"With Me, It's All or Nuthin' . . ."
"Is it all or nuthin' with you??"*
Geez, I sure hope not. At least, not where weight loss and maintenance are concerned.
Truth be told, I'm something of a perfectionist. But I've had to rein in my perfectionistic tendencies in several areas of my life. My house isn't perfectly clean and neat (I'm sure this comes as a complete shock to you). I don't change my furnace filters on time, my grandfather clock oftentimes goes unwound (it's dead right now, in fact), and I don't try to be perfect in my eating habits.
Why?
Because "all or nothing" thinking is a guaranteed one-way ticket to failure.
That's the thing about "diets," you see. Folks panic when they think they've "blown it" or "fallen off the wagon." I am not quite sure why this is. Think about it . . . did you get 100% on every test in school? No? You still graduated, though, right? And you know a few things . . . enough to earn a living, get through life, teach your kids?
I thought so. Yet, you didn't "do" school perfectly.
So, why do you think you have to follow a food plan perfectly?
I will admit, though, that once upon a time, I thought I had to follow a diet plan to a T in order to succeed. I would be absolute perfection the first couple of days, and I'd watch the scale drop. Somewhere around the third day, some extra food would creep in (yeah, I'd be pretty hungry by then). The scale would stop moving. I would then figure that I'd blown it, and I'd abandon the whole thing.
How I changed my thinking and got from there to here is a whole 'nother story. I can tell you, though, that eating "perfectly" ain't the answer. "Good enough" is, well, good enough.
Where weight loss and maintenance are concerned, "good enough" will do. What does this mean? It means that in the long run, if you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. If you eat more than you planned one day, it's not the end of the world. Say, for example, that you eat a couple of cookies that you hadn't planned on. What happens? Well, you probably consumed maybe 200 extra calories. Seeing as how a sensible eating plan will have you cutting back roughly 500 calories a day, you're still ahead by about 300.
Let's say it wasn't a couple of extra cookies . . . it was a couple of extra MEALS. Yeah, that's going to be a bit more than 200 calories. But if you work at eating less than you burn most days, in the long run those extra meals won't matter. (Unless you have a couple of extra meals every couple of days. THAT won't work.)
Maintaining a healthy weight for a lifetime doesn't require perfection. What it does require is persistence -- and the realization that mistakes don't have to blow things sky high. It's what you do in the long run that counts, not what you do on any given day.
Bottom line, gang: you don't have to be perfect to lose weight and keep it off. You just have to get it right most of the time. So, learn from your mistakes, don't beat yourself up over them, and celebrate your successes. (I have it on good authority that self-flagellation does not burn extra calories.)
If perfection were necessary to lose weight and keep it off, you'd sure not be reading my words right now. If this reformed perfectionist can do it, surely you can, too.
*Sung by Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, a musical I was in, once upon a very-long-time-ago. No, I wasn't Ms. Ado . . . I was just in the chorus.
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Some more info to chew on:
Cognitive Distortions (including All or Nothing Thinking)
Nice reference to Oklahoma....one of my favorite movies. I was going to make a comment about it and then I saw your footnote.
Nice entry today and it hopefully it will help those perfectionists out there.
Posted by: Ann Marie | June 03, 2005 at 08:03 AM