More attempts at eating well are ended by a bad week than by any particular food.
We have watched the pattern repeat and it is remarkably consistent.
Somebody eats well for a month, then has a holiday, an illness, a difficult stretch at work or simply a week where nothing goes to plan.
They eat badly for six days.
Then, instead of resuming, they conclude that they were never really doing it, and the whole thing quietly stops.
In our view the six days did almost nothing. The conclusion did all the damage.
Where the thinking goes wrong
We think diets get sold as states you are either in or out of, so people treat eating as a matter of identity rather than of frequency.
Once it is an identity, a bad week is not a bad week. It is evidence about what sort of person you are, and that is a much harder thing to recover from.
Andy spent years on that particular treadmill before any of this.
He lost weight through sheer will more than once and it never lasted, because a system that runs on effort runs out.
What eventually worked was not more determination. It was eating food that did not require any.
What actually accumulates
Your body responds to what you do most of the time, and we find that is the part people forget.
Blood pressure, cholesterol, inflammation and weight all follow the average of many months, not the worst few days inside them.
Six bad days inside a good year is under two per cent of your meals.
Nothing in your body is capable of noticing that, and the idea that it undoes anything is simply not how the arithmetic works.
We would go further. A person who eats well eighty per cent of the time for ten years will be in far better health than one who eats perfectly for four months and then stops for good.
The second one has a better week and a worse decade!
Getting back is not a project
The recovery does not need to be dramatic and it should not be.
There is no reset, no cleanse and no atonement required, and we are suspicious of anybody selling you one.
You simply cook the next meal.
If the fridge is empty, which after a bad week it usually is, then the useful move is to cook one pot of something familiar rather than to plan an ambitious new start on Monday.
Lentil soup. Rice and beans. Potatoes in the oven.
We would say the next ordinary meal is the entire recovery. Treating it as more than that is what turns a bad week into a bad year.
Being unimpressed by your own progress
The other thing worth mentioning is that this eventually stops feeling like an achievement, and that is the goal rather than a loss.
For the first months you notice every meal, because each one is a decision.
Later the food is simply what you eat, and you would no more congratulate yourself for it than for brushing your teeth.
People sometimes read that flatness as losing motivation. We think it is the point.
The last thing worth talking about is what that looks like from further out, once a few years have gone by.
And, always, seek health consciously.
