The 20 minute rule...I can't find it right now but I either read it in one of their books or heard it directly from the Hellers. They state you should not stop and restart the reward meal. But then they go on to say you can have a break of no more than 20 minutes. They said they use this 20 minute rule when they want to have popcorn at a movie. They eat the main part of the meal in their car and then rush through the line and get popcorn to eat in the theatre to finish off their reward meals.

I don't have my book handy, but I do remember reading in CAD that there shouldn't be more than 20 minutes between foods in the RM. I don't recall the movie popcorn thing being in there, though. It would still work if you didn't get caught in a long line!

Glad that is finally cleared up about the 20 minute rule. After all of these years I have been going by the 5 minute rule. In a way maybe that is a good thing, for me at least. When the 5 minutes were up, I never touch another bite of food. At times it would have come in handy to have been able to have those extra 15 minutes, espeically when we wemt out to dinner. I always would panic and order my dessert along with my dinner, so that I was sure it was there within the 5 minutes. I could have relaxed a little bit.

You are all so strong! This is day 4 for me and I have lost 5 pounds. I just got the book and reading slow so I fully understand. Have any of you tried the Hellers 7-day recovery to get on track? The people that mentioned the weight loss slow down from sweets, how long were you on it before you noticed a weight plateau and how much did you loose before that? I am a sweets person and I too think this will be my lifetime solution to flab because I still have the option to eat a treat, so I am very interested in your sweet challenges and substitutions to my IceCream & cookie addiction.
Theresa

Hi Theresa,

Congrats on the loss. You are doing great.

I lost 40 lbs in 6 to 7 monhts, before I noticed a slow down or actually where I quit losing, but it didn't have anything to do with CAD. I went off of CAD to try other plans including WW, but the scale would not budge. I think my problem is my age and lack of exercise, which I am trying to remedy now, the exercise, not the age.

I always use to include a sweet, now I do off and on, but I try not to overdo it. I have been trying to eat fruit or yogurt in place of sweets, but not always successful.

I think the main thing is as long as you balance your RM, you should be able to eat sweets with no problem. It is when you start to blur the edges and your RM becomes unbalanced that a person has most of their problems.

Don't stress too much about it right now. You are doing fine. You can start tweaking the plan as you see fit later, if and when you hit a plateau.

Well, I guess I've just discovered that Zuleika is probably right about me being sugar sensitive!

I've had well balanced RMs all week - until just now! Arrghh! You see, my OH called in to the supermarket on his way home from his night shift and bought loads of chocolate. That in itself wasn't a problem, but then I thought, hey, a small bag of Maltesers for this evening's RM would be all right - so I bought some.

I ate them after my meal - then wanted more sweets. So I remembered the tub of sweets we keep for our son Sam in the cupboard. No less than five mini bars later....here I am! How stupid am !? (Don't answer that, LOL). My only saving grace is that it was all within my one hour, but talk about unbalanced meal.

So it's back to the fruit and yoghurt tomorrow...