This is chapter 13 of Your Designer Diet. This chapter is in many ways the most important in the book is it show how to make all the strategies work together.

Many chapters are free online: Table of Contents, Introduction, Chapter 1: Why is Losing Weight So Hard?, Chapter 2: The 10 Designer Principles for Controlling Your Weight, Chapter 13: The Designer Way, Conclusion, and the Index. If you like what you see in these chapters you'll probably like the book too. One reason to purchase the book is that the formatting is much nicer, though the content is the same.

Imagine you are taking a road trip, driving cross country with a group
of friends. How do you plan your trip? Do you plan every turn of the
steering wheel? Do you insist on knowing every pot hole or detour
ahead of time?

No, that would be absurd. It’s impossible to know all that before you start.
And what good would it do anyway? It’ll all changed by the time you get there
and you know how to drive so you’ll miss most of the potholes anyway. And
your car is more than strong enough to absorb a few bumps along the way.
Even if a detailed plan were possible, which it isn’t, you wouldn’t need it.

You’ll get where you are going because you know the process of how to take a
successful road trip. You know how to drive, follow a map, deal with problems,
work with friends, ask questions, and find new places to visit. At the root of
all these amazing skills is your ability to achieve your goals by learning how
to overcome obstacles.

The problem is you probably haven’t learned a similar process for controlling
your weight. Not many people have, because it’s never been necessary
before. We learn how to take road trips because we’ve taken them with our
parents and friends. We’ve read about road trips in books and watched them
in the movies and on TV.

When do we learn the process for controlling our weight? We don’t. What
we learn are marketing slogans like “eat less and exercise more” or “eat right and get plenty of exercise.” That’s like telling someone asking how to plan a road trip to “drive safely.” It’s worse than useless. It’s frustrating and demeaning
and makes you just want to give up.

You need to know exactly how to control your weight. The process I created
for controlling weight is called the Designer Way. We were introduced to the
Designer Way in The 10 Designer Principles chapter. For a gentle introduction
to the Designer Way, please reread that chapter again.

What does the Designer Way teach? If your journey toward permanent
weight loss is a road trip, then the Designer Way shows you how to make the
best decisions to get you there. The secret is learning how to continually
improve your diet by making small changes in direct response to real events
in your life. Over time these changes add up to amazing differences in your
weight, and powerful changes in your life.

How you make changes to improve your diet is explained in loving
detail in this chapter. Let’s start with a simple step-by-step description of
the Designer Way.

The Weekly Spin

To deliver on my promise of showing you exactly how to control your
weight, I’ve developed a simple step-by-step process I call the Weekly Spin,
which is diagramed on the next page. Please take a look and for the rest of the
chapter we’ll learn how to apply it.

Let’s go over its major components. Don’t worry, we’ll cover it in a lot
more detail on everything later, I am just trying to give you an overview of
all the pieces right now.

First, exactly what does “Weekly Spin” mean? The weekly part means
it’s a schedule of activities you perform during the week to control your
weight. The spin part means you don’t just do it for one week. You keep
going round and round performing the same activities every week for the
rest of your life.

There are three steps in the Weekly Spin:

1. Start Spin. A time for reflection. Every week, take time to check if you are meeting your goals, set new goals, and update your plan on how you want to meet your goals. A spin normally starts on Sunday, but you can start your spins on any convenient day.
2. Daily Check. A time for quick response. Every morning, perform a quick check to see if you unexpectedly gained weight. If you gain weight, quickly respond by adjusting your strategies.
3. Make a Move. A time for immediate action. Always look for opportunities to prevent slip-ups, exercise more, eat to your diet and find more joy you in your life. Take any opportunity to implement a strategy.

The Designer Way is really just that simple. It works for two reasons:
1) continual learning and improvement, 2) quick response to any weight
gain.

You are continually trying new strategies and learning which work for
you and which don’t. Keep the successful strategies and toss the rest. Over
time, these small improvements help you control your weight.

It’s like improving at any skill. Practice makes perfect. By following the
steps, you are always practicing at getting better and better at your diet. You
are continually fine tuning your existing strategies and introducing new ones
that increase your chances of losing and maintaining your weight.

