In honor of New Years and the newbies who usually join the board around this time, I thought now would be a good time to discuss our tools. I don't mean the kind of tools that come from Sears, but the ones that help us be successful with LC...and with life. I think that all TDC members who travel this journey need to have a toolkit packed with useful tools of all shapes and sizes--support from friends and family, a good attitude, behavioral skills, patience, tenacity, self-awareness, self-respect, knowledge, and perspective.

What's in your toolkit? How have those tools helped you in your journey? If you are just starting your journey, what have you added to your tool belt?

--Melissa

My favorite tools:
1. An adjusted attitude. I have finally managed to adjust my attitude to not feel deprived about not eating xyz.
2. A supportive hubby. He is always telling me how proud he is of my determination to not cave-in to temptation.
3. A plan. I plan ahead to make sure I have good healthy choices in my frig at all times.
4. I give myself permission to buy expensive macadamia nuts
when I need a special treat!
5. I joined a challenge. It helps me to sign in regularly and put in my weight.
6. I take my measurements every week. It helps me to KNOW that I am losing fat even if the scale isn't moving.
7. I weigh every day, nekked after my BM. I write it down in a journal so I can see my daily fluctuations as really get to know my body.
8. I try a new recipe every week. It has helped me to not be bored and to see that I can eat great food as I progress toward my goal.
9. I give back as much as I receive. I participate in the forums. I try to share what I have learned and learn from others who have been on this journey longer then I have. Thanks for your help.
10. I don't drink soda except in a drink "desert", where I can't get any bottled water. But I do drink coffee with cream and sweetener every day, all day. It is my one treat that I will not give up yet. As long as I keep losing while drinking it...I am drinking coffee.

Great list Kaz! I'm interested to see what everyone comes up with.

--Melissa

1. A well stocked fridge.
2. A "before" picture of myself is always within reach, as a reminder where I came from.
3. My fat pants.
4. Prepared food in the fridge, ready to grab so I don't eat bad stuff impulsively.
5. A supportive boyfriend, who knows how badly eating off plan will make me feel, and who does NOT like to hear me whine when I eat something I shouldn't..lol.
6. Nice clothes, that fit well.
7. A good attitude about my WOE, so that I don't let others talk me out of it or get me down.

I can't really add to this, they are all perfect. I do the same thing. That before pic is the worst to see. I also, if eating too much, tape a piece of paper on the fridge. I dont' have to tell anyone what it is, but on it, i write down 232, a reminder of exactly what i weighed when i bent over in a parking lot, and split my pants!

So I'm sitting in a room at a workbench, with a big-mawed toolbag open on the bench. Next to it are all the tools I use in building the person I want to become.
The first thing that I have is

• my water cup, just an inexpensive disposable plastic cup that holds 3 cups of water. Beside is is my thermos and a bottle of lemon juice; these represent my commitment to hydrate my body.
• Next to it are the foods I eat on a daily basis: yogurt, berries, nuts, salad greens, veggies, and dressings; assorted meats and veggies;
• In a category of its own is my bar of Lindt 85%, which symbolizes the idea that this is not deprivation; it's rational decadence;
• there's an old red notebook that I've used for years to track my weight and measurements off and on, and a tape measure; these symbolize my willingness to keep data, to face reality;
• my scale; I weigh daily. The battery died in it and then revived; I think it wants to see me through on this journey;
• an old map that I made that is a symbolic representation of the trail from 252 to 152, and possibly beyond?
• my purple jeans, the ultimate reference garment in my wardrobe, and a pair of pants I only dreamed i'd sometimes wear again;
• and because this is a magical toolbox for a mythic journey, it also holds my walk-in closet, girl heaven. This is where I can go every day and dress myself for whatever role I want to play. I paint myself with art in which I live my life.
• My laptop is in there, too, which symbolizes two things: it is my portal to my support community online (you guys know how much I need and appreciate you, right?) and a portal to the information;
• my cell phone is in there, too; it's people I can turn to when I am in need of support and companionship;
• look, *there's* my pillow; if I get enough sleep, I can function better, resist temptation, have better control of my emotions;
• there's a hammer and a screwdriver and an axe; if I can keep the things in my environment in good repair, I feel more in control of my life;
• there's a hoe, a shovel, and a six-pack of starter plants; a fishing pole and a rifle--my commitment to try to gather and grow more of the food for myself and my kids;
• flower baskets; hyacinths to soothe my soul;
• lowcarb cookbooks; not that I cook that much, or add a lot of things to my repertoire. Unlike some folks, I need and thrive on routine. If I like what I eat, I happily eat it everyday. If I go for novelty, I sometimes eat too much, but it's nice to know I never have to feel like `I can't have that'.
• a pair of boots represents my freedom to walk away from things and people and situations that aren't good for me, and towards things that are.

