Give Yourself Grace

 A lot of people who follow the FMD plan are habitual dieters. How many of you have been on Weight Watchers, or Adkins, or keto or low calorie or one of the many other diets out there? I have been on a few.

All of us have been told for decades that calories in and calories out equals weight loss and it if you don't do it that way, you are doing it wrong. That leads to feelings of failure when we have a bad day and need a non diet food treat to make us feel better. That feeling is horrible and it is wrong. 

FMD does not count calories and makes it easy to just simply eat good food at the right times to heal your body and help your body get rid of fat.

But what happens when we make a mistake on FMD? What happens when we can't eat what we are supposed to for a meal because maybe there was an emergency we had to attend to? Or maybe we simply ran out of time to get to the store? Maybe our kid's soccer game ran over and now there just is NOT time to cook a healthy meal? Those feelings of failure come creeping in. Those negative feeling also tend to make us want to eat not-so-healthy foods to combat the crappy way we feel. You know, eat your feelings. We have all been there. 

Some people want to start over when they make a mistake. Go back to square one, which means waiting until Monday to do this all over and try to get through the week...again. You know what happens then? Our brains say "it's only Thursday- you got 3 whole days to eat whatever you want, so go for it!! PIZZA NIGHT!" And then you have SO many opportunities to make poor food choices before Monday. 

What if you did not start over? What if you just kept going? That is what Haylie says in her book, The Fast Metabolism Diet Plan. Just keep going. Don't stress. 

This is a post from social media that has been shared many times and it resonated with me: 

Ten minutes of yoga is better than ten minutes of sitting. Two healthy meals a day is better than 1 crap meal of fast food junk. Heck, even part of a healthy meal is better than one that is not healthy at all. 

Don't be hard on yourself when you are taking this healthy eating journey. Right now, the world is on fire and there are so many terrible things going on everywhere. You may have family not working, or working less. You may be teaching your kids from home and don't know how to do it. Maybe you are working from home and are super stressed. Give yourself some grace and understand that doing FMD poorly is better than not doing FMD at all. This is not an all or nothing game. If you struggle, try again the next meal or snack. Strive to get to 100% but 50% is better than 0% on those days when you are trying to take a business call and teach your kids and get the dog to stop barking.