Today I have been looking for something to write about that can help us all on this weightloss journey. Sometimes my inspiration comes from the PNP girls and other times it comes from the most unlikely places.
On our Autism Recovery site Chris posted an excerpt from an email we shared. It's about Logan and losing his first smiley face at school. He's been very anxious about this and is dealing with the "trauma" in ways Chris and I are at a loss to handle...just yet.
What struck me in reading what Logan is doing is that it is really no different than what my PNP girls do to themselves through their battle with fat and an unhealthy lifestyle. Are they autistic? No, but ya'll need to learn a lesson from the sweetest little boy in the whole wide world.
Logan is trying to lower expectations for himself and us. Does this sound familiar?
I PLAN to eat well this weekend but if I slip up it's OK.
I KNOW the scale won't be friendly so I'll just ignore it.
I will do the best I can but if a few nibbles happen at the luncheon that will be fine.
Are slips ups OK? Sure they are.
Does the scale lie sometimes? Absolutely.
If you have some nibbles does it mean you have blown it? No way.
BUT, I can promise you this. When you live your life with the bar set really low then you will get really low results. You have already said to yourself...
This weekend I am going to just eat what I want and deal with it later.
That scale never tells the truth so cutting off a few minutes of exercise here and there and a few days of not measuring my clean food doesn't matter.
Nibbles happen...that's just my silly little habit. No biggie.
The other fascinating fact of low expectations? When you fall down you don't have to far to go until you are off the wagon. With high expectations you might fall but just out your seat and into the floor of that wagon.
What I am saying is that there is nothing wrong with OVER expecting great things. So what if you don't make it? A good example is a girl I knew who once ran a 5K. Her goal was 40 min. She ran it in a tad over 52 min.and came in long after crowds were cheering.
Rather than being all upset she didn't make her goal she bragged to everyone she knew she ran a 5K! Even though she didn't make the time limit she wanted she did something she never thought possible...run a 5K! Let me tell you, that was me and when I was 230lbs at the age of 30 I never dreamed I would run until I started training for that 5K. The only time I ran was when a dog was after me. One day I just decided I wanted to do a 5K and I wasn't going to settle for anything less.
Our goals shouldn't be to shield ourselves from disappointment. It should be to challenge ourselves. It's only through chasing big dreams do you get those above average results.
So, for Logan? We decided on token rewards. Rather than blowing off bad behavior or spotlighting what's wrong we made him a chart of things he can "buy". We've taken pictures of stuff he likes: going to the lake with Daddy through the woods, blocks and Legos from Target, breakfast for dinner, going bowling, etc. Each thing has a "price tag" and when we catch him doing things we're working on or being a good boy he gets a token. Once a week we'll count out the tokens and he can earn some things he likes.
Doing this we teach him to focus on shooting for the big stuff, earning small rewards along the way, and realizing it's OK to think big.
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