by SactoBob » Sun Oct 16, 2011 2:59 pm
Don't feel down, because there are some great benefits to documenting a bad day. As much as your good days help, your bad days can help even more. The lessons you need to learn are in the bad days.
As to your down feelings, be aware that this could be nothing more than transition symptoms. Have you read "The Pleasure Trap" by Doug Lisle, or watched his DVDs, or watched his free video lecture at the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii. It is natural to experience cravings and decreased pleasure in life for about 30 days while you are improving your diet. I had big problems there, and often watched Doug's lectures at that time. It was important for me to know that the bad feelings were normal and temporary.
As to learning the lessons from a bad day, there are times to forget the bad day and move on - but not usually. Try to recall how this happened. Were you really hungry? Was good food available? Did you start the day with a workable plan? Did you do what you could to make sure that the plan worked? Were you really craving some junk type food?
If you ask a lot of questions like this, you can probably come up with at least a theory, and you can probably come up with a strategy from preventing this from happening in the future. At least you will be trying.
Try to avoid what I see with the long term failures on this program. First, there is an unwillingness to even admit the problem. Then there is an attempt to avoid the problem through sympathy, drama, anger, whatever. Then there is the appeal to ignore the problem with an appeal to sympathy and support.
True support IMO would be to identify the problem and see what could be done to change it. If you try to identify the problem and go after it, I think that you will be surprised how effective that can be. Even if you don't fix things after the first slip, repeated effort will eventually succeed.
The people here who are successful are not the ones who found it easy to be perfect - they are the ones who had the courage to face up to what was happening and the determination to keep at it. You have identified a problem, and I think your approach has to succeed in the long run - it's inevitable.