What to do when you've fallen off the wagon!

Oh-shooot!

Ever have a month that felt like an over-indulgent Christmas day on repeat?  

My recent UK holiday to visit friends and family was one of those.  Twenty-nine of the 30 days involved alcohol, three-course meals and my mother-in-law’s chocolate almond cake (impossible to resist!).  

Great fun at the time, but my return to ‘reality’ (aka jeans too tight, puffing up hills, feeling a bit ‘blah’), required immediate action!  I’d fallen off the wagon and was at least a good 3 days walk behind it. 

Hey, wait up!

So here is my no nonsense 3-step plan to catching up to and securing oneself back on that wagon!  

Read on pioneers, read on!  (Hmmm, have I taken that metaphor to its limits…?)

Step 1:  DO NOT PANIC AND CUT YOURSELF SOME SLACK!  (Sorry for shouting, but this is so important it requires capitals). 

Giving it the ‘I’m so rubbish, I hate my thighs’ spiel is unproductive and pointless.  The fact is: you’re human and you’ll veer wildly off track now and then.  Don’t freak out.  Otherwise you’ll find yourself in a slipstream of:

‘I’m so useless. Why do I bother? I may as well give up and just let myself go, I’m never going to change in a million years....I’ll end up dying fat and alone in a dark damp flat with 50 cats, starring on the TV reality show Hoarders…”  

And those thoughts make it hard to get motivated. Remember, it’s normal to not be perfect! 


All that’s needed is a couple of small adjustments.  So keep calm and imagine what your best mate would tell you.   Click here for more tips on bigging yourself up.  Then move to Step 2 below.

Step 2:  High five anything (I mean anything) that you are doing well.  

Concentrate on the stuff that you’re good at.  Chances are there is at least one thing you’ve been doing that’s good for you (even if its just reading my blog! ;-) .   Find that thing, be glad about it and concentrate on doing more of it. 

This is all about ‘leveraging your strengths’ and ‘accentuating the positive’.  Perhaps you did eat half a packet of chocolate chip cookies by 11am (not ideal) – but you also went to yoga (ideal!).  Or walked to the shop.  Or did....etc 

Focus on that good thing and do more of it, and you’ll start to get moving!

Step 3:  Set some small and clear goals.  

Make em modest.  Small reachable goals work best.  Instead of swearing you are going to lose 10kgs in 2 months, you might start by committing to drinking x-amount of glasses of water a day for 10 days, or going to bed at x-time or eating some veg at lunch x-days a week.   (I have purposely left the numbers out because it depends on where you are now to what goal you should be setting!)

Why is this important?  Because it’s all about momentum!  When you achieve a goal you’ve set, you feel all warm and glowy and you’re motivated because you feel good! You realise you can make a change. 

One thing builds on the next and before you know it you are riding bareback on the lead wagon horse, your pilgrim bonnet flapping in the wind…..

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Yea-haaa!

It’s the little changes that accumulate over time that makes you the person you are with the life you’ve got.  So it’s okay to have an-out-of-control period.  It’s not a disaster.  You can definitely rectify it and get back on track.

Tweet, tweet, tweet.... what's that I hear?  Yes, spring is just around the corner!  If the idea of taking the kid’s swimming, summer outfits and bare flesh is filling you with horror, then now is a great time to get some new good habits on the go!  Contact me now for a free discovery consultation to find out how we can get you feeling all flirty and free in the sun! 
(Psst…it’s about making great new habits and not another fad for you to fail!) 

I'd love to hear from you in the comments below about what makes you fall off the wagon every now and then, and exactly what helps get things going again.  Or just post a pic of your best bonnet!