Failed today

cartedonj89
cartedonj89 Posts: 2 Member
in Motivation and Support
So after 4 days doing good a church dinner for our Pastor and I couldn’t keep tract of my food. Now I don’t have no good entries to apply can get over this failure of today by tomorrow morning ?🤦‍♀️

Replies

  • Alatariel75
    Alatariel75 Posts: 18,167 Member
    This isn't a failure, this is just life! It happens! You can add entries which align as closely as you remember with what you ate, or you can quick add a bunch of calories, or you could just not log at all.

    Just make good choices where you can. Life will happen, and a single day of excess didn't get you to needing to lose weight, nor will it be the reason you don't.
  • Corina1143
    Corina1143 Posts: 3,556 Member
    Today was not a loss. Today was a lesson. Today was an experience. Today was a learning opportunity.
    What could you have done better? Maybe plan ahead? Maybe take a one dish meal you know you can eat? Like a chef salad? Maybe plan on 2 plates -- one big one filled with things you know and can see are healthy and fairly low calorie foods and one small plate half full with decadent things you don't make at home. Maybe eat a little low calorie, high volume food before you go, so things aren't quite so tempting when you get there.
    Most of all. Remind yourself to focus on the occasion, the people there, the social aspect. Trivialize the food. It's only a vehicle to get the event together.
    Now, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back up on that horse. Keep riding!
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,055 Member
    edited October 7
    One day is a drop in the ocean. Log your best guess, and go on. It's not a personal failure, it's an opportunity to learn and revise your plan to be more realistic.

    Spend no more than about 10 minutes thinking about how you might have handled the situation differently, to better support your goals. (Corina upthread had some great suggestions.) Once you have a new plan to try, imagine it vividly in your head a few times so it sticks, then let it go until the next time you're in a similar situation. If it works, great. If it doesn't, try something different.

    Just keep working on making your approach easier, more achievable, more sustainable, and you'll succeed with your goals. One non-ideal day isn't a failure. Only giving up the improvement effort altogether is a failure.

    Some people here use very rough approximations for truly rare events. (I don't know how often you have events like the dinner for your pastor. Maybe that's not rare?)

    Things that happen semi-frequently on repeat are worth finding new strategies for. Things that happen truly rarely aren't as important to pin down. Also, as you get more practice logging things you CAN log, you'll get better at approximating things you can't pin down in detail. It's a learning process.

    Like I said, the rare thing is a drop in the ocean. The ocean is our day in, day out routine eating and activity habits that we repeat over and over. The majority of our days will determine the majority of our weight/health outcome, not the rare day where we ate too much cake, or (flip side) worked out for 5 hours. Focus the most effort on routine habits, I'd recommend.

    Personal anecdote: I lost from obese to a healthy weight in 2015-16, and have been maintaining a healthy weight since. I tried various ways of handling potluck events, where I tend to feel a need to try everything (FOMO?), so tend to overeat. After a while, I realized that I probably only go to half a dozen potlucks in a year, and that I didn't really need to stress about it. Eight years on, I'm still at a healthy weight, admittedly with a little up-creep and down-creep of scale weight in there. After major weight loss, I know how to lose a pound or few if necessary. So I eat over calorie goal when there's a potluck, NBD. That's just me, though. Some people seem to do better psychologically when being more strict.

    You can figure out what you need. It will take some patience, and IMO you should give yourself some grace while you work on figuring that stuff out. What would you say to a friend who did great on weight loss tactics for 4 days, then had one not-great day? Would you tell her to give up? Would you tell her she's a failure? I'll bet not. I'll bet you'd go with some variation on "you're fine, keep going, you can make this work". Maybe say that to yourself, and mean it? :flowerforyou:

    Best wishes - IME, the quality of life improvement is worth the effort!

Categories