I'm struggling! ARRRGGG! This weekend was full of triggers, and I gave in.
....
The good news is that I'm recognizing that this is not my new normal. Eating healthy is my new normal, and I'm taking action more quickly then I've ever done in the past. I'm coming to this awesome group, because I know I'll get a face punch from Faraday, and I'll move forward. I also realized that Thanksgiving really threw me out of my rhythm. Not because it was a holiday, but instead because we were gone from home so I wasn't in my normal pattern of having a plan and prepping for the week. I honestly haven't been impacted too much by the holiday season, other then visiting my parents more often (which equates to crappy food).
Time for me to get back to meal planning and prepping, and back on track! It's a new day!
hey mom22 (and all!);
I'll facepunch you if you feel it will purge you of the evil demons. (I've learned that some folks actually WANT me to facepunch - maybe I'm creative or shocking or entertaining about it? I dunno. I call it "putting your cheek on my fist"....)
Falling off the wagon is "bad" and "cheating", yes. My wife has done it, I have done it.* I don't facepunch myself OR her if it happens. Instead, either or both of us take a walk or do yard work or anything involving enough exercise and exertion that the work burns off whatever it is either of us ate.
I call this "BURN IT TO EARN IT". We are all going to get hit by surprise attacks like mom22boys did. It's going to happen. Most of the time, we'll successfully resist. However, that "mom attack" she found herself in, that's a difficult situation.
When it happens, it happens. So you're sitting there feeling shot-through with guilt, being upset, feeling like you've failed and all is lost.
There's something to remember about these events:
1)
The guilt does not HELP your BODY. Go ahead and have your guilt. Work through the psychological effect however you need to.
2)
The guilt (and the sin itself) does not erase the progress you have already made. You don't destroy the success you have already achieved. Not with one, or maybe even two events.
3)
The guilt does not get you back on track. What gets you back on track is your love of what you are doing and your love of how it changes your body and your life!
It's far more important to BURN IT TO EARN IT. Maybe we learn to have an episode like that, guilt-free, but making sure it schedules us for the work (exercise) needed to burn the bad thing out of our bodies while we get back on the strait and narrow road?
Next Post: How do we get back on track?!?!?PS: Now look - I'm not talking about a Kiwi-style falling off the wagon every other day and calling it good. I'm talking about a situation where you are ACTUALLY ON A WAGON and something happens and you have trouble, fall off, then get right back on again.
In Whole30, if you are doing it "right", you would start over. (I leave that decision to you Whole30 folks since you know more about that than I do.)
In Keto, you run the risk of dropping out of ketosis and ending your body's fat-burning mechanism. In that case, exercise can be critically important to getting back into ketosis as quickly as possible. If the cheat is really bad, it could take up to three days of careful eating to get back on the wagon.
(and BTW: another Keto trick for wagon-faller-offers is to jack up the fat intake. I'm not so sure I like that idea, especially if we're talking about animal fat and not coconut oil or fish oil. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I can't say I want to be in the condition that I need triage of that kind...)
In Paleo, well, I'm not sure if it matters that much to those folks at all - they just get back on the wagon and keep going, I guess?
*We've been on the keto lifestyle so long, that even when we cheat, it's tiny and we run back to the safety of the lifestyle, fearful of what will happen. What we call "cheating" now is nothing whatsoever like before we went keto. A few ounces of peanut butter, a quarter-sized piece of Russell Stover sugar-free chocolate or a piece of fried chicken that's got a little flour on it instead of the baking soda hack we've come to love.
In my case, I can get REALLY sick if I cheat - some confections, and even beers now, are sweetened with lactose. I had a milk stout once upon a time and it made me sick in ways I've never been sick before, an extreme negative reinforcement.