Do you make changes to SBD or follow it verbatum?
 

I was just curious if anyone follows their own version of SBD or has any personal modifications to the plan. I know in the book the author even stressed that it's a flexible plan and you need to find what works for you. It included an example of a guy who followed the plan but ate a bowl of ice cream daily. Also a camara guy who he explained the basic principles to who was able to lose weight just based on this. The majority of the success stories in the book included some sort of...but I still occasionally do this.

I've also been a fan of pasta queens blog..a woman who lost nearly 200 pounds following SBD. She was pretty honest in her blog that she cheated pretty regularly, and ate some not quite SBD friendly foods regularly...ie lean cusiene pizzas.

I personally have been sticking to mostly phase 1 past my 2 weeks. Whenever I tried to add more phase 2 foods into my diet the cravings come back. I ate an entire box of chocolate SBD bars in the span of 2 days. It's the kind of food I tend to overeat if it's in the house. So I've been sticking with something that is kind of like phase 1.3, I eat mostly phase 1 foods but occasionally add a minor phase 2 ingredient or something.

I follow SBD on a week to week basis. Each week I must work out 5 days and follow "phase 1.3" strictly for 6 days. I then give myself a "cheat" day. But on the cheat day I only cheat a little, this may be a saturday night where I got out to the bar with my friends and drink a pitcher of light beer or allow myself to eat an ice cream cone. I don't go to crazy but allow myself a treat if I'm good all week. Although the cheat day can be any day I want it to be..ie if theres a party on wed it will be on wed.

what does everyone else do?

I basically stay close to the plan. If I stray, it just leads to bingeing for me. I won't say that I never cheat, I have found there are some foods that aren't totally 100% SBD compatable that I can enjoy without causing any cravings, but I don't have them on a regular basis. It seems the more I play around with this plan, the longer it takes me to get to my goal.

I stay very close to the plan with some minor tweakings:

I use mostly lower fat regular cheeses. I don't use full fat cheeses that have been turned into reduced fat cheese, like LF provolone. I sometimes use regular provolone, but I cut the portion in half.

I don't use splenda. I use stevia. And an occasional drop of agave.

I sometimes eat a little bit more fruit than the recommended serving if I am having a bad day with sugar cravings.

I use a small amount of regular half and half in my coffee. IMO, the fat free version is gross and it has sugar in it.

If I do ANYTHING other than those tweakings, the weight stalls. I don't recommend you do these things. Stay as close to plan as you can, especially at first. You can try modifications later. It's not worth the aggravation of a weight stall.

I do have a few little tweaks of my own.

I don't count flaxseed as a nut serving, I count it as a grain serving instead, because it's a superfood and got tons of omega-3s in it.

I limit myself on both grains and fruit to 2 servings of each per day, rather than having all the allowed servings; it just works better for me to limit those more.

I have 1 or 2 servings of veggies with breakfast, so I'm not completely strict with myself about having also having 2 cups of veggies at both breakfast and lunch; basically I'm spreading the veggies out a bit more.

I eat dark chocolate more frequently than is officially allowed on SBD, but still limit that to 100 calories in a day when I have it. (I don't eat any other "treat" things--no sugarfree jello or pudding or anything because they are utterly gross to me.)

All of my tweaks are influenced by the Superfoods book, and there's a logic behind them.

Sometimes I have more than the allowed servings of nuts in a given day, but that's a cheat rather than a tweak :)

I stuck with it religiously until phase 3. I allow myself a "cheat" maybe once a month or so, (usually a dessert or a piece of french bread) but that's it. I know me and if I start letting things "slide", then I'll be a goner and start packing it back on again. I'm not great in the self control department.

I think the only thing I cheated on was having ONE fried oyster in that year I was doing phase 2. Really I guess I'm still doing phase 2 for the most part.

All I can say is WOW FEMME! Never cheating? I'm beginning to think I will have to be that way if I ever want to lose this and make the plan work. I think I'm the opposite, I'm TOO lenient! :(

I've been craving foods and always seem hungry ever since i touched strawberries.. i think the natural sugar in fruit gives us all cravings for some reason..

So ya, I think I'm gonna go back to Phase 1 for a couple days cause I haven't been losing, I actually gained a lb or two and don't know why. If anything I'm eating less.