What follows are some thoughts on tools that I or other TDC members have used. This is a bit of a kitchen-sink post, so feel free to read just the parts that interest you.

Board Tools
Starting a journal can be a great help. You can track your moods, your food intake and how it affects your weight loss, your successes, your struggles, whatever you want. This is a great way to get support from other TDC members.

The TDC is a great resource--many of the issues that we are dealing with have been discussed here before. The sticky thread Best of TDC at the top of the TDC subforum has links to many of the great threads from over the years. Feel free to PM me if you find additional ones that you think should be added to the list.

The board has an entire section devoted to LC recipes. Cooking is a huge part of LC, and having a treasure trove of recipes is a great resource.

My Plan is a board tool that can be used for tracking weight loss, measurements, and food intake. Fitday is another website that some members use to track their food intake. Both websites will give you feedback on your caloric intake, carbs, protein, fat, etc. Some members find that knowing this information is crucial to their success; other members prefer not use them using a more maintenance-like approach and have had success. The choice is yours.

Cognitive Tools
Some of my thoughts on cognitive behavioral therapy can be found in this earlier post: Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy for Weight Loss . These tools were described well in the book The End of Overeating by David Kessler, which was the jumping off point for this thread: The Power of Habit . I believe that the Beck Diet Solution by Judith Beck also discusses these topics in depth; just ignore the sections about coping with hunger, since they do not apply to a LC WOE.

Cognitive tools can help us change our behavior and provide a mechanism for positive change until the new behavior becomes second nature. This is a fancy way of saying that this allows us to form new, good habits. New habits can make certain tasks automatic. This is a great tool because it doesn't require a lot of effort when you're stressed, tired, upset, etc. Now I automatically pick the croutons off a salad and ask for a hamburger without the bun without having to consciously think about it every time. Cognitive tools can help with the following challenges:
• dealing with withdrawal symptoms
• developing coping skills (both behavioral and cognitive) for high-risk situations and other challenges
• defining what help and support look like to you as an individual and learning how to ask close friends and family
• utilizing relaxation techniques for stress reduction
• identifying triggers—can be either situational, emotional, personal (particular people), or more than one of these
• recovering from a slip and preventing it from becoming a full relapse
• creating an effective reward system that does not utilize food to recognize your accomplishments

Self-Awareness
Feeling fully present in your own mind and body is a gift that you give yourself. This can take many forms. It's knowing when your body wants to exercise and listening to it when it demands rest. It's hearing the siren call of cravings and critically evaluating your recent diet and environment to detect changes that could have provoked the monster. Am I actually experiencing hunger or is it really thirst? Thinking carefully about what you want your clothes to say about you and making an effort to present your best face. (Many of us never cared what our clothes or appearance said about us before. But they do say something about us nonetheless; self-awareness means that we actually pay attention.) For many of us, self-awareness is a truly new feeling and it can be a bit disconcerting. It is empowering to decide how society views each of us, but it also means that we have a responsibility to ourselves to make decisions consciously.

WOE/Plan Knowledge
The more that I learn about this WOE, the better I am able to work the plan. It is useful to read about other plans as they all provide different information and insight. Periodically re-reading your plan can help you identify areas where you could improve your WOE. Understanding how your metabolism becomes dysfunctional and what foods created this situation may make you more committed to your WOE. Knowledge of biology is also very useful when you get questions from people who are uneducated about insulin and how it creates obesity. Some people are unwilling to or uninterested in learning this information, but it provides a strong backbone for your cognitive skills in moments of weakness. Knowing exactly what that donut will do to your insides is a powerful visual image that will help you keep on track.

Self-Knowledge
Being honest with yourself is of utmost importance. The more that you understand your own body, the better position that you will be in to improve it. Often this involves experiments of one; knowledge about yourself is power. If you know that you hate chicken breast, then there's no reason to force yourself to eat it if you have loads of other meat options. This also involves being honest with yourself about your lifestyle. Many of us made incremental changes that over time have drastically changed our diets and our lives for the better. This is true of exercise as well--if you know that you will hate spending time on the stairmaster every day, then it's counterproductive to force yourself to do it.