A crucial part of the improvement process is figuring out when a strategy
doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work you’ll gain weight, but because of the steps,
you’ll notice the weight gain immediately. This allows you to try new strategies
to get your weight back down again. By never letting your weight get too far
out of control, you are always making forward progress toward your weight
loss and weight maintenance goals. It’s far easier to correct a problem when
it’s small than it is to fix a problem after it grows too big.

The Weekly Spin becomes a steady rhythm in your life. You continually
look for moves that will help you lose weight. Every day you improve by
making adjustments to your strategies. And every week you create a plan for
doing better next week. It becomes a pattern you follow. Every week you do
something. Every day you do something. And every moment you do something.
The process pulsates like a drum beat. Every strike of the drum is the
sound of your diet improving.

The result is beautiful music. You control your weight by following this
simple process. You never gain too much weight before you notice and take
steps to lose it again. And you are always learning and improving your diet.
This is what it means to control your weight. You adapt to what is really
happening in your life based on how the strategies really work for you. That
puts you back in control of your weight. You don’t have to let your weight spin
wildly out of control again and you don’t have to try random diets only to
notice it’s been six months and you haven’t kept your weight off again. With
the Designer Way that doesn’t happen. You are in control.

Now let’s talk about each activity—Start Spin, Daily Check, and Make a
Move—in more detail.

Start Spin–A Time for Reflection

The Designer Way divides time into a continuous series of one week
periods called spins. Each week, usually on Sunday, you start a new spin.
This is a time for reflection, evaluation and planning. Take a moment to see
how you are doing, and think about how you can improve on the last spin. It’s
essentially a meeting with yourself to plan how you can control your weight
better this week.

Gaining weight is very easy if you don’t take this time. What use is it to
notice that you have gained weight during the past couple of months? That’s
too late. Checking your progress every week gives your strategies a chance
to take effect so you can notice if they are working or not. If your strategies
aren’t working, you can make changes to improve them.

Yes, the start of a spin is taking time for yourself. You can do that, you
know. Í You don’t always have to work, or be helping other people. Take some
time to think about your progress. Your chances of staying on your diet are
poor if you can’t set aside even a little time for yourself. Remember, you are
worth it.

If Sunday isn’t a good time for you to start a spin, then pick any other
convenient day. All you need is a little private time to carry out all the start
spin steps. To begin your weekly spin, find a comfortable place where you’ll
have some relatively uninterrupted time.

Think about running your weekly spin with a friend who is also using
Your Designer Diet. You can help each other to carry out all the steps, talk to
each other, support each other, and give each other ideas.

Ask Yourself Four Questions
Every spin starts by asking yourself the same four questions:
1. Did you meet your spin goals for last week?
2. What is standing in the way of meeting your spin goals?
3. What are your spin goals for the new week?
4. How will you meet your goals?
The end result of asking and answering these four questions is a plan for
what you want to do this week and a reasonable idea of how you are going to
get there. In creating your plan, you’ve looked at your life and you’ve learned from experience. Every week you adapt to changes in your circumstances, and you get better at losing weight and staying on your diet. It’s this consistent focus that puts you back in control of your weight. Let’s look at each question.

Question 1: Did you meet your spin goals for last week?

A spin goal is something you would like to accomplish or do during a spin.
It could be a strategy you want to implement, a goal like losing one pound, or
a goal like walking 2,000 extra steps a day. A spin goal is anything you want
to do that you think will help control your diet.

The point of this question is for you to evaluate your progress on your spin
goals. Are your strategies working? You need to know this so you can decide
if they need to be dumped, adjusted to work better, or if new strategies are
needed to meet your goals.

To determine how well you did on your previous spin goals:
1. Go through each spin goal you’d set in your previous spin.
2. Use your feedback system to see how well you met each goal.
These two steps show if your strategies are helping to control your weight.
They do this through feedback. Feedback is information about responses to
your actions.

