Lose the battle, but win the war. Fail Forward. If first you don’t succeed, try, try again. You learn more from your failures then your successes.
All slightly different ways in saying the same thing. Mainly – there are times when you think you do everything right but you fail anyway in your near term goal. In those cases, you need to look deeper into your “failure” to find the future seeds of success. So why all the sayings for this blog?
Well, I met all my established targets this week. Walked an Average of 10,000 steps this week – check. Indeed I did two days in excess of 14,000 steps! Track my food and eat healthy – check. I even ate fish twice (and with no tartar sauce) and was on a vegetable extravaganza. Work out 4 times a week – did seven! Even was able to manage stress for the most part and get some sleep. So somehow when I stepped on the scale at Weight Watcher’s I gained a pound. Ugh!
Before my weight loss journey , this setback would have sent me in a tailspin. I would have faced my equivalent of Waterloo which, in my case, would be chowing down on a cup of Peanut M&M’s.
But I learned enough in losing over 170 lbs. that sometimes the unexpected happens so you have to learn from it. Indeed, I had 4 of these weight gains in the last year, and each time I figured out what was the culprit and tweaked the bad habit the next week. Once it was sleep. The other time it was stress (note I inculcated the increase of the former and the reduction in the former in my current goals).
So what is my hypothesis on this one? Something new and suggested by a person at my WW meeting – salt intake. I was eating healthy protein – hardboiled eggs but poured on the salt. Ate some pretzels for the first time in a while. Then I had a few Diet Cokes – heavy in the Sodium. When I looked back on my diet, I had overdone it with the salt. So this week, I am watching my step with the salt shaker. I will let you know the results next week – I am banking on 2.5 lbs. lost. Until then in the famous words of Winston Churchill:
“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never!”
Weight Loss and Leadership 