[Video!] EXACTLY What to do when you fall off your diet goal
Trigger Warning + Disclaimer
We talk about food and body. We’re pretty unabashed in describing self-deprecating thoughts, binges, specific foods, and dieting.
Sugar Sober (it’s content and offerings) is absolutely not intended to substitute for psychological counseling, therapy, or professional health care advice.
If this is triggering for you and/or you need qualified, professional health care, we recommend you check out our Eating Disorders Resources page first.
Fell off your diet, body, or wellness goal?
Of course you did.
Approximately 80% of people that make a New Year's Resolution drop it by the second week of February.
Mid-February.
That sweet six week mark.
And that's based off a survey of 800 million people.
But here's something interesting. So while literally millions of people are gonna end by the second week of February, most don't even make it that far.
This survey then predicted that most people give up on January 19th.
That sweet three-week mark.
The research firm literally calls it Quitters Day! (Now THAT’S a holiday for the people!)
And that's exactly where we're gonna pick up the conversation - Today we're talking about what to do when you've fallen off of your diet, body, or wellness goal.
You've probably set one and it's probably very ambitious because you're a high achieving lady who does hard shit. And now it's not working out and you're frustrated.
We’ve both been there 1,001 times.
So we're gonna break down exactly why this is happening and exactly what you can do to move forward towards your goal.
In this blog and video, we're talking about New Year's Resolutions because in real time, right now, it's New Year's. But there's a pattern where this happens again like four times throughout the year:
Spring break when people decide to tighten up their diet and workouts for summer
Summer itself when everyone’s consumed with fears of their bodies being seen in a bathing suit
September when the “back to reality,” marketing hits and people desire getting back to a normal routine after summer travel and parties
then right back at New Year’s with resolution setting
BUT FIRST, an important notice:
It feels so gross when we say "if you fuck up going keto and eliminating carbs, here's how to fix it and be MORE keto adherent!"
We hope you understand that we don't really think you need to be keto. We think keto is trash (and Laura’s a licensed Nutritionist!). We don't want you to be keto.
What we want is to meet you, our dear reader and sister in Sugar Sober, where you are.
If keto (or any other diet or workout or body modification program) is what you're doing and you keep fucking up, let's talk about it. Let's use this as a case study example for what social scientists and nutrition scientists have figured out is the pattern or the system of human behavior.
The goal was never to be keto (or any other diet or workout or body modification program). The goal was to feel a certain way. Keto is your the vehicle to get there.
The real goal is "I wanna feel this way." And so we tell ourselves, “oh, if I just go keto, if I just go to the gym all the time - whatever it may be - then I'll be happy. Then I'll have all of these things in my life that I want.”
So maybe it’s inaccurate when you say, "my goal is to eat keto."
Maybe you need to do some soul searching and figure out why.
What would that bring you?
What would that really add to your life?
That is the conversation that has to happen instead of arbitrarily picking a goal because it's what the girl with the perkiest ass on Instagram is doing, it's what your favorite fitness influencer is promoting, or it's what the coworker at work who lost 20 pounds is doing.
They just had the best persuasion marketing in your world in that moment. But there's so much really impressive research into how to pick a smart goal that is for you and actually gets you where you want to be rather than arbitrarily trying to wear other people's goals.
That leads to being really upset and identifying as a failure when it doesn't work out.
if 80% of people are falling off at the six week mark, it's not a YOU problem.
The whole process is flawed.
Your plan of how you're gonna get from A to B is simply, “Well, I'm just gonna do it, and I'm gonna do ALL of it."
^There's no process there!^
The lack of process is what's ultimately going to lead you sitting in your bed in the dark with a bad of potato chips wailing, "I don't know why it didn't work. It must be me." (this may or may not be an exact image of us years ago).
Below are the Top 3 Reasons we see ambitious, focused, driven women fall off of their diet, body, or wellness goal.