Let’s say your goal during the previous spin was to lose one pound. How
might you get feedback to determine if you’ve achieved this? You would probably
weigh yourself. OK, calling weighing yourself a “feedback system” sounds
a little grandiose, but feedback is a general concept and weighing yourself is
just a good example.

Weighing yourself is a pretty easy form of feedback, so let’s tackle a more
difficult problem. Let’s say you adopt a spin goal of walking 2,000 more steps
each day. How would you know if you reached your goal? That’s tough because
it’s not likely you can count your steps in a day. I’ve tried and it doesn’t work.
It turns out there’s a device called a pedometer you can wear on your hip
that counts your steps as you walk. Using a pedometer, you can figure out how
many extra steps you take in a day. If you created a spin goal of walking more
steps, you could use a pedometer as a feedback mechanism for determining
if you met it.

The knowledge of how many steps you actually took in a day would let
you know if your strategies for taking extra steps were working or not. If you
reached your 2,000 step goal then your strategies are working and you don’t need to do anything. If you didn’t reach your goal, you’ll have to figure out why not and then plan how you can improve. That’s the critical value of feedback: you learn when changes need to be made.

So, for each spin goal you need to create a feedback system that will tell
you if you have successfully reached your goal. We’ll talk about how to create
a feedback system for your weight in the Use Feedback to Control Your Weight
strategy. Whatever feedback system you create for each of your spin goals, use
it here when answering this question.

Question 2: What is standing in the way of meeting your spin goals?

The point of this question is to help you remove any roadblocks that stand
in the way of you meeting your spin goals. Sometimes a few little problems
hold you back and once you clear them up, your progress races ahead.
Think over your week. How did you do in the spin? What worked well?

What didn’t? What changes can you make to improve your results? How can
you remove the obstacles keeping you from reaching your goals? How can you
make this spin a bit more successful?

Answering these questions helps you to continually improve your diet.

Question 3: What are your spin goals for the new week?

Now it’s time to take your answers from the first two questions and turn
them into spin goals for this spin. Your goals can include anything, for example
which strategies you want to implement and how much weight you want to
lose in the spin.

There’s a lot to think about when setting your goals. If you didn’t meet
your goals in the last spin, how might you meet them this week? If there were
forces standing in the way of meeting your goals, how might you work around
them? What new strategies do you want to try?

A goal for almost every spin is how much weight you want to lose in the
spin. At the start of a spin, think about how much weight you want to lose and
which strategies you can use to reach that goal. We’ll talk about picking a spin
weight loss goal in the How Much Do You Want to Lose in a Spin? strategy.

You may have other goals too, like increasing the amount you bench
press, or trying a new walking trail, or buying a set of smaller plates. A spin
goal can be anything you think will help you control your weight.
Where can you get ideas for new spin goals? All over the place. You have
all the strategies in this book to choose from. You can create your own. You can get ideas from magazines, the Internet, or your friends. Maybe there was a spin goal from the last spin you didn’t get to and you can move it forward to
this spin. Make a goal of anything you think will help.

At the beginning of a new spin, you have the opportunity to think about
new strategies you might want to implement. Some strategies are simple and
you can just adopt them without much thought or preparation. Others are
more complicated and will take some planning.

Take some time now and look at which strategies you might like to adopt
in this spin. In Design Your Weight Loss Plan strategy, you’ll create a strategy
list so you’ll have a variety of strategies available to try when you’re ready.
Once you select a set of goals, write them down so you can remember
them for the next spin. In the first question, you’ll have to check if you met
your goals and that’s hard to do when you don’t remember them.

Question 4: How will you meet your goals?

The point of this question is to make your goals real by ensuring you
have some idea of how you will accomplish them. After you decide on your
spin goals, create a plan of how to achieve them. The amount of necessary
planning can vary from none to lots.
Let your own nature guide you in your level of planning. I am not a big
planner, so my plans tend to be simple without a lot of detail. I don’t worry
too much about it. Plans are life for other people, and they like every detail
to be well thought out and scheduled. Either approach is fine, do whatever
works for you.
Part of a plan is creating a feedback system for determining if you’ve
reached your goal or not. We talked about feedback systems in our discussion
of the first question, so you might want to reread it. Here’s where you think
about and decide how to implement your feedback system for each goal.

