Day 15 – the fall

So as you may or nor gathered but I have not posted an update for a while and I felt that it was best to explain what has happened since 10th. It is day 15 of the challenge and I am sorry to inform you all but I failed to complete a whole month of the challenge – it was however completely out of my hands.

It seems that all was going well when I fell ill with something and had to pause the challenge. While many of you may argue that eating fruit and veg should be vital to getting back to health, for me I was not well enough to cook so I had to rely on BF managing food. With so much on his plate with his work, a family visit and looking after me, keeping up with the high levels of cooking fresh fruit and veg was the thing that had to slip. I feel so bad that I was not able to keep it going the whole time but everything in my life stopped for 3-4 days including attending a friends hen do, work and staying awake in general.

This is the problem though that it is so easy to stop and heart breaking when it does happen. It could be so easy for me right now to just completely give up but ironically I think that this is just highlighting why it is such an issue. Fad diets have this issue – once you fall from grace you feel bad and often turn to food. For me I was not eating 5 portions but compared to what I would normally eat when ill, there was still at least a portion or two a day – in some ways this is a success for me.

It does show though how easy it can be to not do everyday – it is so much easier to chalk it up to being too busy, ill, lazy or bad at cooking. In one day I went from being high on reaching a significant milestone to being too ill so having to rely on someone else to cook. Most days I had been down finding new fruit or veg, or finding ways to use up existing supplies but I fell ill just as I was due to top up on fruit and veg.

I have never been interested in fad diets – I know that I will just go back to my original weight once over so I set out on this journey to make real healthy changes that would change how I ate from now on. It in some way has worked with me wanting to eat certain fruit or veg instead of reaching out for sweets even when I knew I was not going to be able to continue my personal challenge that day.

Now back to the world of the living I am full of even more passion to complete the rest of the month with my head held high. I may have had to stop for a few days but now I know it is making a difference – it is going to improve my chances of having a healthy diet from now on.

After watching Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, a documentary all about a man using a smoothie diet to lose a lot of weight, I found out that one of the guys who took part lost 200 pounds from taking part in the documentary but then 3 years later gained all of it back again when he hit a bump in the road. It is easy to be knocked off for a moment – it is getting back on the trail that is the hard part. So my hope is that, don’t dismay if you don’t manage to keep to a challenge, diet or change – we are not perfect! Instead learn from what has happened and how you can stop it happening again. For me that might be harder in this instance – how do you manage to eat healthy when ill but I know that I have learnt from it.

I would love to hear from you – what challenges have you faced but has made you stronger? Did you feel like you failed from something only to realise that you had improved as well? Will you be trying my challenge and if so what will you do if you miss a day? Do you have any tips on how I can eat healthy when feeling too ill to cook? Leave a comment below!