Today, for lunch, I did something I shouldn’t have. I was in town to buy a few groceries to prepare tomorrow’s lunch, the one we’ll eat in the car on the road to the other end of the country for our Easter holidays, and all my resolves and right tinking went down the drain when I saw one of the unhealthy foods I used to eat before. Yes, that’s it, I couldn’t resist, and ate this instead of a healthy lunch of vegetables and lean meat, in spite of knowing that I was acting wrong. Oh noes! Is my diet completely screwed up now?
Well, no. Even though I would have thought this a few years ago, with my glorious ideas of “willpower is everything”, a setback doesn’t mean that I am hopeless and shouldn’t even dare try and reach my goal one day. This kind of thinking would be exactly the mistake I - nor anyone else, for that matter - mustn’t commit, because it can give me the perfect excuse to indeed fail: “I took a slice of pie, I blew up my diet, might as well eat the whole pie now”. It’s not a matter of willpower, of being focused 100% of my time on being perfect and behaving perfectly; nobody’s perfect, and one mistake doesn’t mean that we’re complete failures at everything.
The key, however, is to study these setbacks, not close our eyes on them. The key is to analyze them - not too much, just enough to understand why this happened, and how to avoid it in the future. Was it a sudden craving? One induced by the sight of the food itself? Was I bored when I ate it? Did I feel like I needed this food as some kind of comfort, because I was stressed, had had a bad day, or had just gone into a fight with my significant other? Did I do it, all that simply, because it’s a busy day and I didn’t feel like taking time to cook something healthy? If a setback would just happen randomly, out of nowhere, it’d probably be easier to ignore it and go on walking my road to a healthy weight, but there it is - most of the time, it’s not as random as it seems.
Thus the need to look at the mistakes, and learn a lesson from them. I didn’t resist at noon and bought food I shouldn’t have: first thing, the food was under my eyes at the supermarket as soon as I entered in, left to the vegetables and fruits, which were my primary destination. It was easy to spot it, know that it was there, and have this idea slide into my mind, insidiously. Then, after going on analyzing my reaction to this food, I also realized that it was an easy food; I wouldn’t need time to prepare it, I’d just have to take it out of the wrapper once back home, and thus it wouldn’t take me much time except for eating it. I was worried that I would run short of time, between running errands, going to the bank, walking my dog, ironing all the four washes I ran in the past two days, calling our customers who still need to be called, free a spot to go to the gym, preparing the bags, clothes and foods for tomorrow… The end result is that I bought this food more out of worry of lacking time, than out of real desire for it. And now that I know this, I am better prepared to deal with the next similar craving that can (and will) happen someday in the future.
So now, what? Well, for starters, I know that I ate appropriately during the first four days of this week. I know that I exercised on every of these days, from a good walk on Sunday to the full hour of cardio of Wednesday. I also know that I ate the wrong food as a full lunch, without adding any dessert to it, and that I haven’t had any snack today; it wasn’t as much an extra as a meal replacement, even if a wrong one. Finally, exercising was at my program for this afternoon anyway, thus I didn’t add insult to injury by cutting on it: I switched from lifting weights to doing one hour of cardio again, in order to help me getting rid of some more useless fat already, and I’ll lift weights again later on.
Evidently, there is no need to over-analyze the lapse and worry my head in guilt about it. What’s done is done, and what I have to do now is to take efficient action:
- Making sure to go on exercising as planned (and not use my mistake as an excuse to mourn in my corner and not go!)
- Carefully watch what I eat in the upcoming days
- Keep focused on going on and succeeding - not on a single mistake that can’t and won’t ruin anything, unless I allow it so
- Not drown myself in guilt that will only make me feel like indulging myself in more sweet foods
I somehow doubt that all the bad foods will completely stop tempting me one day, if only as occasional treats. But as long as the lapses aren’t happening every day - in which case, of course, one would have to take a very different course of action - they are not the ultimate catastrophe, nor the gauge of one’s ability to succeed. They simply need to be taken as learning tools, as a way to understand our own behaviors and finding a way to bounce back and do better “next time”.
- Kery
