Monday, May 16, 2011

Plant-Strong Success Tip #8: Progress Not Perfection


Perfectionist thinking.

I'll bet it's something that a lot of readers of HGK suffer from. Personally, I'm no stranger to it.

While this may work in other areas of your life (and I'm doubtful that it does, but let's leave that for the therapist's couch!) perfectionist thinking will backfire like nobody's business when it comes to your diet.

Imagine this scenario: You are on a "diet." You have been great at sticking to the plan for 5 days. You attend a 5 hour long dress rehearsal for your kids' annual ice skating spectacular. The adults running the show believe that it's a good idea to have a room full of things like pizza, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, birthday cake, chips and sugary drinks available to all of the kids and adults during said dress rehearsal. You "indulge" in a piece of cookie, a bite of cake, a leftover pizza crust and an entire blondie while you are at the rink (but who's counting?). You know "that" food is not "on your plan" but worse than that, you physically and emotionally feel like crap after eating the sweets.

What is going on in your head now?

Are you beating yourself up? Are you telling yourself that you blew it and now you might as well eat more junk? Does this carry over into how you eat for the rest of the day (possibly a binge)? Maybe into the next day, the next week, the next month? Do you tell yourself that you can't possibly stick to a healthy eating plan so you might as well give up and eat whatever you want?

Or, do you acknowledge that it wasn't the best choice and decide to go back to your healthy eating plan immediately? Can you let it go, really let it go, right then and move on? I'll bet you can if you just give it a try. That's how I got off the vicious cycle of beating myself up about poor food choices and I have never looked back.

Even Rip Esselstyn says it's "plant-strong" NOT "plant-perfect."


Do you suffer from perfectionist thinking when it comes to your diet?

Do you think you can give it up so that you can have a healthy relationship with food?

Can you feel good (even great) about the progress you have made and remind yourself of that when you experience self-doubt?

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