Welcome to June ’s Slim Down

Patio Povera!

Ferns in rollerblades, a pert bottom and ivy-clad kinky boots in a bird-cage….? We loved 77 year-old Anthony Samuelson’s “Patio Povera!” roof garden (at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show last month) for his wild imagination and DSD approach to gardening. That’s the photo at the top of the page. He says the idea of using crazily random objects (rubber chickens, giant ketchup bottles and ballcocks too) came to him when constructing a patio for his wife. He decided traditional pots, troughs and trugs were just too “same old, same old” and presumably swapped B&Q, Focus and Homebase for skips, household waste sites and charity shops…?

So now it’s June and Chelsea’s been deconstructed. Tomorrow, Tuesday 5th June is World Environment Day and we wanted to awaken your environmental awareness with a watering of ideas to mark it DSD style. How might you go crazily and randomly green? As a starter for fifteen:

• Go gregarious and breakfast at dawn with the birds
• Plant bulbs or seeds in a communal space
• Sweep away dead leaves or collect a carrier of litter
• Sign up to Freecycle and give unused stuff a new home
• Get to work under your own steam – walk, jog, cycle or row
• Start a compost bin or a wormery
• Adopt the Australian toilet philosophy – if it’s yellow, let it mellow
• Take a meeting or an appointment outside
• Refuse excess packaging on shop-bought goods
• Keep the lights off and burn some tea lights instead (or go to bed early)
• Make your own lunch and avoid packaged goods
• Notice the country of origin stickers on fresh fruit and veg – avoid airfreight
• Picnic in your park, dance round the flowerbeds and play on the swings
• Create a piece of art out of ‘junk’
• Go for a moon walk and notice what’s different about nature at night

A Year From now

On the forum, one of our regular NDDers inspired us and even got a personal surprise by comparing life today to how it was 12 months ago. We hope postings like these get other people being more mindful of their life goals:

When I started DSD about a year ago I wrote down where I wanted to be in a year’s time. I wrote about personal relationships, work relationships and ambitions, and of course, weight loss. I have just read through what I wrote and now want to share a couple of thoughts about this with you.

• I have pretty well got to where I wanted to be (further in many ways not thought of at the time). This tells me that doing a list like this is a good idea, and really helps in achieving what you want.
• I have lost a lot of weight….. I am sure I would not have got here by a "conventional" diet. To be specific, I have lost on average 2/3 lb a week, total weight loss 2 1/4 stone.
• I am surprised now at how modest my ambitions were. I have done so many new, exciting and interesting things this last year that I never thought possible - but now do.
• I am going to do the same exercise again where I want to be in May 2008.

I hope this encourages those of you who are setting out on the DSD adventure that it does work, not only with the weight loss, but in transforming your life for the better. …

What will you do? What have you done? What’s in the offing? Move your own and someone else’s mind by leaving a future-focused post on the forum.

NDD in the Press

The second edition of the No Diet Diet is out now (with a whole new jazzy cover) and the daily Telegraph featured us every day last week as part of their “Look Your Best” campaign. Monday’s paper carried an overview of the NDD and seven steps to get started – number six was to do the above “what do I want to have achieved by this time next year” exercise. So here’s to great like-minds and new friends joining us on the forum soon…?

Until next month, give some thought to how you want to have grown and developed by June 2008, In a DSD kind of way, of course.

The nodietdietway Team