Perfection

I recently started a program with Health in Habit and I’m absolutely loving it.  Each day, Jennifer assigns a mental exercise that’s supposed to help you think through all of the emotions behind weight loss and healthy living – not just the calories in and out.  I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a program that doesn’t involve shakes or supplements or any other external factor.  It’s just working on your heart while you work on your health.  Anywho, I wanted to share something I wrote for today’s assignment because it’s a helpful reminder to me when I feel like a failure and just want to give up.

In all of my failed weight loss attempts, “perfection” looked like:

• never “cheating”
• always being obedient to my exercise plans without faltering or complaining
• acting like losing weight is fun and easy
• turning down food when I’m hungry
• abstaining from anything “bad”
• not talking about weight loss – just acting like I woke up one day and lost lbs.

I know perfection isn’t sustainable so, maybe this is what success looks like:

• taking it one meal, one bite at a time
• trying new exercises and making plans to work out with friends so that it’s fun and on the schedule
• talking and journaling through how hard this is – mining the emotions that I’ve buried under mountains of shame and food
• eating foods that nourish me when my body is hungry and learning to listen to my body to learn when it is actually hungry vs. bored or lonely
• splurging when it’s worth it – it’s totally cool to have a piece of birthday cake on my birthday or to order my favorite dish when I visit my hometown once a year
• thinking through when splurging isn’t worth it – why am I eating right now? Am I actually hungry or am I eating just because there’s a bowl of chips sitting out?
• seeking out a community of people who are also on this journey and really relying on that support when it gets hard

Perfection is unattainable and completely unsustainable. The very nature of being human makes perfection impossible. They say that practice makes perfect but it seems like a more relevant saying would be practice makes habit. I’d rather build a lifetime of healthy habits than 2 weeks of “perfection.”