Over the weekend I want to a holiday party. And I got off track. Yes, even professional diet coaches make mistakes. The party started at 2:00pm and I ate (a healthy and satisfying) lunch before I left. My plan for the party was: no alcohol (in part because I was driving) and just raw vegetables (which I was pretty sure they would have), and then once I got home, eat a good dinner and have dessert. The first hour or so of the party went smoothly. I was able to stick easily to my no alcohol rule and I didn’t even go look at the food. Then, a while later, I found myself sitting around the food table talking to people. It seemed like everyone around me was eating from the delicious looking spread. They did have raw vegetables, and for a while I was able to limit myself to just that by placing the bowl of carrots and cauliflower directly in front of me.
But after a while, my resistance seemed to go down and I started eating the junk food. What were my sabotaging thoughts? It wasn’t, “Everyone else is eating it so I can, too,” because I know that my body doesn’t know or care what anybody around me is eating, it only knows what I eat. It wasn’t even, “It’s the holidays and I should be able to indulge,” because I knew that I had many more holiday-related events coming up where I was planning to eat more food than just vegetables. I think it started with, “Just a little bit is okay,” and as frequently happens, a little bit turned into more, and then even more. Before I knew it, I found myself taking chip after chip and even eating the candy that I had already decided I would take home and have after dinner. I was most definitely off track.
And then I remembered a situation one of my dieters was in a few years ago. She was at a party at a bar and got off track by eating too many of the bar snacks being passed around. Instead of just thinking, “I’ve blown it for the party, I might as well keep eating and get back on track when I get home/at the end of the day/tomorrow/the day after tomorrow,” she went to the bathroom, read her Advantages List and Response Cards, refocused, and didn’t eat anything else for the rest of the party. I have recounted this story countless times to my clients as a reminder that it’s possible to gain control in the middle of a party and that they never need to wait even one more moment to get back on track. With that in my mind, I realized that if my client could do it, I could, too. I made the decision that I would get back on track right that moment, and just like my client, not eat anything else for the rest of the party. And that’s exactly what I did.
I ended up staying at the party for several more hours and didn’t leave until after 8:00pm. By the time I left the party, I was hungry again and looking forward to dinner – but I knew I wouldn’t eat it until I got home. As I was leaving the party, I took a moment to reflect back on my experience and give myself a whole lot of credit. I acknowledged how great it was that I was able to get back on track and what a triumph it was that I managed, after getting off track, to stop eating completely and actually leave hungry. What could have turned out to be a bad experience in which I continued to eat off track for the rest of the party (and potentially the rest of the day), and felt really badly about it, turned into a major success. Although I had overeaten earlier in the party, because I recovered and got right back on track, it became an experience I was proud of, not one I regretted.
The moral of the story is that even diet coaches get off track from time to time. We’re not perfect, no one is perfect. But a mistake doesn’t have to be a painful thing. In fact, a mistake that you recover from right away can turn out to be something that makes you feel even stronger and more confident, instead of less, because it gives you the opportunity to prove to yourself that you can bounce back right away. If you get off track during the holiday season, get right back on. Just like my dieter did at her party, and just like I did at mine, you never need to wait even one more moment to get back on track. And remember – the moment you get back on track is the moment you start feeling good again.