1.The number one reason why the New Year's Resolutions don't work - they're really outrageous.
So damn many of our Sugar Sober sisters set really big diet, body, and wellness goals (because they’re badass, high achievers). And that's particularly true on New Year's.
"I'm going to be vegan green smoothie wellness girl every day from here on out,"
"I am going to lose 40 pounds by May, when the weather gets warm,"
"I am going to go full keto and not have a carbohydrate for the entire calendar year.”
This is the equivalent of saying "I'm going to be somebody else starting….NOW!" And while, yes, people are malleable and change all throughout their entire life, but you don't just decide “I'm gonna be that person” and poof * you’re them.
You have to create the small steps to get there.
What we’ve found is typically when people are struggling with any single step, they jump to, "I need to just do The Big Leap."
One of our favorite examples of this is a client who desperately wanted to lose weight. Our conversations constantly revolved around fighting the candy and cookies her family set out on the counter every evening for the kids. It was a classic case of fighting it all day just to over indulge at night (I’m sure you can’t relate…).
And so at least once a month, she would hop onto our 1:1 session and say something like, "I just need to do like a 900-calorie-a-day-diet so I can get this weight off."
And every single time we’d have to ask her again - If you can't resist the cookies today, why tomorrow are you gonna be able to stick to 900 calories a day?
There's a real disconnect in the process.
This is the seductive perfectionist fantasy that “Starting tomorrow, I'm gonna do everything, even though previously I was doing nothing.”
It’s a disconnect we see constantly.
And that's why the researchers in that study observed a total drop off at that sweet six week mark in mid-February.
2. Life throws you curve balls - and always will
Another reason why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work is because life always has phases that get really busy and responsibilities disproportionately take up more of your time and your attention.
There's always gonna be:
A family vacation that comes up.
Your boss assigns a big work project.
Your kid gets sick.
Your kids have a gymnastics competition.
There's a blizzard (hello, January) and you can't get to the gym.
So many things happen in life that don’t go according to plan.
That's always gonna happen.
If you can only achieve the goal or the behavior when there's no other distractions, it's never gonna be a reasonable goal.
It's a fantasy.
And there's no sustainability in living in a fantasy.
New Year's Resolutions seem deeply American. The 2-3 months leading up to New Year's - Halloween through New Year's Eve - is chaos for most people. It's so overly demanding on their schedules, time, attention, and money that the New Year's Resolution is like an exercise in reclaiming themselves. Like "Okay, that's the line in the sand. All of the parties are done. Doing X for my mom and Y for my kids, is done. Now I can finally do the thing I wanna do.”
And the top of mind thing they want to do is change their body because that's what we're told we should do.
Plus, so many people go through the holidays feeling out of control of what they're eating.
So it's like pressures from both directions:
It's pressure to get control of my eating because I feel like I've lost control (there's a lot of reasons that can happen).
And it's also the pressure to take my life back from outside demands.
From the jump, people are establishing really rigid goals on purpose to reclaim themselves. "I'm not gonna let life stop me from every Sunday having a perfect meal prep with the 21 day fix blah, blah, blah."
And again, it becomes an attempt to 180 degree pivot instead of slowly recalibrating.
If your goal can't work within the ebbs and flow of life’s demands, then it's never gonna work.
News flash: It’s not YOU who failed. It's that you have to have a life.
3. The reason You Fall off is because there is no “done” in any diet or body goal.
It's not like you reach your goal and you're done.
There's no done. There’s not end point.
Especially in a diet, weight loss goal, or body goal.
Even if you did lose that weight, you're still not done. You have to maintain that forever. And so if it's not sustainable, if it's not flexible, if it's not something that's gonna work within your life, then you're just setting yourself up for failure because you're never really done with it.
Years ago, we (Hanna and Laura, here) were working on writing a manifesto about food and body and we would call it the Myth of Maintaining, meaning The Myth of "and then I'll just maintain!"
