How to Get Back On Track - Reader Question

I got an absolutely great question from a reader, a question I have received a few times:

"Did you have days that you had completely failed? How to get back on track? PP days for a while? Or just keep going normally? Thank you so much for your blog and sharing your story. It's truly an inspiration to me. XO."

I would like to start by saying: ‘D’aaaawwwwww’ :3

I love receiving questions, and I love love loooove hearing about your stories, your lives, and all the wonderful compliments. The best thing anyone can ever say to me is that I’m an inspiration, I just get so proud and so joyful. Thank you.

So, to I’ll try my best to answer this once and for all with an analogy.

If you were to take a class at your gym, like Body Pump (my fav class at Goodlife… even though I no longer have a membership there.) Or just a barbell weight lifting class, they are super popular right now…
So you are at this class and you ask the instructor, well what do I do? How much should I lift?

The instructor could answer a number of things, but what determines how much weight you put on those barbells is you. What level of fitness are you at? How long have you been lifting? How determined are you and how motivated are you to see results? What are you comfortable with?

Well what do you do if you cheat, you fall off the wagon for a day, a week, for years. What then?
It depends on you my dear reader. How long did your binge-cheating-thing last? How strictly did you follow the diet prior to cheating? Do you think you could handle a 4-5 day attack phase to pick yourself back up again?

I could tell you what I would do, but that doesn’t really help you, does it? If your weight lifting instructor told you how much he or she lifted, that is completely off of what you should probably do in most cases, they have been doing it longer and have had a completely different experience weight lifting than you.

You could easily go back to one PV day one PP day, alternating rhythm with no ‘punishment’ to yourself, because that’s what it would be, giving yourself a few PP days in a row seems like a punishment to me, when you could easily get back on regular Cruise and lose the weight without having to do an Attack phase.

The reason my situation would be different than most of yours is because I never alternated days, I didn’t do a single PP day all throughout my Cruise Phase. So what I would do, is a mini-attack as a reminder to myself to not to cheat, kindof like a punishment really.

I did cheat, on day 2 of the diet a friend I didn’t know at the time would bully me the entirety of my weight loss journey, pressured me into drinking because she didn’t want to feel left out.

So I drank 5 shots of tequila… and felt super guilty afterwards. I just continued on with the diet like normal, finished my 10 days of attack and the rest is history ;)

Have not cheated since, but I have cheated in the way that I have eaten over my daily limit of yogurt or oat bran, consistently throughout the diet. When I did a binge-yogurt day, week, month as it would happen, I never did any attack phases, just calmed myself down, cut out my temptation (stopped buying yogurt) and tried to use my willpower to do better the next day.

If you cheat at the beginning of the day, your day isn’t lost. If you spend over budget, 50,000$ on your wedding day, does that justify buying another 10-15,000$ thing, because hey, you are over budget anyway. Snap yourself out of it and don’t make it worse. It’s hard to get out of that mentality but you can do it.
Hope this helps.

Above all just don’t give up, right? The weight does come off, everybody has moments of weakness, you are only weak if you let those moments defeat you.

Good luck, and thanks for all the comments and questions.

xoxo