Keep making excuses!

GettingHealthy8765

I am stuck in a cycle of starting to eat healthy and then falling off the wagon, eating take away and saying I’ll start tomorrow. When I decide to eat some take away, I always end up saying to myself ‘today’s ruined, start tomorrow’! I was doing really well for a week and then my son got sick and cooking went out the window. I know what I have to do, just need to stick to logging my food and trying to lose weight! Anyone in the same boat?

kommodevaran

I think it's great that you're realizing that you're making excuses. Many people are totally in denial. But what to do about it? Maybe you need a complete reframing.

For lots of people, "eating healthy" becomes something that is both vague and strict, a mashup of guidelines from governments, media, blogs - and trying to adhere to something we don't really understand, makes us think we don't want to, even if we want to - and perfectionism paired with ambivalence and misinformation creates a large black-and-white monster that basically divides food into "food I love but is bad for me" and "food I should eat which is awful". While the rational part of our mind really really wants to follow the rules and be healthy and thin, we are so much more, we are pleasure-seeking, vain, impatient, irrational, social, stubborn animals. Being told what to do, makes most of us rebel, and still we want to be told what to do, because we're letting ourselves be confused by the very people who tell us what to do and make us doubt our own judgement.

Weight management is so simple that it almost hurts: You lose weight when you eat less. That's something you do, not try. You can eat less of anything.

And this: There is no wagon. A healthy lifestyle is a set of practical habits that should fit quite seamlessly into an everyday life. Healthy cooking can be simple, easy and relatively fast if you plan/prepare in advance.

88olds

Why do you quit logging? Keep your food diary no matter what. Anybody can record their good days. You need to record them all.

Is there a way to modify your take away order to stay within your number? A way to get close? Log it anyway.

Sooner or later everyone will eat too many calories. Perfection isn’t possible. But that’s not a reason to not log your food.

Consider this, maybe you don’t really know what to do. Oh, you know you need to eat at a deficit but do you know how to do that? Do you start each day with a plan that has enough food that you like that there’s a chance you will stick with it? Give yourself a break. Weight loss is a skill set. It takes time to learn. Think- plan and diary, plan and diary. Work on that for few weeks and see where you are.