There’s this vision or fantasy like “I'm gonna push, push, push, get there, and then I can finally chill.”
That’s a myth.
That doesn't exist.
There's a phrase that we love by the podcast Maintenance Phase and it's "the maintenance phase of any diet is the diet." Because that's how you maintain it! You have to continue doing it!
We use the term The Myth of Maintenance.
Whatever you're doing to achieve your goal, you're going to have to continue to maintain it.
And so, if you're miserable doing whatever you’re whipping yourself to do to get there, you're setting yourself up for misery ending in ultimately for falling off of your goal. Because your body and your brain are not going to allow you to put yourself through misery of your own making forever.
Eventually your body and brain are going to retaliate and be like, "this is not working."
So, What do you do when you fall off your diet goal?
First and foremost, we gotta figure out why you’re falling off.
As we've explained, the reason is not:
You can't do it.
You don't have the willpower.
You’re just a failure at this part of your life.
You [insert self-criticism].
And to figure out why, you must track. This comes as no surprise to our Sugar Sober people:
You need to keep a Food Journal.
Would’ya Look at that,
we just happen to have a free, fillable(!) Food Journal PDF right here.
This fillable Food Journal PDF is taken directly from the print and bound Sugar Sober Food Journal.
No worries, we would choose to test drive before we buy too ;)
Check out the gorgeous, full 90-Day Sugar Sober Food Journal at the bottom of this blog.
We like to think of it in the metaphor of like a GPS or navigation on your phone. You're trying to figure out why you can't get to your destination. We gotta figure out where you're getting stuck, where you're slamming into traffic, where the roads are closed. What's actually blocking your journey here?!
It guides your brain to picture what's happening instead of that storm of feelings, "It's me! And look at me, just fail again." fainting debutante voice* (We know that’s how your internal dialogue sounds because we both used to be so dramatic about this shit.)
When you track on your little fuckups within your goal, you include:
What exactly is going on in that situation?
When is it happening?
Where is it happening?
What are you thinking in that moment?
What are you feeling in that moment?
What is your internal dialogue?
What are you saying to yourself?
What happened 12 hours ago?
The day before?
All of this context IS CRUCIAL.
That context is the map. The Food Journal’s job is to map out where are the walls you're running into.
Otherwise all you know is you're hitting something repeatedly, and you don't really have a sense for the pattern or the route that keeps getting you to run into the wall.
So it's a multi-step process to actually break down why this isn't working or why you keep fucking up:
the raw data itself - what you’re eating or doing
and then the context (which is more raw data) - when, why, where, how.
And then we find the patterns in that data.
A Food Journal does not serve you if it’s just a running list of the shit you put in your mouth. Don’t let it become a graveyard list of these items! A list doesn't help your process at all.
Why take the time to keep a food journal?
All of that context allows you to then you can go back and look at it and realize specific patterns. Like, "Oh, wow, every time I have a shitty meeting with my boss, I end up going home and pigging out!”
Those were the types of patterns Laura found in herself when she started using the Food Journal. Originally she started using a food log, which is that graveyard list of foods and meals we described. And it took years to figure out that what she needed a Food Journal.
And that's what we created together!
When she finally started using the Food Journal that included all the elements of the situation, the thoughts, the context, she was quickly able to figure out that if she was around certain people or even knew she was going to go see them she was (this word is overused but we can’t think of an alternative yet…) triggered to slam a lot of sugar and processed food.
This doesn't mean they were bad people! We’re not insinuating she discovered problematic people in her life! But rather that her way of digesting being around them (to use a pun) was to literally just shove food in. Laura never would've picked that out without the Food Journal! Before the Food Journal, it was only "See, damnit, I fucked up again today."
She didn’t have the data to find the pattern.
This system works because it separates you from your actions and behaviors.
The Food Journal is so effective because it separates you from your behaviors, your thoughts, and your feelings.