Self-respect
Your opinion is the ONLY one that matters when the issue in question is your health. I have stopped caring about other people who comment on my food choices or otherwise pass judgment on me. My health is too important for that. Remember that it is your decision who you do or do not tell about your WOE--your diet is YOUR business and anyone who will not give you that respect does not need to belong to that inner circle. So long as you are not infringing on their rights to eat what they want, they have no right to second guess your decisions.

Cost-benefit analysis
This is a concept from the field of economics, but it applies well to almost any complex decisionmaking process. I use this all the time. It allows me to take an objective view of planned or unplanned cheats. Often I realize that the potential benefit or satisfaction from eating a particular food is not worth the cost of weight gain, bloat, and miserable feelings that result.

Behavioral Tools
Sometimes changing your behavior is easier than changing your thoughts. If you challenge yourself to do one day on-plan and succeed, that one day can snowball into a week, a month, a year...and suddenly you realize that your behavior has changed your thought patterns while you weren't paying attention.

Patience
Understanding that things will happen at their own pace is priceless. Setting deadlines for yourself like "I must lose 50 pounds by April" are usually unrealistic and merely set us up for disappointment and possibly abandoning our WOE. When I set out on this journey, I decided that as long as I was making progress on at least one health front, that milestones could happen at their own pace. Weight loss is only one front in this journey to health--the others include normalized blood sugar, disappearance of other disease symptoms, loss of inches (aka fat), fitting into smaller pants, behavioral changes, improved ease of movement, etc.

Tenacity/Persistence
This journey is not exciting--there will be exciting moments, but most of the journey is actually quite mundane. Making breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for years on end is not generally what blockbuster movies are about...Julie & Julia excepted.

Attention to detail
This allows me to scrutinize food labels so that I can make the best possible choices. It's also helpful when I'm changing carb levels so that I can precisely count to ensure that I am where I want to be. It is also an important tool in being self-aware, as it allows you to notice how different foods affect you.

Support system
Your support system can take many forms--it can include family, friends, co-workers, church members, the ladies in your book club, anyone. The TDC and the board in general form an important support system for many members, because this is the place where people really understand what you're going through. A strong component of my support system is my husband because we're doing LC together. If you don't have this type of support, then find it somewhere--friends, other family, board members, co-workers, wherever you can get it. Many board members find that the journals is where they find the daily support that helps them the most.

--Melissa

My tools, in no particular order:

-self respect
-getting sufficient sleep; deep sleep, every single day
-moving my body in ways it's not used to on a regular basis helps build my self confidence
-a great support system (some days this includes only myself, but for the majority of this time, its all of you and my family)
-the ability to pick out whole fresh foods to nourish my family and I
-arming myself with the knowledge that things added to food does not = food
-being able to set healthy boundaries for the toxic people in my life (and the ability to recognize such people as toxic)

I am sure there is plenty more, but that is off the top of my head.

I neglected to mention earlier that the seed of this thread was sown by this earlier thread: Integrating our WOE into our WOL.

--Melissa

main thing for me is well stocked fridge with low carb because to make this WOE work, I can't be left with the options of will power or something that is really bad for me.

another thing is crystal light it broke my addiction to soda.

my scale I weigh on it everyday no matter what, keeps me honest with myself and holds me accountable, so I know if I eat something I'm not supposed to that I have to answer to the scale so to speak.

This is very helpful.

Hi,

I love this thread and the great comments and ideas of what is listed really hits home to me!

~a picture of where I loved what I weighed and how I looked
~positive reinforcement and thinking to keep my mantra I know I can do this
~posting what I eat in my journal
~getting online to read and benefit from this supportive group I am fortunate to belong to
~getting more exercise in 2010 even if it is going up and down my 3 levels more often than I need too
~keeping the foods handy for my WOE and in the fridge
~Finding and reading the emotional eater book Melissa has mentioned so I can conquer that beast once and for all..............
~measure myself so that I can see results in numbers when the scale does not move..........I really was afraid to know how big I had gotten before...
~feeling good that even though I backslid I did not give up! I got back on track and that is really big for me. My past weight loss times I would have just given up as it is too big a number to reach ..............
Gloria

I don't know if any of my tools will add to this as it looks like you guys have fabulous tools already.
What I can share with you is what worked for me and still works for me today, almost 6 yrs since I began my joourney...this time.

