OK. I need the whole world to stop associating Good and Bad with eating. Really. Just like I managed to banish “fall off the wagon“, I want to stop saying things like, “I had a good week” to mean that I ate in a way that would lead to weight loss. And especially to ban “I had a bad week” to mean that I ate in a way that wouldn’t lead to weight loss. People say they had a “bad week” when, actually, they ate in a way that left their weight exactly as it was the week before. What’s so BAD about that?
Much much worse are the phrases, “I was bad” and “I was good”. I actually bite my tongue when I hear them. But this is (at least partly) my blog and I can be rude, right? If you kill a kitten, you are bad. If you eat 10 Mars Bars, you are a person with disordered eating. If you kill the kitten because you ate 10 Mars Bars, you are sick.
OK – so what am I going to say instead of “had a good week”? This week,when asked, I tried, “I worked hard and it paid off”. Not bad… It’s what I meant, but there’s more.
Sometimes you work hard and it doesn’t pay off.
Or sometimes it’s all quite easy and you lose weight.
So I figure I need three measures:
- How easy it is from the inside. In other words, did I have the motivation to eat well and move? Or was it struggle from the moment I woke up to keep my hands out of the crackers?
- How easy was it from the outside? Did my schedule accommodate going for walks and calm, planned meals at home or did I actually have a social life?
It’s that last situation that makes me struggle with the good/bad thing. It’s GOOD to eat out with friends. It’s GOOD to celebrate around a meal. But all that goodness makes losing weight harder – at least for that week.
- Given the above, how hard did I work to lose weight?
If I was going to make this a graph, I’d have two axes- the lines, not the chopping things. One would chart the hard/easy side of life – an average of the first two questions above. The second would chart my own effort – from working hard to slacking off completely.
But how do I boil all that down into a one sentence answer?
- Q: Did you have a good week?
- A: Yes thanks; it was hard to eat well on nights out and to find time to exercise but I worked hard and it paid off.
- Q: Did you have a good week?
- A: It was kind of boring but that made it easier to lose weight.
- Q: Did you have a good week?
- It was dreadful – my car/guinea pig/favourite shoes died. I had no motivation at all to eat well or exercise and I gave into my emotions.
- Q: Did you have a good week?
- A: I had a fantastic week. I had two dinners out and a short break in Paris. I couldn’t get my head around eating well and had no time to exercise so I didn’t lose weight – but it really was an amazing week.
- Q: Did you have a good week?
- A: Not really – it was boring. I should have worked harder to take advantage of all the time I had but I just couldn’t find the will to work hard so I didn’t lose any weight.
OK. Sorry for the excessive Qing and Aing but I needed to know for sure that, even though people are always going to use Good and Bad to talk about a diet – I can deflect and use other language. At first it will be just language but, as with all things in this search for food/body sanity, it will eventually become how I think and how I act.
I just cannot have weight management define the quality of my life!
So here’s to a good couple of days in London. I may not always be in control of where and when I eat, but I’m feeling motivated to make good choices and walk miles.
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