Those tend to feel like they ARE you. They feel like a messy hurricane of heaviness. They feel like they’re Capital T Truth.
The Food Journal allows you to tweeze apart thoughts from feelings from behaviors. They become separate entities that you can write about on the paper. Then they're simply an entity that you can observe. And that perspective shift, that's a massive leverage point.
Revisit the example above about how Laura realized "when I'm planning to see this person or I'm around this person, I tend to overeat and stress eat." Until she physically wrote it somewhere external to herself, it felt like a hurricane - an extremely unclear kind of whirlwind experience.
When you physically put that out separate from yourself, then you're observing it, you're coming at it from a different space. You're coming at it to figure shit out and draw connections.
But when you are in it, you just can't see it.
The Food Journal also tracks what's going well.
It tracks the days or the times when you did eat that healthy lunch and everything went fine. And then you went home that evening and had dinner and there was no big binge at all. You had a good day.
You track the context around that day too!
Who were you with that day?
What kind of day were you having?
What were your emotions?
Where were your thoughts that day?
Tracking those little pieces so that you can then connect them to find patters. Like "Oh shit! there's something about the energetic alignment with me and this person in my life that actually propels me the direction I want to go."
That's really valuable information!
To take it to the keto example (we like using the keto example because it challenges us to not just be judgemental assholes about keto):
if your goal is hardcore keto and you're falling off at certain points, tracking with the Food Journal can point out where your behaviors are actually going really well! What’s the context around hitting your goals?!
The Food Journal with full context can point out that you actually feel really good when breakfast is a higher fat, lower carb general formula. You've got your energy. You have your satiety. You can think clearly until it's lunchtime.
That's good information to know!
That's something we can make work for you.
Food Journaling highlights what does work for you nutrition wise, behavior wise, movement wise, which you’ll need to build smart goals and Resolution’s and map out a smart process to get there.
This ONLY works if you Find the patterns
In case it hasn't been pretty obvious, the Food Journal is not just for writing all of these things down and then putting it away.
The second part of the practice is building in the time to go back and review your past entries.
If you only write it down and don’t look at it to find those connections and patterns, then it's really not going to serve you.
Yes, write it all down. Bet it all in there.
But then set a reminder on your phone every Sunday evening (or whatever day is more peaceful for you) to sit down for 20 minutes and review it.
Ask:
How did this week go?
Where were things going well?
Where were they not going well?
How did that relate to what I saw last week?
That's where the magic happens. That’s when a Food Journal becomes a tool that is really serving you.
It absolutely cannot be a passive act. You have to be engaged for it to serve you in any way. Otherwise you're just wasting your time, honestly.
Good news - redeeming yourself isn’t complicated!
Redeeming yourself in your diet goal with the Food Journal pretty simple. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily easy.
You still have to commit to it. You still have to do it.
It is not passive.
But it is very simple practice.
And by the very nature of how simple the at practice actually is, it's incredibly easy to build it into your life and your existing habits. It can be cemented as a habit really quickly.
You just hitch it right on to your routines - every time you eat, you write. That's incredibly easy for the mind, neurologically, to do.
It doesn't take a lot of extra work to add in the practice of food journaling. You just have to actually do it. And then, like we've reviewed, you have to review it. It can't sit as a graveyard list of all food you've had. You have to engage with it.
In Conclusion
80% of people fall off their New Year's Resolution by the second week of February. If you're in that 80%, you're very normal.
The solution is to figure out why you're falling off and exactly where you're falling off. Build a map of what the hell's going on!
And you get that from the Food Journal.
You’re ready.
It’s time to start your Sugar Sober Food Journal.
Created by a Nutritionist and a Sociologist.
Designed specifically for overeaters, food addicts, and yo-yo dieters.
Delivered Amazon-fast.
Pin this blog to come back to later!
Tell Us In The Comments,
What diet, body, or wellness goal are you currently aiming for? Where are you getting stuck?
