By now, y’all know I am all about some grace. I believe grace is necessary to stay the course… or at least to not completely derail and go up in flames! But, it can be very easy to begin to allow ourselves to claim grace every single day when maybe it is just disregard.
Grace is when you had intentions of tracking and planning, but life hit you strangely different or hard. Your baby got sick and wanted to snuggle and eat PopTarts all day. Your work got extra busy and you were unable to come home to prepare the planned healthy dinner you had hoped for. Family stress got the best of you and before you knew it you were binging out on Annie’s birthday bunnies instead of the carrots and ranch you packed for snack. Your husband surprised you with a nighttime dessert date after the kids were in bed because you needed that quality time together. These are the types of incidents that we would call for grace. You had a plan and great intentions, but they just didn’t quite pan out how you’d hoped.
Disregard is when you wake up with nothing truly “different” going on, yet know in the back of your head that you have no intentions of tracking, planning or attempting healthy eating. You are just moving throughout your days praying the nutrition fairy comes down and removes some weight on the scale, but your actions are not aligned with that wish. Sure, you check in to the Facebook group some. You talk to your friends about Lean Queens. You may even choose only one cookie instead of three from the break room (“Constance says that’s good right??!!”) but otherwise you are not attempting to plan for or take control of your days. At the end of the day you have no idea whether your consumption was closer to weight loss calories or maintenance calories because you weren’t really plugged in. You know you didn’t do great, but you didn’t do horrible either so surely you will see some weight loss???!!
Disregard is how so many of us can get discouraged. With grace days, at least we know what to expect. We know we splurged and we know we will likely see the consequences of that splurge, BUT we also know it was worth it and that we can always do better tomorrow. With disregard, we still feel in a tizzy about our days and our weight loss progress. Grace should not feel anxious. Grace is knowing and acknowledging the day, yet forgiving ourselves and moving forward anyway. Disregard can often look like flying by the seat of our pants and then looking back on the days wondering what went wrong and feeling extremely discouraged because you can’t figure it out.
We all go through seasons of less/more caring regarding weight loss, but if you are frustrated with the scale and don’t quite understand why, you might be stuck in disregard. Take back control so that you see it move in the right direction.. and then when the grace days come, the burden won’t feel as heavy!