Example Goal Plan: Buying a Treadmill Machine

Let’s say one of your goals is buy a new treadmill machine. This allows
exercise at home and you think that will give you more time to exercise. This
might be too big a goal for one spin. We don’t want spin goals to become
another source of stress in our lives. So perhaps you might want to divide this
goal into two goals, one for each of two weeks.

This week you might want to research which machine is the best for you.
Your feedback system is to check if you’ve actually made a decision of which
treadmill to buy.

Next week you might want to actually buy the treadmill, take delivery,
and set it up. Your feedback system is that the treadmill is ready and waiting
for use in your house.

Has this spin goal actually done anything to control your weight? No,
because all you have is another piece of exercise equipment taking space in
your house. To control your weight you actually need to use the equipment
and that needs to be a spin goal in the next spin.

To move forward on your weight loss journey, a spin goal must result in
a strategy that helps control your weight. Not all strategies work. That’s OK.
But a strategy must make some progress toward controlling your weight or
it’s not worth doing.

Daily Check–A Time for Quick Response

Waiting a week in between spins means it could be a whole week before
you deal with any weight gain. You can do better. A Brown Medical School study
has convincingly shown the quicker you notice and respond to small weight
gains the more likely you are to be able to maintain your weight loss.

That makes sense doesn’t it? It’s harder to lose a lot of weight than it is to
lose a little. If you notice a small weight gain, you can take immediate action
to lose it. Tackling a potential weight gain before it becomes a big problem is
a better way to control your weight.

This is the idea behind the Daily Check. Make a quick check every morning
to see if you unexpectedly gained weight. If you have, then make adjustments
to your strategies to bring your weight back down. You don’t usually
have to make large adjustments. Maybe you exercise a little more, tighten up
on your portion sizes, or reverse a habit you recently started. The idea is to
notice quickly and just do something.

How do you notice a little weight creep?

You notice weight creep using what we call your Daily Feedback System.
You’ll learn how to create one in the Use Feedback to Control Your Weight
strategy.

For now let’s say your daily feedback check is to weigh yourself every
morning. Personally, I just use the fit of my clothes to see if I am gaining weight,
but most people are probably more comfortable using a scale.

So let’s say you’ve weighed yourself and you find you gained weight unexpectedly.
Why worry only about unexpected weight gains? Because not all
weight gain is a surprise. If you are a woman menstruating or you drank a lot
of water, you could expect weight gain. A small amount of weight fluctuation
is normal. You might want to ignore small weight increases until you become
convinced it is a real problem and not a normal part of life.

When you notice an unexpected weight gain, take action. Make immediate
changes to bring your weight back down again. You can make any move
you think will help. If your weight doesn’t come back down, then wait for the
start of the next spin to give it more thought.

Make a Move–A Time for Immediate Action

A move is applying a strategy to your life. Making moves is something
you do all the time. It’s not something you just do at the start of spin or at your
daily check. You are always looking for opportunities to better control your
weight. When you see an opportunity to make a move–take it.

A common example of a move is making the decision to take the stairs
instead of the elavator. Chances for taking the stairs just pop up during the
day. You couldn’t possibly know at the start of spin that you’ll have the chance
to take the stairs on Thursday; it just happens. So when there’s an opportunity,
take the stairs because the extra steps will burn more calories.

Over time you make thousands of these “little” decisions. Little is in
quotes because they are not little decisions at all. They add up to huge tidal
waves of positive change.

The smallest of changes may seem trivial when you first make it, but the
force of a thousand changes over time is awesome. A lake fills up one rain drop
at a time. You lose weight one small move at a time. You don’t have to make
big changes to make a difference. Choosing to make a move instead of doing
the easier thing is the most powerful weight control strategy.

Here’s how you make moves:

1. Continually pay attention to your life and be on the lookout for a
strategy you can apply that will accomplish one of the following
goals:
❖ Eat to your diet.
❖ Exercise more.
❖ Add more joy.
❖ Prevent slip-ups.

