Not Guilty

Ok, I admit it - I ate like a pig last night. Well, that's not technically correct (not to mention unfair to the pig). While a pig eats fast and sloppy like he may never eat again, he rarely eats because he's bored, nervous, there's a lull in the conversation or well past the point of being satisfied simply to avoid being impolite to the host. At a holiday party, I did all that (and more.) I ate rich food. I ate sugary food. I ate a lot of it. And I ate late into the evening. A conservative estimate of my excess calories yesterday would be about 1,500 - 2,000. If I ate like that every day, I'd weigh about 330 pounds a year from now.

So now what? Am I a complete failure who should curl up in a hole somewhere because I went way over the top last night? Please! Give me a break! I'm going to give myself one. You know why? Because I don't eat that way every day. In fact, I stayed up late last night so I wouldn't get indigestion (but I still did), woke up this morning still full (I hate that - I love to be ready for breakfast first thing in the morning) and I know it's going to take about a week of extra vigilant clean & light eating days to break even. But that's okay, because I know it's an isolated situation and I know how to fix it. And I will. So no big deal.

Several of my past and current clients (and many of you reading, I'm sure) would be feeling very guilty about an over-indulgence like that right now. You'd feel bad about your lack of control or about letting yourself down. You might even feel a physical sensation of heaviness or a tightness in your gut and a sense of helplessness, sadness and disappointment in yourself. But what good would that do? In fact, it's the worst thing you could do. It lowers your self esteem and makes you feel even more a victim, it creates a negative association with being fallible (which is only human), and it makes it more likely that you'll just give up on your efforts to clean up your eating because, what the heck, you blew it last night anyway, right?

Worst of all, lingering guilt can obscure the learning opportunity that it initially presents, which is its only real value.

Guilt serves one very important purpose: to show you how you might do better in the future. If you are blaming yourself for slipping up, realize you did the best you could at the time, otherwise you would have done something else. So be gentle with yourself and look for the lesson. It's there, believe me, and you're more likely to find it sooner if you surrender the guilt first. And then you'll not only feel better, you'll know you've grown and then everyone one in your path will be just a little better off as a result, even if you can't see it.

I got up this morning and took two very grateful dogs for a walk they may not otherwise have gotten today if I hadn't overdone it last night. They felt much better after the walk, and so did I.

And then I got home and had a heck of a workout.