Healthy Eating with Jhet

You’re Going To Fail

It’s gonna happen. I know it sucks but it happens to everyone. You’ve started your food diary, you’ve seen where you need to cut back and you have your plan in place. But it’s still going to happen. You are going to have that chocolate bar or that piece of cake. You’ll eat out one night at Chilies (points at self) and completely blow your sodium, calories and/or fat intake. You’ll try so hard to be rigid and strictly follow your diet plan to the letter. But it won’t matter. You will fail.

But you know what? It’s not really a failure. As a matter of fact, I’ll say it is good for you. And I’ll even go ahead and say that if you don’t fail in these little ways along your diet you will fail big all at once. Big as in you will stop your diet plan all together.

Look at all the people who strictly follow their [insert diet name here] diet plan and lose 20 or 30 pounds only to regain more than that after a few months. Why does it happen? Well in my opinion, they viewed the diet plan as a chore. As a means to an end. And once that end was reached they were finished. I mean, can you imagine being on the cabbage soup diet…forever?  Of course not! It is a means to an end. And that is precisely the wrong way to thing about your diet.

Think of your diet as, "This is the way I want to eat for the rest of my life."  This will force you to focus on what is going to be healthy for you rather than what is going to get you to an end goal. For example, I know that eating fish and vegetables is more healthy for me. Therefore I’ve modified my diet to include those as primary source of dinner. Before I used to have a lot of pizza and processed foods. That doesn’t mean I never have pizza, it means that I do not have pizza very often. Every now and then I "Fail" at my diet and go ahead and have pizza. As long as I stay within my diet plan tolerances and don’t do this every day, it’s fine for me to do.

These little "Failures" or breaks from your diet should be fine as long as you don’t make them a habit. Keep within your daily / weekly tolerances and don’t make a big deal out of minor blimps in your diet. You still have to record them to make sure they are not becoming a habit but beyond that I would not worry.

As always consult your doctor for medical or diet help.