The holidays are a tough time for anyone who is transitioning from an omnivore diet to plant based. We were doing so well throughout the rest of the year, but as time grew short more and more temptation was around us, we fell back into our old ways and indulged too much. We enjoyed every single meal and we don’t regret any of it. I see it as a learning opportunity. One of the things in the past that helped us succeed at things, is that we have a giant white board on a wall that we would write down our personal and together goals for the year, simple achievable things that we could be proud of. We didn’t do that this past year. Normally along with the goals we them the overall year for something we are trying to focus on, on a broader scale, but last year it was just about focusing on building our family, this being our first year living together. And it was an amazing year! But we lacked focus on growing. So, this year we are back to more structure. Another trick that helped us eat healthier last year was utilizing our calendar and planning our rare inappropriate meals no less than two weeks apart, but towards the holidays we kept track less and less until we didn’t care when our last rare inappropriate was and started to stack unhealthy days back to back. Now that it is the new year though, we have been rigid in our eating. In order to get back on track with our health goals, we are being strict vegans with no rare inappropriates for the first 31 days of the new year. And we are definitely going to be going back to tracking those indulgent meals in order to properly space them out.
A big downfall people have when trying to do something so monumental as changing to vegan, is that they can’t seem to allow themselves to not be perfect. This is also true for just about anything in life. “Perfection is the enemy of progress” – Winston Churchill; perfectly sums up why people fail. You have to learn to forgive your own failures. When we don’t forgive ourselves for mistakes, and get frustrated and angry about them, then we are less likely to rebound, it becomes a vicious self-defeating cycle that is near impossible to pull out of. So, even though we haven’t been perfect, we forgive ourselves those days, and we carry on with our mission. I truly hope everyone had the best 2020 they could, despite the pandemic, and here’s to an even better 2021!
-Matt