (minimum) weeks, I ate only my daily requirement, plus no more than half of my earned activity points and no more than five of my weekly allowance. On MOD (moderate) weeks, I'd eat my daily requirements, any earned activity points (up to four) and roughly half of my weekly points. On MAX (maximum) weeks, I'd eat my daily requirements, all of my earned activity points, and at least 30 of my weeklies.

In an average month, I'd shoot for one MAX week, one MIN week and the remainder MOD weeks. I found this system worked best when I didn't follow the MAX week immediately with the MIN week, but the other way worked fine (MIN followed by MAX).

On balance, I suppose this is kind of a longer-term version of the controversial Wendie Plan, but it has worked for me in the past. Due to circumstances and general life insanity of late, I haven't been able to plan out things that fully, but as we cruise into the holiday season, I can see when I will have events that will bring me towards a MAX week, and try to plan around that. I'm thinking I may add an additional week-type: CORE. This could easily replace one of the MOD weeks, because CORE tends to net out to a MOD week anyway.

I don't expect this method to work for everyone, but I know for me it did a few things: It gave me a dang good reason to splurge and have a burger at Red Robin one in a while. It helped me find more control over balancing my foods and forced me to find a variety of options. And it helped me lose, which is the benefit I'm hoping to see again as I work the program with my own personal tweaks.

Posted by foxydot at October 31, 2006 12:57 PM