Not Just a Man's World

I had been thinking about starting a “lessons learned this week” feature in a few weeks.  However, tonight’s activities have caused me to bring this forward to today.

Tonight was one of our work socials.  Usually I turn up to these things clutching my bottle of water, maybe have a few games of whatever the work social is (table tennis, pool, etc), make my excuses, and sidle off again.  As a rule I never touch the food or drink unless (i) there is something strictly “on” diet for me (rare); or (ii) the social involves dinner out where I can order a large hunk of meat and veg and leave the bits I’m not supposed to eat on the side.

Tonight, I completely fell off the wagon.

I attribute this to a few causes:

1. I’ve only recently reduced calories.  Normally this isn’t an issue for me.  I’ve got willpower of iron most of the time.  But it turns out I’m only human after all.  In fact, it put me in mind of a recent blog post I read about snacking on highly regimented diets – I scoffed when I first read the article and said, “I don’t do that”.  Oooops.
2. I was organising the social, so I couldn’t sidle off.  I had to wait to tidy up at the end.
3. There were some nibbles there that I thought were “on” diet for me, but it turns out they had potato in them as well.  The lure of the carbs and delicious E-numbers left me craving more after only a small taster.

As I drove home through the rain I berated myself for my folly.  I reckon I consumed 400 – 500 calories.  When you’re on 1,100 calories, that’s a big proportion.  So what have I done since I got home?

• Put my dinner into the freezer for another day.  My dinner is 450 calories of my daily allowance, so my total calories for the day should be about right, even if my macro-nutrient content is a bit wrong (though a lot of the food I ate was high-protein sandwich fillings without the bread, like prawns, duck and crayfish, and small mini-omlettes with bits of potato, so perhaps my macro-nutrients aren’t too bad).
• Got straight into the gym to make the most of those extra carbs with an impromptu mini-workout including a 20 minute weighted cardio 15/15 workout, alternating 5 mins of dumbbell snatches with 5 mins of swings.

So hopefully I’ve limited the damage.  But what have I learned from this experience?

1. Never agree to organise a work social during a cutting phase (well, duh!).
2. Take any obvious remedial action that can be taken immediately (so for me, leaving the dinner and getting in the gym to convert some of the carbs to glycogen instead of fat).
3. Catch yourself as soon as possible: Yes this may have a slight impact on my progress today, or even this week.  But it’ll be nowhere near as bad as if I had said, “well I’ve failed now so I may as well go the whole way” and come home via the take away.
4. Forgive yourself and move on: I’ve punished myself with 30 short-but-constructive minutes in the gym and now I am moving on (in the immediate future, to get into bed and finish my book).  I’ve probably still got a bit to learn in the self-forgiveness department.

How do you deal with falling off the wagon?

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: primal endurance diet
2. Lessons learned this week: listen to your body
3. Lessons learned this week: the sleepless side-effect of dieting
4. Lessons learned this week: the Cholesterol Story