2. Set the extreme-o-meter. Decide how extreme you need to be
when applying a strategy. We’ll talk more about setting your
extreme-o-meter later.

3. Continually learn, create, and adjust strategies you can apply
to your life. Use your knowledge of the threats to help you. If a
strategy doesn’t work, then drop it and move on to another one.
Something will work.

Some moves are made once for one specific situation. If you are at a
wedding, for example, you’ll have to decide how much of the rubber chicken
and delicious cake to eat. That’s a one time move because you’ll never be in
exactly the same situation again.

Some moves are made for longer periods of time. If you work at a company
offering a cafeteria, for example, you could decide to implement a strategy of
eating the salads every day for lunch. That strategy will last as long as you work
at the same company. If you change jobs, you have to change strategies too.
Some moves you make for your entire life. A good example is deciding
to walk more each day by parking far away from any building entrance. You
can use this strategy all the time.

Other moves are more planned. You may notice that your company has
vending machines stocked with junk food and you want to do something
about it. You may want your company to lower the price on healthy foods in
the cafeteria. You may want to move to an area of the country where you’ll
naturally get more exercise. You might notice these opportunities at any time,
but they don’t happen automatically.

At the heart of the move is simply being involved with your own life.
Often, life just seems like it happens to us. By making moves, you are continually
engaged and active. Nobody else can make moves for you and nobody
else can tell you when to make a move. A move happens because you see an
opportunity and take it. That’s truly being in control of your weight.

Weight Gain is Information About What Doesn’t Work, it’s Not Failure

You will gain weight from time to time. Gasp! Don’t get depressed or freak
out. Gaining weight is not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean you should
just give up. It doesn’t mean you are a horrible person. It doesn’t mean you
are a failure. It means you have learned something.
Gaining weight is a learning opportunity. Weight gain is simply information
telling you that something you are doing isn’t working or your situation
has changed. Your job is to try and figure out what isn’t working and fix it by
adjusting your strategies.

Figuring out what went wrong isn’t always easy. Perhaps you’ve picked
up a new routine of stopping by a coffee shop in the morning and ordering
a shockingly high calorie coffee drink. Or maybe you stopped taking your
daily walk at lunch.

Whatever the eventual reason for the weight gain, you need to try different
strategies to meet your spin goals. Fortunately, with a new spin starting
every week and your daily check, you can never gain too much weight before
you notice. You will always have the time and the ability to adjust.
Don’t let a little weight gain get you down. Use what you’ve learned to do
better in your next spin.

The Designer Way seems like a lot of work, especially when compared to
doing nothing. Why follow it at all? First, in actual practice it takes very little
time. Second, you will see results and seeing results is exciting. Seeing results
is better than fun–it’s a blast! Life becomes more joyful when you see your
control over your weight continually getting better and better.

Using your Daily Feedback System, you’ll see how your weight is progressing.
Sometimes your weight will go up and that’s fine. It just means it’s time to
make a move. Sometimes your weight will go down. Congratulations! A move
you made must have worked. And sometimes your weight will stay the same.
Excellent! Your weight staying the same is actually a huge accomplishment,
yet many people see it as a failure instead of the amazing achievement it is.

If your weight is staying the same then that means your weight isn’t
going up! Think about that. Your weight isn’t going up. That’s a big deal. Most
people’s weight goes up steadily throughout their lives. But your weight is
holding steady. That’s great. Any move you make at this point will help you
improve. That’s a wonderfully powerful position to be in.

Example: Weekly Spin Session

All this talk about spins, daily checks, and moves may seem a little abstract.
Let’s go through a few example spin sessions so you can get a better idea of
how it all works together.

Spin 1, August 13th, Sunday

This is your first spin. You need to create your initial weight loss plan.
That’s covered in the Design Your Weight Loss Plan strategy. In creating your plan, you’ll learn important information like which threats impact you most, which strategies you want to try, how extreme you need to be, your initial spin goals, and much more. You’ll be able to use all this information during this first spin. Even though you haven’t created your plan yet, we’ll show a few example
spins anyway. It’s more important that we run a few spins than it is to go into all the gory details.

