Diet Lapse?

I do not know what was going on, but yesterday I just couldn't stop eating dessert. Easter candy started really haunting me and the birthday cake sundae from Braum's has been calling my name for awhile and yesterday I decided was a good day to go for it.
I was starving, so I actually started that indulgence out with a hamburger. When I got home I grabbed some M&Ms as if the sundae wasn't enough.

I did get distracted for awhile, but then once again I was super hungry for dinner. My dinner protein/carb load at dinner was decent but no veggies. Do I get props for taking the bag of frozen broccoli out of the freezer? Because I did. I just ended up putting it back 30 minutes later when I realized I never actually prepared them.

Even while my dinner was cooking, I snacked on a few whoppers. Afterward I guzzled some milk to go with more whoppers, some recess pieces and M&Ms. Later I picked at some ice cream and popped a few more candies. I couldn't bring myself to log all of this into myfitness pal. I ended up playing a silly video game and stayed up until 2:30 in the morning (I'm pretty sure I snacked on a few more recess pieces before bed...)

After a crap diet day like yesterday, there are 3 choices, get defeated, press on and pretend it didn't happen or learn from it. It's taken me a long time, but I see now that even if I can muster up the motivation to press on, if I don't learn something from the experience, I'll inevitably run into it again and eventually I'll wear thin and get defeated. I tried something new and decided to learn from it. Here is what I learned.

1) Planning is important
I had run out of Keifer, and I did not come up with a substitute for my regular blueberry, keifer, granola component of  breakfast. I didn't have a mid-morning snack available either if I were to get too hungry before lunch. After my veggie-less lunch, I could have planned a mid-afternoon snack to fit in my veggies and prevent my dinner experience from following on the same path as my lunch. I don't really mind vegetables when they are prepared, but waiting until I am starving to cook something like broccoli, just doesn't work.

2) Respect your hunger
I did not respect my body when I ignored the hunger signals throughout the morning and the afternoon. This allowed me to go into frantic, so-hungry-I-can't-think-rationally mode two times in one day.

3) Celebrate growth
My Braum's excursion was actually relatively successful. I took off the top of the bun to save carbs and I could tell I would not feel good if I ate the whole thing, so I actually threw out a whole scoop of ice cream. In the past I would never have done that!

4) Timely log calories
It's probably best to first log the calories and make sure it fits in your plan, but if you don't do that (every time I do that I inevitably change what I eat), at least log as you eat rather than waiting until the end of the day. If I had really seen a number figure, I would have been much more careful about grabbing extra candies here and there throughout the day.

5) Continually increase your portion size awareness
In the past, candy downfalls occurred where I was snacking on those mini-candy bars that get handed out at Halloween. Those are around 40 calories for a kit-kat or 85 calories for a Butterfinger. I realized that you can't just eat 10 of those without completely busting your calorie budget. I try to eat 1 M&M per bite to enjoy it more and according to myfitnesspal, 1 M&M is only 3.4 calories, so it really is not that big of a deal to eat 10 M&Ms. Bottom line, if you are going to indulge on sweets all day, slowly eating a few small pieces of candy here and there is the way to go.

6) It's not as bad as you think
This may not be as true for people who are shorter and less active, but for me with a 1,800 or so calorie goal, my "bad" days tend to not be as catastrophic as I expected. Sometimes I feel like I ate 5,000 calories or something, but now that I've logged my calories so much I'm realizing that on my more indulgent days, I'm at about 2,100 to 2,400 and sometimes once my exercise is logged in I actually even meet my calorie goal regarding net calories. Half of the reason I ate those sweets was because I actually had not eaten enough; I was hungry for nutrients. I do not have a character flaw; it is not about willpower. I just need to give myself some grace and learn from it if I want to move forward.

I'd love to hear if I helped you and what you learned in your experiences, so please comment!