For those interested in how the new eating plan has been affecting my measurements, I present them here for your perusal: Waist: 31, Hips: 37, Legs: 21, Weight: 126.6. I’ve lost an inch here, gained an inch there, an dropped 5 pounds (which for me is fairly normal – I can vary 6-8 pounds over the course of two days). I’m not sure whether eating Paleo has had any impact on these numbers; longer-term will probably be a better measure of that. But psychologically, I’m definitely feeling a benefit.
I’ve been pretty lucky in my life to not have fallen victim to too many destructive habits. I never picked up smoking (although I did play at it for a few days back in grad school, to fit in with some out-of-town friends). I drink, and have been drunk many times, but I’ve never become an alcoholic. And I never developed any really bad eating habits – I have the typically American vices of eating fast food a couple of times a month, and probably not eating as many veggies as I should, but I don’t have the kind of relationship with food that Lifetime creates movies-of-the-week about.
I tell you all this so that you understand why I’ve never really “had” to quit anything before. No hitting bottom, no rehab, no appearances on a reality show; nothing that would force me to give something up before it killed me. As a result, whenever I have tried to change a behavior, it’s never had a life-or-death urgency to it. Which is a good thing, because my approach to change is what coud be described as “unproductive”, to put it mildly.
All-or-nothing, baby. Balls to the wall.
While this is a good approach when you’re quitting a controlled substance that could kill you (and perhaps not even then; research on addictions shows that no one approach works for everyone), it’s perhaps less effective when you’re trying to, say, change your eating habits or start exercising.
The reason this approach often doesn’t work is because humans – and real life – just don’t work that way. We try something new, stick with it for a few days, and then might slack a bit. We start an exercise plan, for example, and a week in are waylaid by a business trip to a hotel without an exercise room. Or we try to go vegetarian, and our sister’s barbecue-themed wedding is too strong a temptation to resist.
The healthy response to this, as anyone well-versed in creating effective change will tell you, is to dust yourself off and get back on the horse. The “all-or-nothing” approach, though, tells you that if you experience a setback, you give up. Can’t hack it? Can’t do it 100%, 24-7? Give up. Go back to your sedentary, fast-food-and-soda chugging lifestyle. Leave change to the pros, or at least to those who have the willpower to do it right. You suck.
Yeah, that’s my internal monologue in a nutshell.
So I’m finding that two weeks into The Primal Blueprint 30-Day Challenge, my biggest lesson hasn’t been how to eat more Paleo, or eat healthier, or even how to substitute low-carb foods for my beloved fast food. No, it’s been a confirmation of a lesson I had yet to learn: That it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. That I’m still eating healthy if I have some cheese at a wine tasting. Or if I make some cornbread because I’m sick and need some comfort food (like tonight). Or even if, God help me, I have a Pepsi while I’m out shopping.
It’s been a tough lesson to learn, make no mistake – and one that my brain still fights. I suspect I’ll never kick the “that ice cream cone means you’ve failed!” mentality, but there’s a part of my brain that’s fighting that and getting stronger by the day, that says, “You’re still okay if you have a piece of pie with dinner.” Because all-or-nothing is actually failure – it guarantees that, when I do something that I shouldn’t (and let’s be honest, it’s going to happen to 99% of us at some point or another), I’m going to give up on it completely. I’m going to fail.
It’s an approach that’s sort of illogical, at first glance – that accepting failure makes you more likely to succeed. But by accepting those “minor” failures, I stay on the path. Eating a doughnut is just a blip in an otherwise pretty good diet, not an excuse to give up. By accepting minor setbacks – and really, I don’t see them as setbacks, but as slight variations in a mostly healthy diet – I guarantee my success. Seeing a piece of cheese as an excuse to give up is the real failure.
Because failure only happens when you stop trying.
