Tools – These are some things

Do you want your child to sit in a nappy full of their own faeces? Do you enjoy changing dirty nappies and wiping poo from their bottom, legs and back? Do you think it reasonable to allow your child to soil themselves, rather than to give them the opportunity to relieve themselves in a potty or toilet? If you answered yes to any of the above questions then this article is not for you.

Very young children are capable of holding it until given the opportunity to use a potty, and it is very easy to build this routine into your life. It has lots of benefits and is definitely something you should do.

Nappy-free baby is a concept I first came across (like so many things) via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools (previously featured here). In this case it wasn’t through browsing the Cool Tools catalogue, a large printed book full of recommendations from the website and elsewhere. I highly, highly recommend the catalogue, it’s a few years out-of-date in some areas but browsing through it opens your mind up to all sorts of new opportunities, tools and things that you may not have considered before.

The basic idea is that children do not want to soil themselves, and if you give them the opportunity to poo in a potty then they will do so, rather than in their nappy. The usual advice of waiting until a child is 2 or 3 until trying to introduce the potty is advice that has been promoted by and on behalf of Pampers and similar companies to sell more nappies. Nappies are very good and effective at holding in waste so it is easy and convenient to continue to use them. This is relatively recent advice, since good disposable nappies were invented. Prior to the 1950s, it was usual to encourage young children to use a potty, since it saved on laundry. This approach is still followed in many developing countries.

So nappy-free baby (also known as elimination communication) is the idea that you pay attention to your child and give them opportunities to use a potty at appropriate times. For us, this meant that every few hours we would hold our daughter over the potty. Her very first poo was in an old ice cream tub in hospital when she was a day old. Whenever she woke up from a nap, we would hold her over the potty and change her nappy, whenever we changed her nappy we would hold her over the potty as well. When she seemed fussy but wasn’t hungry or tired, we would hold her over the potty and usually catch a poo. By watching and paying attention to your child, you can recognise the signs that they need a poo and give them the opportunity to do it in a potty, rather than in their clothes.

NB our children still wore nappies all day every day, but most of the time those nappies were completely clean and they were never filled with poo.

This might sound intimidating and a lot of work, but it really isn’t. From about 6 months until they went to nursery, both our children did all their poos in a potty – no filthy nappies, no nappy rash.

One day when our daughter was about two years old, she told us that she didn’t want to wear nappies anymore. We had about a week of accidents where she would wee herself, but she always pooed in a potty or toilet. Then after about a week she was potty trained and out of nappies during the day.

I recommend the book “Nappy-free Baby”, but it’s not really necessary. You need a potty that is suitable for a small child. On eBay you can find lots of child chamber pots from the time before nappies, or you can use a standard plastic potty. You hold your child’s thighs with their back to you and support them in a squat position. That’s about it really. You need to commit to the method for a week or so, but once you start making “catches” and putting clean nappies on your child it’s very rewarding. There are lots of blogs and forums about this, but they can be full of right-on Americans and hippies. Nappy-free baby is not just for hippies, this is the sensible approach to looking after your child that makes both of your lives better and easier.

Here is the method that I and others have found to be the most effective for managing your weight, whether you want to lose, maintain or even gain weight. It is a very simple method, but if it fits with your particular mindset and psychology then it works very well. Particularly if you know what is a healthy diet and if you’ve tried calorie counting or other diets in the past.

Weigh yourself every day, and use a spreadsheet to record that weight.

That’s it.

This method takes inspiration from the “Lean Analytics” movement, and in particular the notion of “One Metric that Matters”. If your goal is to lose weight, then weight is the metric that matters and that is what you need to track. Important to acknowledge here that weight is not a perfect indicator of physical health, or athletic performance or attractiveness – but as a metric it has some features that make it very useful:

You can measure it easily and precisely. Buy some bathroom scales, stand on them and write down the number. It takes 5 seconds. Compare this to testing your 5km time, or trying to measure bodyparts or compare photographs.
Because it is so easy to measure, you can do it every day. This gives you instant feedback on the consequences of your actions. You know that eating cheeseburgers and cake will have a negative impact on your progress, but now you will see that immediately, or at least in a day or two. Vice-versa, 2 days of disciplined actions will result in a measurable change in your weight (assuming digital scales in kilograms)

You may say that you don’t actually want to lose weight. What you really want to do is to look better naked, or be able to run quicker or some other underlying goal, so you should be using a mirror or a stopwatch to measure your progress. What I say to this is that you can worry more about that other stuff, once you have your weight in the right area. In my case that means getting down to a healthy BMI. In other people’s case, it’s about getting back to their pre-baby weight.

This method can be intimidating, as it forces you to face the consequences of your actions, but you should realise that this is a good thing. If you find yourself not wanting to record a weight after a particularly heavy weekend, then you should ask yourself how serious you really are about achieving your goal.

The spreadsheet template will calculate a weighted 10-day average weight, which smooths out some of the natural ups and downs you will experience. Given a target weight, it will calculate when you can expect to hit that target, based on your progress so far. It will also show how consistent you have been in your weight loss (or gain) and the change in the last 7 days.

Here’s the spreadsheet

This is a Google spreadsheet and is locked for editing – to use it you’ll need to make a copy of the template you can use. Otherwise you’d be over-writing the template and I would be able to see everything you’re doing. If you have a Google account then sign in to that, make a copy of the template to your own Google Drive and crack on (File >> Make a Copy). If you don’t have a Google account then I recommend getting one just to use Google Drive, but otherwise you can download the template to use in Excel. I have not tested the template in Excel, and recommend using a Google account and Google Sheets. The Google Sheets app for mobile is good and easy to use as well.

You start by entering your target weight in cell G1, in this case my target is 91.0. You also need to enter the date you are starting the plan in cell B6. Then every day you enter your weight in column C and everything else will update automatically. You may want to enter notes in column F to record any reasons for why your daily weight moves.

There’s also a tab with a chart:

My progress is pretty erratic. Christmas was not a good time for the diet

The red line here is the weighted 10-day trend which you can see smooths out a lot of the day-to-day variation and is the line to worry about. In my case I started really well, then went on a work trip to Italy which set me back considerably. Summer I made much slower progress but still progress and now I’m going to have to work off everything I’ve put on over Christmas. I’m confident I’ll get to my target though. Here is the equivalent chart of someone more disciplined than me:

You can’t expect to lose weight at Christmas

I am not a doctor and have no training in nutrition or dietary science, you should eat a balanced diet with lots of vegetables and exercise. But if you are not at a healthy weight, then this is the most effective tool I have found to game your psychology into getting you to a healthy weight. Use at your own risk

Category: Tools

Nappy-free Baby

Data Driven Weight Management