1-Come here daily and logged all my food into my journal for accountability and to have a record of my food for later.
2-joined weighins here to report my losses each week.
3- changed my ticker for every single pound that I lost...it was fun to do that.
4- changed my profile too, for every single pound.
5- made "progress and not perfection" my mantra and forgave myself for mistakes I made.
6- followed my plan of choice and avoided getting caught up in fads that came and go.
Yes, I did add good carbs while I was still in weight loss mode!!!
7- did not look for fast weight loss....1.5 lbs a week average per week was fine for me.
8- worked at not whining and complaining and keeping a good and positive attitude about EVERYTHING!!!
9- only looked at the next 10 lbs...much easier to handle mentally than looking at 120 lbs.
10- this one is the biggest....Learned how to cook!!! Got my kitchen organized, which took months....and started watching Alton Brown and Rachel Ray for tips....trying new things all the time, many of which got tossed...blech!! But many things I still make and love....and I now love to cook!! I cook big....portion it out and freeze for fast meals.
No more "Queen of Ordering In" for this girl.

Good lUck you guys!! I know you can do this .....cuz I did!!

- I always carry my gallon of water everywhere with me no matter how stupid I look, because then i'm constantly reminded to drink all my water.
- I have a little dry erase board on my fridge where I write X lbs. lost on it in big letters so before I open the fridge I remind myself how much progress i'm making, and it keeps me from slipping up.
- I have a piece of lingerie hanging on my closet door that i'd like to fit into when I reach goal. I can't wait for my husband to see me in it.
- I also have the most supportive husband who goes out of his way to make sure that if we go anywhere out to eat my LC lifestyle can be accomodated, and he gives me all of the emotional/physical support possible when it comes to the hardships of this journey.
- I make sure the fridge is stocked with PLENTY of LC food at all times.
- I also put little sticky notes on things in my fridge that I may want to cheat with i.e. my kids ice cream, juice, etc. I just write on the note " you know you may want this now, but it's not worth it, and you'll regret it later."

There are just a lot of little steps that I take to make sure i'm successful, and having those tools available at all times is what is going to make me successful.

Awhile back, I began to think Atkins wasn't 'working' or that low-carb wasn't working for me anymore.

It was me, not the plan. See, little did I know, I'd slipped into coasting-along mode and I really wasn't following all the Rules of Induction. Got my book out, reviewed the rules of the plan, highlighter pen in-hand. I highlighted the things I wasn't doing. Realized that "most" of my carbs were not really coming from vegetables, and that I wasn't exercising at all. I didn't really know if I was at or under the 20 grams carbohydrate per day either, because I wasn't tracking my food, weighing/measuring my portions etc. That said, I was pretty good at gooping blue cheese dressing onto practically everything (no measuring spoon required).

So I decided to try actually following the plan. This meant making some decisions, and more importantly - it meant closely sort of supervising myself to ensure I was meeting all the rules of the plan. In fact, at one point, I changed the subtitle under my userid to "Needs Supervision" as a bit of a light-hearted joke about it all.

I created some paper worksheets, where I had to write in my (measured/weighed) food, account for daily exercise, and even account for three cups of low-carb vegetables per day. Later on, I'd struggle with learning how to enter in all the foods into the My PLAN feature here on this site. I did it though, because otherwise - how would I know for sure what my carb intake really was?

With regard to exercise, I wanted to do something everyday, or nearly everyday - and the only way for me to do this was to make it pretty easy on myself. A simple walk around the block a few times was 'good enough'. The important part was to make it a regular, routine thing.

So, in terms of my own 'toolkit', one of my favourite tools is putting some sort of system in place to make sure I'm actually following plan. How many carbs did I really get? Did I get my vegetables? Did I do my exercise? Those low-tech paper worksheets really helped. Basic measuring cups and an ancient plastic Weight Watchers food scale also helped. I had a plan and a goal to meet each and every day. Get no more than 'x' amount of carbs, take my vitamins, do something (anything) for exercise, get the three cups of vegetables in (this ensured that 'most' of my carbs really were coming from LC vegetables and not blue cheese dressing or macadamia nuts!).

This worked so well for me. Awhile back, I tried starting a challenge in the Challenges section of the forums, but it didn't really take off (probably too much work and too complicated for a challenge). Here's a link to the challenge if you're interested in the details of 'creating a system to succeed.' I'm not wanting to start up the challenge again, but posting the link in here in case some of the ideas in it are useful for others:

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthre...16&page=1&pp=15

My silly worksheets are in there too.

This one particular post explains that even when you get very clear and simple about things, it's still a lot to get done:

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showpost...287&postcount=5

Good luck everyone!