Don’t Start Over

One possible tendency for someone who is trying to lose weight is the Monday morning start-over. You eat well for say two weeks. Then comes Aunt Jane’s birthday party, followed by a neighborhood meet-and-greet party, then you’re asked to make cookies for a church function. Before you know it, you’ve blown your positive stride.

So what do you do? You might decide it’s just too hard right now to eat right and make a firm determination that come Monday, you’ll start over with a clean slate and purpose. It sounds pretty promising, but does starting over actually work? I’m inclined to say no. At least, it hasn’t worked for me.

Here is why the “starting over” plan doesn’t work: it makes you stop trying. It’s tempting to see your diet as a game where you either win or you lose. If you ate too many calories today, we’ve already lost. We may as well we may as well eat donuts, chips, and fried chicken. Right?

I don’t think so. Let’s say you outspent your daily food intake by 500 calories for the past two days. If you give up and decide to start again on Monday, you will likely stop counting calories altogether and add on another 500 without thinking twice about it. Our minds may reason that temporarily giving up doesn’t matter because we’re going to get back on track next week.

We will never lose weight or get healthy this way. We will spend the first half of next week just working off our weekend splurge. Then another temptation will come and it will much too easy to promise ourselves another Monday start-over. And so the cycle will continue.

What should we do instead of starting over? Continue in patience. Patience with ourselves that we might go over our caloric goal at times. It’s okay. Just move forward and keep trying. Remember, there is no such thing as wiping the slate clean on Monday—everything we have done to our bodies will indeed still be there.