All or nothing doesn’t work. I’ve beaten my head on that wall way too many times…please learn from my (and millions of others) mistakes and don’t go there. If we could abstain from food, ensure we’d always get 8 hours of sleep and were active every day then ‘all or nothing’ might be an option. But those are all impossible so we’ll move on to something that actually works in real life.
Health is a continuum, just like (almost) everything else. There’s a ‘best’ choice (maybe an organic salad with free range chicken), a ‘worst’ choice (possibly eating every fried-on-a-stick food at the state fair) and about a million in-between choices. Many of the in-betweens are perfectly acceptable options, which is good news if you hate salad or chicken. 🙂
As routines change, families go on vacation, graduation parties abound and real life keeps right on rolling…and we suddenly feel like making healthy choices is simply too hard so we’ll put it on hold for a while until life slows down (if you find out when that happens, please, let me know!), it’s helpful to remember the continuum. Ask yourself these simple questions:
- What’s the worst choice I could make right now?
- What’s the best choice I could make right now?
- What’s a reasonable, sane, doable choice somewhere in the middle?
