BREAKFAST: Fresh fruit platter (kiwi, berries, and peaches)
LUNCH: Vegetable soup with cucumber and tomato salad
SNACK: Peach and avocado (in the evening)
DINNER: Brown rice, black beans, tomatoes, salsa, avocado, cilantro (and a little bit of Yumm Sauce)
WATER: 55 ounces
SUPPLEMENTS: Done!
EXERCISE: 22 pushups
I think I cheated today 🙁
I say I “think”, because I’m not exactly sure.
Regardless, it was not a good situation for my mental health, and I learned a good lesson from it.
It was another one of those crazy-busy days, and I was running from one thing to the next (Have I mentioned that I cannot wait for summer, and for me to be done teaching? I seriously need a break). The day was progressing well, and I was eating well and getting all my supplements at the appropriate times. We decided to schedule an end of the year dinner celebration for our Exercise and Movement Science students, and we catered Café Yumm at a local park (it got into the 90’s today, and there are a lot of kiddos amongst the faculty and students).
For those of you who don’t have a Café Yumm near you, it is a beans/rice bowl that usually has tomatoes, olives, avocado, cheese, salsa, sour cream and cilantro, with a canola-based dressing on it. I knew I wouldn’t have time for dinner at home, either before or after, so I ordered my own meal at the restaurant (brown rice, black beans, tomatoes, salsa, avocado, and cilantro, and added Liquid Aminos on top for more flavor). These are all foods that are utilized in the Ultimate Reset program, so although this was my first time going ”off-script”, I figured I was okay.
I did well at the party in the beginning, avoiding the tortilla chips that I was craving to eat with my beans/rice bowl. However, the food I order for myself was a smaller portion than what I am used to eating right now, and so I was still hungry after I finished it. Really hungry. I am sure it didn’t help that we were in a social eating environment as well. So, I ended up taking a scoop of the regular Café Yumm bowl as well (the vegan version). All it means, is that I ended up having the dressing, however it really felt like a “cheat” to me. The ingredients in the dressing are not horribly bad for you, and most are included already in the program. But it was not made by me, and I don’t think the nutritional yeast or canola oil is really allowed on the program.
I felt emotionally crappy after I ate it, and was pretty down on myself for the rest of the night. I had wanted to go through the whole program without any slips, and I just plain wasn’t perfect (shocking, right?)…. I ended up craving more food (I am sure it was an emotional response) later in the night too, so I ate a peach (a fourth serving a fruit for the day, which I shouldn’t have had), and a small slice of avocado (to try and fill me up).
But then something made me STOP. I took a look at my emotions, and realized I was being utterly stupid. I was emotionally eating because I felt like I had “failed” at my eating.
How stupid is that? Yet, it is the pattern that I fall into a lot (as I think most of us do). “Well, I already ate something ‘bad’, so I might as well just continue since I already failed.”
Isn’t this what gets me in “trouble” normally??? It was time to STOP the madness! I stopped myself right there and then, before I spun out of control and started reaching for the chips and salsa and cheese.
I didn’t fail just because I ate something that wasn’t the best for me. Letting it spin out of control is what the failure would have been.
No. I recognized what was happening, and corrected the behavior. That is SUCCESS! I was able to change what I was doing, to help me feel better about myself, and that it all the success I can ask for!
It was an interesting lesson for me. I was falling back into negative food habits. The negative habits weren’t the actual foods I was eating. It was the emotional eating response that was happening, and my negative thoughts about myself. It was interesting to see things from this perspective, and I am glad to have learned this lesson.
The foods you eat don’t matter near as much as the way you think about yourself, nor the tendency to eat as an emotional response. Lesson well learned!