For now, let’s say my plan is:
1. Spin Weight Loss Goal: lose one pound this week. I plan to do this
by eating 250 fewer calories and burning 250 additional calories
from exercise. If I lose 1 pound a week that’s 52 pounds a year!
That’s a good attainable weight loss that will make a big difference
to me.
2. Weekly Feedback System: weigh myself. I weighed myself so I
would know my starting weight.
3. Daily Feedback System: feel the fit of my clothes.
4. Strategies to Implement:

❖Walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes four times a week. I figure
that will burn about 400 calories for each session. For my
feedback system I’ll just remember that I exercised. You may
choose to keep a journal instead.
❖ Find more steps to take each day with a goal of reaching 2,000
extra steps a day. For my feedback system I bought a pedometer
to count my steps. I’ll establish my baseline average number of
steps this week and start looking for more steps next week.
❖ Watch my portion sizes and cut out one piece of junk food a
day. For my feedback system I’ll just check my weight to see if
I’ve been successful. You could use a food journal for a more
rigorous check. I’ll just keep it simple until it’s clear whether
what I’m doing is working.

For your first spin, choose strategies you feel comfortable with or feel
excited about. It’s up to you. These are just examples. Keep it simple though, as
I tried to do. Start simple and add more strategies as you feel comfortable.

For example, I don’t count calories, even though it’s a powerful and
useful strategy. I’ll just watch portion sizes and see how well that works. If it your daily calories. Many people find this extremely useful, especially when starting out.

One goal of your first spin is to figure out your own way of running spins.
Some people like a more formal approach with a lot of structure. They will want
graphs, spreadsheets, lists, and accurate calorie counts because that’s what helps
them succeed. Other people will want to just wing it. Either way will work. As
always: do whatever works for you and be as extreme as you need to be.

Let’s assume I’ve followed my plan for a week and it’s time to start the
second spin.

Spin 2, August 20th, Sunday

I start each spin with a big cup of hot coffee, early on a quiet Sunday
morning. To prepare for your spin you might want to collect any journals and
charts you’ve kept, as these might help answer the four questions.

At the start of a new spin we always answer our four questions:

1. How did you do on meeting your spin goals for last week?

Not so good. My weekly feedback system is to weigh myself, so I
did that first. My spin weight loss goal is one pound and I ended
up gaining a pound! I did reach my exercise goal of walking on the
treadmill for 30 minutes four times for the week, so that was good.
And I did figure out my base line average number of steps taken
each day.

2. What is standing in the way of meeting your spin goals?

Where did the weight gain come from? That was a bit of a shock.
I must have eaten too much. I don’t keep a food journal, so this is
only guessing, but I went through a lot of changes last week, so I
may have eaten more than usual.

I changed jobs last week, which threw me off. I need to make some
changes to make up for my different environment. Where I worked
before, we had good cheap salads for sale in the cafeteria. In my
new job, we don’t even have a cafeteria. And in my old job I had to
walk a lot. In my new job I don’t have to walk at all.

I was lazy and I didn’t use the daily check last week. That wasn’t
smart. If I had performed a daily check I would have caught the
weight gain earlier and responded faster.

3. What are your spin goals for the new week?

I am still going to try to lose 1 pound during this spin. There’s no
reason to try and lose more. I’ll just keep doing the right things and
once I find the right mix of strategies the weight loss will happen.

I’ll check my portion sizes very carefully.

I’ll add in another exercise session and go 5 minutes longer on my
existing exercise sessions.

I need to find a way to eat a better lunch.

I need to find some moves to walk more at work.

I want to find some smaller plates and some tall thin glasses to
help me maintain my portion sizes better (see the Use Smaller
Plates and Bowls strategy).

Oh, and now that I know my baseline number of steps, I’ll try finding
2,000 more steps each day.

Every morning I’ll implement the daily check step.

4. How will you meet your goals?

I am going to read The Honest Calorie Estimation Method strategy
to help develop my portion control skills. All the other goals are
pretty simple and don’t need a plan.

