Don’t give up just cause of one bad day!
Let me ask you a few questions:
Would you buy a house if you were only allowed to see the kitchen?
Would you purchase a new car if you were permitted to only see the inside of the trunk and the backseat?
Would you pass judgment on a book after only reading one page?
Neither would I.
You need to look at the big picture in life. This is not only true in purchasing houses, buying cars and reading books; it is true in looking at our life. One failure does not make the person a failure; just as one achievement does not make the person a success.
Life’s trials and temptations are only a page out of a book.
We are on a long journey. For me, at this time in my life, it is a weight loss journey. This journey does not stop once we lose the weight… it is a lifelong journey. We did not gain this weight overnight so we can not expect to go to sleep and wake up the next day at our ideal weight. That would be like reading the end of the book to read about the happy ending.
Have you ever done that before? I did once. I was short on time once but really wanted to see how the book ended (hoping for a happy ending) so I skipped to the end. I found that after I did that, I could put that book away knowing how it ended, but would that satisfy me? Did I learn anything? Did I appreciate the struggles and challenges it took to get there? Would I know of the happy times the characters had? The sad times? Would I know the characters at all? Would I care?
We need to look at this journey as a book. I have often heard that we have many chapters in our life. I can easily see that in my life.
As a kid I had chapters such as “
Sesame Street
is my Friend” and “The growing years”. The teen chapters of “Schools out for summer” and “Boy’s Aren’t So Bad”. In my twenties we had “Take this Job and Shove It” and of course there was a chapter of “Eating on a budget: Hostess Cupcakes for Breakfast and Pasta for Dinner”
Right now I am in a chapter in my life that I will title “Becoming a Healthier Me”. Someday I will hopefully be able to look back at this chapter in my life and see it as a success. Since I am living this chapter day by day, page by page I will be able to appreciate the struggles and challenges that it took to bring me to my goal, the happy times, the sad time, the sucessess and the failures.
In our book we can view each day as a separate page. Some pages may be filled with successes while some may contain what we consider failures. However, we need to remember that just because you failed on one page, does not categorize our whole book a failure. In turn, just because you had one success on a page does not make our whole book a success. It is everything from one cover to the other that matters. In this journey, we will have successes and failures. We just need to remember to turn the page and continue through the book until we come to our own happy ending.
So as you write your chapter for the weightloss journey you are on remember that after a bad day you just need to turn the page, start fresh and keep writing.