Whoops, here's the rule: eat less.
Really simple, but not necessarily easy. I've got a few systems in place that help me eat less. The first one is this blog itelf. It's keeping me accountable. If I don't commit publicly, then it's too easy to let it slip (...and not eat less).
Second, I weigh myself every day in the morning. Mornings because this meaures my weight at a baseline level everyday. Every day so I can monitor my progress and know where I stand.
The cool thing is, because I only have one rule, and that rule is to eat less, I don't necessarily need to be picky about what I actually do eat. For instance, on my first day (two days ago), I ate ice cream. I ate a lot of ice cream. But because I made up for that by skipping dinner, I woke up the next morning a quarter of a pound lighter than when I began.
The pitfall is that I can still eat anything I want. So for example, yesterday, I ate cheesecake. Someone brought over a delicious cheesecake a few days ago. Yesterday, I decided to just get rid of it — into my belly. That incident brought me back up to being a quarter of a pound heavier than when I began. (That's a half pound of weight gain yesterday.)
Of course all these fluctuations will eventually be smoothed away once I check my weekly weight, next Sunday morning. But at least today, I know where I stand and whether or not I need to watch what I eat super stringently or just casually over the next few days.
Hint: I need to buckle down starting today.