Why do we self-sabotage?

I plan my food at least a week in advance. I shop on Saturday and I spend several hours on Sunday cooking for the week. I'll also have to do additional cooking and preparation on a daily basis. Food planning is hard work and takes a long time.

I take great pains to improve my recipes on a regular basis. I'm always tweaking them, trying to find ways to reduce fat, eat more whole grains, get better quality protein and get my five a day. So when I spend hours and hours a week doing all of this and then on top of that I spend hours and hours in the gym every week, why on earth would I go and sabotage that by ordering a great big Chinese meal that feeds me for three days?

In this particular case it was because I was feeling ill. I'd been off sick from work, I'd had a crappy day and I just did not feel like cooking at all. Luckily I already had my lunches pre-prepared from the day before but I was supposed to cook an evening meal that would last me three days and I simply did not have the energy so I ordered a Chinese instead.

Now I'm not going to beat myself up about it too much because these things happen but it made me think about the reasons that we self sabotage. I was not feeling well. What does that mean? I was very low on energy. I was totally demotivated. I didn't really care about my fat loss at that point. Do we get those feelings at other times? In my case yes. Sometimes I feel like that if I've not slept well, or if I've had a particularly bad day at work, or if the traffic has been really bad. Usually I can handle any one of those on their own but it's when I get a combination of all three that dinner is usually replaced with a pizza!

What do these things all have in common? They sap our energy levels. If we feel ill, we're low on energy. If we don't get enough quality sleep we're low on energy. A tough day at work, bad traffic or train journeys, arguments with a partner, stress over kids etc etc. All of these things sap our energy and cause us to sod the diet and fitness plan and reach for the comfort food and the sofa. The question is, what can we do about it? I haven't quite figured that bit out yet :-)

But one thing I have been learning in recent months is that the food we eat has a great effect on our energy levels. If we skip meals, pig out on high carb, high sugar, high fat crap then we're going to feel that crash later on and get cravings for more of the same crap. On the other hand, if we feed ourselves with regular meals that are full of all the good stuff we're far more likely to have sustained energy all through the day.

I think that one of the things I'm going to do from now on is analyze my sabotage patterns. Anytime I go off my plan, rather than beat myself up about it, I'll think about why I did it, how i felt at the time and try to think about the real cause. Did I really, really want that ice cream at that point or was I suffering from a sugar craving because my last meal was nutritionally poor? Did I really want to drink a whole load of alcohol or was I just feeling peer pressure from my friends? And so on. I think it's important to figure out why we do things if we're ever going to come up with ways of preventing these sabotaging habits.