Diary of a Habyt babe PT. 4
By Kate Holland - a Habyt member
It wasn't until recently, that I realized I am an extreme person. I'm far from a bungee jumping daredevil, but I'm extreme in the sense that when I do something, it's all or nothing. My dad always told me, "Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing." Okay, so that wasn't my dad, it was Ron Swanson, but it's a saying I hold true. If I do something, it's going to perfect, otherwise, why bother? The problem with this logic is that I often have a hard time finding balance. I don't mean that I'm physically unbalanced (although my tree pose could use some work), but that I struggle to find a happy medium between two extremes. I tend to think that if something is not going to be perfect, it's worthless. When I started my journey with The Habyt, I applied this logic to my diet. The Habyt was my chance to reboot my eating habits, and I wasn't going to screw it up this time.
Of course, things in life are rarely perfect. During the first two weeks of my Habyt journey, I was extremely regimented. I was measured every gram of food and planned out almost every bite. Then, during the second week, we celebrated birthdays at work. A carton of Magnolia Bakery's banana pudding stared at me from across the conference room table. I watched as everyone else took their pick of cupcakes and cookies, and I thought, one spoonful of banana pudding won't hurt, right? After all, banana is a fruit. So it's practically a serving of fruit. It's like a healthy dessert! Somewhere along the way of deciding pudding has the same nutritional value as fruit, I was half way through the carton. And once I had a taste of the sweet stuff, my reaction was similar to Bruce (the shark from Finding Nemo, obviously) when he gets a sniff of blood in the water. Except instead of chasing Nemo's dad and Dory around a sunken ship, I was diving head first into a jar of Swedish Fish.
Within an hour, I managed to tear my way though almost every snack in the office. I sat at my desk, which was littered with candy wrappers, and felt utterly defeated. In general, whenever I screw up on something, I tend to think everything is ruined. Apparently, I can be a bit dramatic about this. Even as a kid, if I accidentally colored outside of the lines on one page, the whole coloring book was dead to me. I now see the flaws with this logic, but it's still a thought process I tend to apply to dieting. I sat at my desk convinced I had destroyed all my hard work. I decided to shoot Christina an email confessing to my sins and asking how she copes with a bad day. She told me that bad days are common, and they can often turn into bad weeks and even months. I'm not the only one who tends to think, "If I go over 10 grams of carbs, everything is ruined, so I might as well go over 300 grams." Christina reminded me that one bad day is not the end of the world and that I shouldn't feel guilty. You can let yourself have a bad day, but the next morning pull it back together and start fresh. If you color outside the lines once, it doesn't mean you need a whole new coloring book.
I also remembered something that an old therapist told me. When you're going through the recovery process, it's common to relapse. However, this relapse doesn't mean you have to go all the way back to the beginning and start again. You already built a foundation of progress, which means getting back on track will be even easier the second time around. I once heard Shira Lenchewski, the author of The Food Therapist, say that it's more harmful to eat a Bic Mac and shame yourself for it, than to just enjoy the Big Mac (I may have over heard this on an Instagram story interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, do not judge me). Don't ruminate on your mistakes, in your diet, or in your life in general. Okay, so you had some banana pudding. You don't need to justify the pudding by telling everyone you went to the gym that morning, or that you had a salad for lunch. Just because you ate something unhealthy, it doesn't have to come with a side of guilt. You've been working hard, enjoy the damn pudding.
