My 12 Week Year

Thanks for your good wishes! I'll post minimum once a week with results, but I may post during the week too, depending on how the mood takes me, I think!

It's the end of day 2 and I'm pleased with how today went. Being disciplined around food isn't easy, but I feel so much better in myself when I'm able to do it compared to the days when I throw discipline out the window and just eat mindlessly. It's a lesson I learn over and over, and yet it's so hard to remember in the moment sometimes.

@GaryM_25, congratulations! You've made great progress in just a few weeks and it sounds like you've really set yourself up for success in the weeks to come. I'll be rooting for you.

End of day 3, and I've had another good day in terms of sticking with my plan. I hit my goal distance on my run today, but it was slow and pretty listless. I think I need to figure out how to better support my running with my nutrition... but tackling the junk food calories is the primary focus for this 12-week year. Can't fight all the battles at once.

I've chosen to set a daily limit on my junk food calories. For the first 4 weeks, the limit is pretty generous (but well below what I've usually been consuming), and I'll reduce that limit in the last 8 weeks of my plan. Allowing myself this relatively generous amount for the first few weeks of my plan felt like a difficult step - like I would never move the needle with that sort of incremental approach.

But I've been listening to some of coach Sohee Lee's content and she said something in a podcast that really struck me. To paraphrase, she spoke about how she sets very attainable goals for her clients and sometimes they say, "That's way too easy, that's never going to make a difference." To which she says, "Okay, if it's so easy, show me that you can stick to it for two weeks, and then we'll set a harder goal for you!" Her view is that high adherence with an "easy" goal is better than poor adherence to a harder goal. Consistency over the long term is what wins the race, not extremes or an unsustainable sprint.

So I'm experimenting with that approach to see if it will work better than the more intensely restrictive approaches I've tried in the past. I don't know if this 'generous' phase puts me in a proper calorie deficit, but I think it will help me build psychological muscle and better habits, and it's definitely an improvement on how I've been eating lately. It's hard for me because I'm not a naturally patient person, but I can see the logic!

Thanks for your comments - this thread already feels like a really helpful support.

Day 4 yesterday went pretty much to plan, although I did go over my junk food calorie limit by a bit (less than 10%).

This morning I’m checking in early because it feels like one of those days that might go off the rails. Do you ever get days like that, where you just have a feeling from the start that you’re going to be more susceptible to poor choices? I’m not sure why it’s happening today - early morning gym session so not much sleep last night, and a run of successful days always makes me feel like I can take my foot off the gas. Will do my best to rein that in and be particularly mindful about my choices today.

@nossmf Thanks for your comment! Your approach is exactly the same as mine - I prelog my plan in the morning or the night before and make adjustments where necessary as the day goes on. I agree, it's an extremely helpful strategy, especially when I prelog everything I expect to eat, including treats and snacks. The choice I face is whether or not to stick to what I've planned, of course, rather than "what will I make for dinner tonight?"

To answer your question, it's all pre-packaged candy, cans of soft drinks, or sometimes home-made treats that I've logged as recipes in MFP. I choose what I want for the day up to the limit I've set myself.

I do use kitchen scales a lot and try to be as accurate as I can be within MFP, but I'm aware that calorie measurement (both in and out) is only one metric on what I'm doing and it's a less exact science than it appears to be. So I try to take the calorie counts seriously but with a grain of salt. If MFP says I overshot my limit by 10% or whatever, there's a margin of error in that figure and I know that it was probably still approximately in the right ballpark. It's closer to the end of the scale that I want to be on.

So this is the end of day 5. The sugar cravings were definitely present at times during the day but I was able to stick to my plan with simple strategies - a healthy snack, brushing my teeth, a long walk right after dinner. I know that all these things work, but it just feels so hard to actually do them some days! But today I did and I'm really pleased.

Thanks for checking in, sorry I’m late! 😂

I’ve done my scorecard for Week 1 and it’s so revealing. My overall execution score - percentage of individual actions achieved over the course of the week - was 80.5%. That’s far above the 60% target I set myself, which is great!
However, looking just at the individual actions related to calories (staying within my junk food and overall calorie limits each day), my execution score was 57%.

So even though I didn’t do so well on the calories specifically, I’ve done well on the actions I’m taking to support that piece of the puzzle - pre logging my meals, faithfully logging in MFP, drinking enough water, working out and running. I approached Week 1 as a sort of settling in week to establish an attentive mindset and bed in some of those supporting habits, so that part has been achieved and now I know where the room for improvement is in Week 2.

Those are my leading indicators, in 12-week year terminology. My main lagging indicator is weight change on the scale, and I dropped a little more than my target this week. That’s to be expected for week 1 of any change in nutrition, but it’s an encouraging start!

Today is day 2 of week 2. I’m not off to a very strong start for a variety of boring life reasons/excuses, but posting here has helped to refocus my mind for tomorrow. Thanks for your nice replies on this thread, I really appreciate it!

Hi all - checking in on day 4 of week 3. My metrics for week 2 were as poor as I expected them to be - 47.5% execution of my tactics. I hit my calorie goals only one day out of the seven, and my other supporting habits - prelogging my food for the day, drinking enough water, etc. - were also pretty spotty.

Week 3 is not going perfectly to plan, but it is going much better so far. I'm travelling for work two days this week, so will have to try to keep some focus to avoid the "calories don't count while you're travelling" mindset that I sometimes fall into! Eating out is always tricky to log in MFP but I'll do my best.

I've moved into my new place and have a new set of bathroom scales, which are giving me a different (higher) reading than the set at my last place. The reading on the scales isn't the be all and end all, of course, but I am pondering over how to handle the change. I guess I could take the first reading on the new scales as a new baseline and measure weight change from that?

@AnnPT77 , thank you for your thoughts on the meaning (or lack thereof) of short-term change in weight. I've definitely found that the scales can fluctuate pretty substantially from day to day, so I try not to put too much stock in that number. The 4-6 week timeframe is a sensible way to think about this - thanks for the reminder!

@nossmf , this is a very valid point! Yes, I knew about the move ahead of time. I see the wisdom in what you're saying, but I knew that the move would be a 'disrupting' moment in my life over the course of at least a few weeks, and I am not a patient person so when I felt the psychological readiness for change, I didn't want to wait. I also knew that because I would be moving from living with other people to living on my own, there would be a natural shift in my lifestyle and particularly my eating habits - cooking only for myself, doing all the grocery shopping myself, choosing what to bring into the house, greater freedom to try new recipes and refresh my rotation of meals. For that reason, a week or two prior to the move felt like the right time, rather than the wrong time, to try to get into a new way of thinking and harness the energy of this big 'fresh start'. I guess we'll see if it works out!!

Thanks again for your comments - again, this thread has helped to keep me in the game.

@megelza I'm really excited for you, best of luck! I definitely recommend reading the book or some in-depth articles about it - the authors have great ideas about leading and lagging indicators and how to choose the actions (tactics) you're committing to for maximum effect. There's much more to it than what I've described in my post!
I would love to follow along on your journey if you'd like to share!