the right way to mess up your diet

I’m sure you’re familiar with messing up on your diet. I’m sure you, just like me, have felt that frustration of messing up a diet and wanting to start all over again cos it feels like we just ruined everything in life and the only way to fix it is to start over. Then you start over only to mess up again, and go through all the frustrations again and either start the cycle once more or just quit and try again sometime down the road. It's a never ending cycle.

It’s normal.

It’s normal to mess up. But messing up and keep trying to start over only to do similar things hoping for different results is the wrong way to mess up.

Let’s get this idea of perfection out of the way first. There is no such thing as a perfect diet. There is no diet program out there where every single day is just super happy-go-lucky zero frustrations, zero hunger and your weight just falls off more and more everyday till you reach your goals. That’s called Wonderland.

It doesn’t exist.

Messing up in your diet is normal. Super normal. It’s suppose to happen just like school, just like work, just like life. No one ever went to school and had a good day every single day. No one went to work having everyday perfect days leading to promotion after promotion year after year. No one’s happy every single day in life. Same with your diet. It’s not gonna go perfect every single day and that’s normal.

What do you do if you mess up your diet?

You keep going. You acknowledge you messed up and you keep going. You don’t start over, you don’t beat yourself up for it, you just stand back up after fallen down and keep moving forward towards your destination.

I mean yeah of course you can analyze why you messed up. Did you mess up cos of a lack of planning? If so, get back up make some plans and keep going. Did you mess up although you did everything according to plan? If so, make some adjustments to your plan. You don’t have to abandon your plan completely, just make adjustments around the area that made you mess up in the first place. Did you mess up cos of something completely non-diet related? If so, just stick to the plan and keep going when you are able to. Life happens, sometimes it hits us like truck and we need a moment to get back on our feet. Take all the time you need when that happens and just get back on track afterwards.

A weight loss journey is a series of mess ups. It’s a journey of constant adjustments. The mess ups are golden. They tell you what may or may not need some tweaking, and once you’ve made those tweaks the chances of messing up the exact same way again lessens. The more of these little tweaks you make over time, the more you’re adjusting your habits to be realistically sustainable for the long term.

Messing up isn’t a reflection of your self worth. You’re not better or worse for messing up. You’re better or worse for how you deal with messing up. Own up to your faults, fix what needs fixing, and keep going. There’s no secret to losing weight, a big part of it is to truly just not give up. As long as you don’t give up you’re gonna keep finding ways to move forward towards your goals. Sure it’s gonna take a lot longer than you think, but that’s the reality of this journey. Changing your habits and creating new ones is supposed to take a long time.

I hope this helps!

In other news, there was a recent meta-analysis that came out last week that looked the relationship between daily step count and all-cause mortality. I’m not gonna go through all the nerdy number here, but I’ll link the study here along with an article here on it with all the details.

Long story short the researchers found that rates of all-cause mortality were around 12% lower per 1000 steps per day, and walking for 20-30min (2400-3600 steps for most people) daily for a year led to decreases in blood pressure, resting heart rate, body fat percentage, BMI, total cholesterol, and depression scores, while increasing VO2max. In other words walking more could equal to living longer.

I’m sharing this with you cos it’s something I realized recently that I needed to change in my life. 2021 for me has a been a year where I’ve successfully embedded workouts into my lifestyle. Though I was working out regularly, my daily steps took a huge hit cos of the pandemic. I didn’t think of it much as I was still pushing iron regularly, but the release of this study made me re-evaluate my lifestyle.

At the end of the day I’m chasing for health. I’m really not fussed about having bulging abs, or looking absolutely thicc like a tank. Health is my ultimate goal, and all that other stuff that comes along with it is a really nice bonus but not my personal endgame. I wanna have the freedom of mobility in my 80s-90s. I wanna see the kiddos grow up and settle into their lives without having to worry about my health. I wanna have the ability to chase whatever dreams and goals I have at any moments notice without ever being hindered by health.

And so couple of days ago I got a small home treadmill. You probably would have seen me babble about it on my IG stories if you’ve been following along there. It’s only been a couple of days but so far feels like my best investment in 2022 so far. Getting an extra 3000steps (30min casual walk) has never felt so easy. It’s been great as a warmup before my workouts, also whatever extra calories I burned from that is definitely a plus too (remember though if you’re on a weight loss journey don’t count burned calories into your diet, leave burned calories out of your calculations). I may have hit my weight goals a while back, but this whole figuring out how to live a healthy lifestyle while balancing enjoyment of life has been a super fun and challenging journey in itself.

Anyways sorry for rambling on, thought I'd give you a little update on my journey as well.

Till the next one! Stay well, stay safe!

—Po.