August 21, Monday

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.
This morning I figured out a new move! This is always exciting.

Every morning I wake up and refill the water bowls for the dogs. We have
two dogs so we have two bowls. Every morning I walk to the dog room to get
both their bowls, walk to the kitchen to fill them both with fresh water, and
then I walk back to the dog room and set the bowls down. I have done this for
years and the dogs have never once said thank you!

Of course, I always want to be as efficient as possible, so I make one trip.
The drive for efficiency is almost always a bad move.

It dawned on me today that I was missing an opportunity to make a
quality weight loss move. If I made two trips, one for each bowl, I’d naturally
get more exercise.

You might say “big deal, that’s nothing.” Well, it’s actually twenty extra
steps a day. So I would be getting 20 extra steps per day, and there are about
2,000 steps in a mile, so over 100 days I would be walking an extra mile. Walking
a mile burns about 100 calories. Over 10 years I would burn off one pound
worth of calories because a pound is about 3,500 calories. Don’t worry about
the math; we’ll cover all this later in more detail.

But you are still probably saying “big deal, a pound over 10 years, that’s
nothing.” Well, alone it’s not much. But what if I can make 100 such tiny moves?
That would be 10 pounds over 10 years! Now that’s a big deal, especially when
you are trying to maintain your weight loss.

And that’s how the Designer Way works: continually searching out and
making small improvements that add up to big results.

August 22 Tuesday

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.
Driving to my new job, I have to pass by a really nice donut shop. I couldn’t
take it anymore. The temptation to drop by on the way to work was too much.
So I made a move. I found another route to work that didn’t go by the donut
shop. That’s an easy 1,000 calories a week saved.

August 23, Wednesday

Daily Check: Clothes feel a little looser.
I found a grocery store within walking distance from work. I kill two birds
with one stone with this one move. The grocery store has a nice salad bar so
I can get a good lunch and I walk a quarter of a mile.
You might say “big deal” again, but you can’t only search for big wins,
every move counts, no matter how small.

August 24, Thursday

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.
I tried some of the ideas from the Volumetrics book at dinner tonight
(see the Pump Up the Volume strategy). I added more vegetables to the
sauce, which made the meal more filling and it has fewer calories than my
old recipe.

August 25, Friday

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.
I got one of those computer programs to remind me every hour to get
up, stretch, and take a little walk. That adds another 500 steps to how much
I walk every day.

I also stopped by the store to buy some smaller sized dishes.

August 26, Saturday

Daily Check: Clothes feel a little looser.
I checked my spaghetti dinner portion sizes and they had crept up
again. So did my salad dressing portion size. I always seem to add more as
time goes by.

I think I’ll make the move of prepackaging my spaghetti into the correct
portion sizes again. This worked before, but I just drifted away from doing it.
And I’ll also use a measuring spoon when putting dressing on my salad.

Spin 3, August 27, Sunday

Let’s go through the four questions:

1. How did you do on meeting your spin goals for last week?

Better. My weight loss goal for the spin was 1 pound and I lost
1.25 pounds. I reached all my exercise goals, including walking
an extra 2,000 steps. I got the smaller dishes, but I haven’t had
a chance to really use them, so I’ll have to make that goal in the
next spin.

2. What is standing in the way of meeting your spin goals?

I think most of my issues with my new job are worked out.
Nothing else this week, just the usual trying to outwit and outlast
the power of food.

3. What are your spin goals for the new week?

I will aim to lose 1 pound this spin too. In fact, I think that will be
my goal every spin.

I’m going to start using my new dishes.

I’ll keep the same exercise goals and give the previous changes
another week to work. I think that will give me the results I’m
looking for.

4. How will you meet your goals?

Nothing really to plan. I’ll just implement the strategies from
question three and we’ll see how they work. If I lose another 1.25
pounds next week, I’ll drop the extra exercise session and drop
the extra 5 minutes too. I am getting tired of it and it’s really more
exercise than I’ll be able to keep up over the long run. If I don’t meet my goals after those changes, I’ll just have to figure out
something else.