I cheat on occasion, but they are small cheats, and not totally off plan. For instance, the week before TOM if I am really craving chocolate I may have 3 fudgesicles (120 calories) in a day. I may on occasion eat too many nuts. Once a week I have a glass or two of red wine and some dark chocolate, but that's not really cheating. I use agave nectar (sparingly), which I don't know is a cheat or not. Other than that, if I run out of skim milk, I may drink the kids' 2%, stuff like that.
Then I have once-a-year planned cheats. In July I have 2 doughnuts and eat at my favorite sushi restaurant when we are on vacation at the beach.
Then there have been maybe 3 occasions over the last year, where I really cheated badly, went totally off plan for a few days. They were Christmas and Girl Scout cookie time. Which taught me that I can't plan to just cheat a little with sweets, one cookie will always lead to another.
I don't know if any of us stays perfectly on plan, but I do think it's best (at least for me) to stay as close as possible. As my signature says, staying on plan is easier than getting back on plan.

I eat SBD foods. I eat more than I should.

I cheat. A LOT so i've only lost 71 pounds over 2 years and a few months...


but cheats are planned.

and i try NOT to cheat on a daily basis.

I intend to stay as close to the plan as possible and I'm going to tweak in that when I can allow good carbs back into my diet, I'm going to limit those. I have insulin resistance which means my body doesn't process carbs the right way (the right way is that your body will turn carbs to energy, mine turns them to fat - simple version as I understand it). All this is subject to me talking it over with a nutritionist which I will be doing this week.

Like the others have said, the day will come when you just know you have to turn things around. You'll know when that day comes.

Considering I'm on day two I don't know how much my opinion counts yet lol but I plan on following the diet exactly. My husband lost over 60 pounds a couple years ago o nthe plan and he followed it verbatum, no variance or cheating until he met his goal which really didn't take all that long for him. He lost that weight in a matter of months, without much working out until the end. Now he is in maintenence and cheats occassionally and is more relaxed but when weight creeps on he just goes phase one again for awhile. It really has become a lifestyle for him, I hope to have the same success and intend to!

well i will admit that following the plan in phase 1 and early phase 2 AS WRITTEN in terms of food is critical. maybe more in terms of amounts... but in phase 1 and the first few months of phase 2 I strongly suggest NO DEVIATIONNS from the plan.

Never cheated on Phase I. Only had a couple planned cheats on Phase 2. I am comfortably maintaining on kind of Phase 2.5. Some days I eat Phase 3, some days less (I'm very full on this food plan). Whenever I cheated on Phase 2 it was only for one day, got right back on it the next day & it never hurt my weight loss, thank goodness. I do think throwing some extra exercise in there helped to minimize the damage.

I pretty much stick to the official plan, don't really tweak it. I'm pretty strict with myself. I'm an all or none kind of person, so it helps me to stay on plan if I don't stray at all. Oh, I do have an occasional nibble of my husband's dessert or a taste of the cookie dough, something like that. But then that's it. The one thing that has made me more accountable is a monthly weigh in at Weight Watchers since I'm a lifetime member. There are times when knowing I had to weigh in has kept me from eating stuff I shouldn't have.

I plan on having corn once in awhile (not everyday, but won't cut it out completely), and watermelon and pineapple every once in awhile. Not everyday, of course.

If I ever plan a cheat day, I will have turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy.

After awhile of doing Phase 2, I may have a monthly cheat, perhaps. Once in awhile go to my favorite chinese restaurant and eat something horrible for me such as sesame chicken (it's breaded and fried and covered in this sweet, sour, spicy sauce that HAS to have some sort of sugar in it) as well as egg rolls and crab ramgoons. I know I could never cut those foods out completely, so I will still enjoy them, although not often.

I'm in week 5, so I'm still pretty new at this. I've had 1 official "cheat" which was pizza and a salad at lunch last week with my boss. It wasn't planned, but once she told me where we were good, I reconciled it with myself. I probably did step up the exercise a bit to make up for it, and I stopped at 2 pieces, rather than the 3 I wanted. :)

I'm on vacation Thursday-Sunday of this week, and was planning a cheat at this greasy, not really Mexican at all, Mexican restaurant in the town where I grew up. I was already planning that one cheat meal, when mom told me that my grandma is ordering pizza Thursday night. That's my weakness! I was trying to plan for it, then she told me that my Mexican restaurant closed a year ago! Oops. So, pizza will be my cheat - have to stick to the program for the other 11 meals.