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Hey guys! I came up with a fun way to stick to your diet. I'm posting to share it so that maybe it can help you guys out too. It's very in line with the gamer mentality we all have at NF. It's pretty cool if you can commit to the gameplay! So. Stickers. When I was a kid, everyone went rabid when the teacher baited good behavior with sticker rewards. If you had enough stickers in your sticker book, you touted them like merit badges. Puffy stickers with goggly eyes. Ecstatic smiley faces of every variety. Lisa frank. Hot wheel. Scratch and sniff. The animal ones with actual fuzzy textures. The giant sparkly metallic kind, envy of everyone in the whole class. There is great motivational power in stickers. Why not harness it to stay on track with your diet? I don't know about you guys, but diet tracking apps don't really work for me. It's annoying to upload pictures, browse databases, and key in portion sizes for everything I eat. It's awkward in public. It's WAY more convenient to keep a notepad and write everything down. And you can put stickers in a notepad! Plus, everyone's long term goal is to eat wholesomely, but it shouldn't be at the expense of never enjoying treats every now and then. Obviously a slice of homemade birthday cake is worth more than a handful of M&Ms for "something sweet" after lunch. I built this mentality of differentiating "special" treats into the game. Here are the rules I set up for myself personally in my sticker-diet book. It's a little complicated but I'm neurotic like that so it suits me fine. Feel free to steal this and adapt it for your own priorities. If you like it, get thyself to a Staples or craft store, pick out a booklet of little stickers that engages your inner-kid enthusiasm, and give it a shot! Here goes. The Sticker Merit Diet: GAMEPLAY Write down everything you eat. Every. Thing. If you follow your diet (*A*) that day, you earn a sticker. If you follow your diet for three days in a row, you earn a small reward.(*B*) If you follow your diet for a week straight, you earn a big reward! (*C*) There is NO PUNISHMENT for not following your diet. You just didn't follow your diet. This is a positive reward based game! Consistently aim to challenge yourself. I've been at this for about six months now, and it's still pretty tough at times. If it becomes too easy (you'll know when it is) to follow your diet for a week solid, modify it so you level up! Experiment with paleo, eliminate processed foods, or make your rules a little stricter. If you can sail through all your diet obstacles and you are happy with your lifestyle, mission accomplished! DIET RULES (*A*) You define your ideal diet. Think hard on your habits and where you need the most incentive to eat right. Decide your conditions for a healthy diet and aim to meet them all, every day, so you rack up your sticker badges. For me this includes: eat a salad every day, limiting myself to one unhealthy food serving per day, and eliminating junk food (soda, candy, potato chips, artificial cheesy things) entirely. An unhealthy food in my case is: one *~*SPECIAL TREAT*~*, one serving of white bread/rice/pasta, one serving of red meat, one serving of buttery/creamy/oily food (slice of pizza, miscellaneous food you might have at a restaurant, etc), 2 oz of high fat cheese, or one alcoholic bev. (*B*) Establish a 3 day reward. Find something small, repeatable, and something not unhealthy, for following your diet for 3 days straight. You could win a bigger shinier sticker, or an hour of guilty pleasure TV, a favorite healthy-ish snack, whatever. It has to be cheap; expense cannot be a deterrent in this game. (I use these popsicle things called Smoozies, they're tasty, treat like, and I can order them in bulk.) It works best if you can invest yourself in getting whatever it is, so that if you're halfway into your 3rd good day on your diet, and an enormous cake presents itself to you, you can withstand the temptation because you WANT the reward instead. The strategy: treat + sense of victory > impulsive eating. (*C*) One week reward! This is actually pretty tough to get, so the stakes are higher. For my 1 week reward, I let myself buy or do something fun for under $100. You can set your expense limit at whatever is reasonable, the idea being that you can do something nice for yourself without breaking the bank. It doesn't have to be expensive! I used one reward to get my nails done with gal pals, I used another to get a rocking new pair of gym shoes. A concert ticket, a new video game, or something that shows off your increasingly good-looking self. The one caveat here is that your reward cannot be food. Eliminate the idea that you can ever deserve to eat badly. ~*SPECIAL TREATS*~ This is the part of the game that keeps your sweet tooth in check while and diet realistic. That adage of nothing tastes as good as eating right feels is, IMO, baloney. Obviously whoever thought of that has not had my mom's banana bread. So identifying a sweet treat as *special* allows for some leeway in your diet. If a unhealthy food is Special, that means it will life-enhancing as opposed to just "tastes good because it has sugar and fat in it". Examples: A home made pie made just for you with love by your SO for your birthday. A lavish dessert at a fancy occasion restaurant. A regional specialty donut that is unique to the area that you are traveling to on vacation. A deliberate choice to indulge in an ice cream cone, because it is a perfect summer day on the beach and it's just what the doctor ordered. A cookie or two from the new recipe you're trying out. Etc! Special treats are NOT store-bought or mass produced. Special treats are NOT the kind of treat you eat "because it's there", or because you happen to crave it. They do not have high fructose corn syrup. Examples: a slice of your coworker's birthday cake from Walmart. The brownie that comes with your combo meal. Candy, cookies, chocolates, ice cream, pastries, extra whipped cream caramel frappacinos, or anything like that that you suddenly want when you're out grocery shopping or running errands. Etc! BONUS This is an optional part of the game. I let myself offset 1x high fat food, so that I can have 2 high fat foods in a day and stilly earn a sticker, if I complete one of the following bonuses. There is only one bonus credit per day allowed. 1. Have a second salad, so that 2/3 of the day's meals were dark leafy greens. 2. Go to the gym and complete a solid workout. 3. Earning a "gold star" at work; i.e. working a double or triple, generally kicking ass way above normal levels, getting shit done. Game on!