but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure. – Bill Gates

Before I went on my trip to London in February, I had made several changes to my eating habits and I was really flying high. “This isn’t so hard,” I told myself (and anyone who would listen). “I can do this, no problem!” And then the dreaded business travel came up and … I fell off the wagon. Big time, I fell off the wagon. It was so easy, I didn’t even realize I had fallen off.

I’m not a big fan of most of the food in London, so not over-eating there is easy enough for me. It’s when I got back from London, after not having logged any food for a week, that things got really difficult. I’d already fallen out of the habit of weighing and measuring everything in those seven short days, and when I got back to the States, it was like I gave myself a license to eat whatever, whenever, however I wanted. And now, eight weeks later, I’ve gained three pounds. I guess it could be LOTS worse than that, since I’ve heard of folks gaining that much in a week of unfettered eating, so don’t think I’m complaining about that, because really … I’m not.

What I AM doing here, is making myself accountable for the failure of the last eight weeks. This doesn’t mean that my entire program is a failure; what it means is, I need to get better about regulating what I eat even when I’m not at home, and even if it’s difficult to make the healthiest choices, I need to log them, even if I’m estimating how much of the food I’m actually eating. On the one hand, this may seem a little misleading, but for me, it’s more important to maintain those healthy habits of logging my food and exercise all the time, no matter what. This is an eye-opening lesson I have learned from the last several weeks, and one I need to embrace.

The second lesson of failure I need to embrace is that I MUST measure every single food item I eat, no matter whether I want to or not. Measuring my food out makes me accountable and opens my eyes to how much I’m eating, all the time.

The final lesson of failure I’m taking away from this experience is this – failure is not final. It’s not the end, nor is it the worst thing I could have done in the last seven weeks. Failure is just another opportunity to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try a different approach. That is perhaps the most important lesson of all for me. Even though I strayed for so many weeks, even though I sort of lost sight of my goals, and even though I don’t really have the enthusiasm to get back on the wagon, I’m going to do it anyway. Because as much as I don’t want to go back to being so regimented (it is totally outside of my nature to be regimented in any way), I know it’s the only way I’m going to be ultimately successful in the battle of the bulge.

So, where do I go from here? Well, a good start is to go back to myfitnesspal.com and start logging all of my food, good choices and bad, again. I’m not going to necessarily focus on what I’m eating nearly so much as just getting it written down every day. Then, when I have established that habit again, I will start to make better choices in what I eat. And then, I will start to exercise more frequently.

A word about the exercise thing – I’ve been really run down the last week, in large part because my body is fighting off an infection, and I just haven’t felt like doing much of anything. But hopefully, the antibiotics will take care of it and by the beginning of next week I should be back at full strength. Once I get back to that point, I will be in the gym, working out and weight lifting. I have a very weak left arm due to some surgery a few years ago and I need to strengthen it considerably. But my goal is to get back to lifting fairly heavy weights to burn fat and start sculpting muscle definition again. I know from past experience that when I work out, I just feel better. I will get back to that point, but it’s going to take some work to get there.

Celebrating success is important – I believe folks should definitely do that. But why not celebrate failures too? Because really, if you learn from those failures, you know what not to do next time, and isn’t that just as important as being successful?