August 28, Monday

Daily Check: Clothes feel a little looser.
Today we are having a party at work to celebrate a new product release.
There will be a lot of people and lot of wonderful tasting food at the party. I
think I’ll reread the How to Eat Joyfully in Different Situations strategy. And I’ll
also read the Put the Brake on Automatic Eating chapter again to review some
strategies that will help me not overeat at the party, which I usually do.

August 29, Tuesday

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.
At 7:00 PM I only had about 200 calories in activity for the day and my
goal is 250 calories from activity. I decided to take a walk to the mailbox to
add another 50 calories.

I noticed a new threat. We bought a new sugarless whip cream last week
and I was using way too much of it. That’s not good. Because I wasn’t consistently
able to stop myself from placing a frothy dollop of cream in my coffee,
my best move is to throw away what I have left and not buy it anymore. Is that
too extreme? Not for me. I can always make whip cream from scratch for the
times I really need it.

August 30, Wednesday

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.
I was just browsing Your Designer Diet last night and I read in one of the
strategies about how getting support can help you be a lot a more successful
at staying on your diet. I think I’ll go to the http://YourDesignerDiet.com website and see what their support is like. Maybe that can help me with some more ideas.

Let’s stop the example here.

A Little Post-Example Discussion

We’ve run through a couple of spins in the example, and I hope you started
to get a feel for the rhythm of the Designer Way process. You make moves,
check your weight every day, and every week you try to do better. The result
is powerful and supremely simple.

This process takes very little time, and the example may not have made
this clear. No time is wasted in the Designer Way. If it was, you wouldn’t follow
it for very long. Every step can be as quick and simple as you need it to be.
I know this process sounds deceptively simple. It may sound like all I
am saying is, make some goals and create a plan to reach your goals. I am
saying that, but that’s not what I’m really saying. That sounds too much like
a marketing slogan.

Remember the deep underlying wisdom behind the Designer Way: pay
attention to your life and react to it as you are living it.
Everything else just helps you do better.

The Move is the heart of the Designer Way: look, plan, try, and learn. By
making moves you are always finding more and better ways of eating less and
exercising more. If you can only do one thing then do the Move.

The Daily Cycle is the next most important part. Getting daily feedback
on your weight means that your weight can never fall too far out of control. If
you can only do two things, then do the Move and the Daily Check.
The crowning jewel of the Designer Way is the Weekly Spin. It helps you
develop perspective and see a little farther into your future. If you can do all
three parts of the Designer Way, you are creating for yourself the most powerful
weight control process possible.

Did I Fulfill My Promise?

Earlier I promised I would show you exactly how to control your weight
for the rest of your life. I think the Designer Way fulfills that promise. You’ve
learned a simple, clear, and powerful step-by-step process for creating
your perfect diet. Through each step you learn how to fit your diet to your
nature and your life. The result is a diet designed just for you. And because
of that finely tailored fit, you’ll finally lose weight and keep it off for the rest
of your life.

What’s Next

We’ve covered the core of the Designer Way in enough detail that you can
get up and see results immediately. But there’s a lot more you can learn about
the Designer Way. The rest of this chapter explores strategies for helping you
get the most possible benefit out of the Designer Way.

Strategy 4. How Extreme Do You Need to Be?

Strategy 5. Design Your Weight Loss Plan

Strategy 6. What Do You Do if Your Plan Isn’t Working 

Strategy 7. Changes in Your Life Means Changing Your Plan

Strategy 8. Why Do You Really Want to Stay on Your Diet?

Strategy 9. Know Your BMI–Are You Overweight and What Does It Mean for You?

Strategy 10. How Many Calories are You Really Eating?

Strategy 11. Understand the Pound

Strategy 12. What is Your Long Term Weight Goal?

Strategy 13. How Much Do You Want to Lose in a Spin?

Strategy 14. How Many Calories Can You Eat Each Day?

Strategy 15. Use Feedback to Control Your Weight–Know When to Take Action

Strategy 16. Darrell’s Classic Weight Loss Move