When we first started working together, my client, Gina, was struggling to make healthy eating choices and establish healthy habits both during the week and on weekends. Like many of my clients, over time Gina figured out systems and habits that made her weekdays go so much better (e.g. she started making her lunch the night before, she meal planned dinner with her husband Sunday nights, she started getting regular grocery deliveries, etc.), but weekends continued to be a big struggle. Week after week, Gina and I would meet and she would tell me how frustrated she was that her weekend, once again, got off track.
I asked Gina if she was making a plan for weekends. Was she (in advance) thinking through what social engagements and plans she had for the weekend and then deciding how she would handle each one, eating-wise? Gina said that she was doing it a little bit, but mostly informally and in her head (not writing anything down). We decided that Gina would start formalizing her weekend plans every Thursday evening so that for each social event she would have a written plan for how she would handle it, therefore relieving herself of having to make in-the-moment decisions.
Gina did this for two weeks and she was very frustrated to report to me that things still weren’t going great on weekends. While she was making food plans, she wasn’t actually able to stick to them much of the time. I asked Gina to tell me about a few of them. She told me that one time she was getting her kids sushi but planned for herself to eat a salad once they got home. She ended up eating her kids’ sushi instead of the salad. Another time, she was at a Mother’s Day brunch at her sister’s house and didn’t plan to have cake but gave in in the moment and had some anyway. I asked Gina, “But why didn’t you plan to have sushi with your kids? Isn’t it reasonable to have sushi with your kids sometimes? And why didn’t you plan to have a slice of cake on Mother’s Day? Isn’t it reasonable to have cake on Mother’s Day?”
Gina and I discussed this and we quickly realized that while she was (much to her credit!) now making weekend plans, she was making “ideal” weekend plans (i.e. the plan she would follow to maximize health/weight loss) but not actually reasonable or realistic weekend plans. And because the plans weren’t reasonable, no wonder Gina wasn’t able to follow them! Gina and I decided that moving forward, she was going to shift her mindset from, “What will help me be entirely healthy and lose weight the fastest?” to “What plan is reasonable and realistic to for me to follow, given the circumstances?”
It was important for Gina to remember that the “ideal” plan is rarely a reasonable plan, and if it’s not actually doable than it’s not the ideal plan anyway!