Tag: forgiveness

Advice I wish I had Given My Younger Self

The question is not really whether you would go back. The question is what you are going to do today with everything you already know.

Lately, scrolling through the noise that social media has become, I keep running into a certain kind of post. You have seen them. They usually start with a photograph, a high school hallway, a gymnasium, a parking lot that looks like every parking lot from 1984. And then comes the question. Would you go back? To a specific year. To a specific moment. To a specific version of yourself you have not been in a very long time.

The comment sections on these things are something. People arguing with complete strangers about which year they would choose and why. Some of them are serious. Some of them are heartbreaking. All of them are trying to answer the same question underneath the question, which is: was there a version of this life that went better?

I think about that question more than I probably should. When I see those posts I think about the 1980s with genuine nostalgia. It was a simpler time. We were not being bombarded around the clock with news and noise and everyone’s opinion about everything. But nostalgia is not the same as regret, and when I am honest with myself I do not look back at what I had and feel like something is missing now. My life is good. Arguably great. My wife is my best friend. My sons turned out amazing. My work has mattered, for the most part. My friendships have lasted longer than most things I own. And Ginger meets me at the door every single day like I have been gone for six months.

So the long and short of it is I am not going back. But I would send a note. That note, it turns out, has existed for years in rougher form, tucked inside syllabi and first-day-of-class remarks and the things I said on the last day when I thought nobody was writing anything down. It was shaped by the mistakes I thought I had made and the opportunities I thought I had missed and the things I wished someone had told me before I had to figure them out the hard way. Since I do not have a DeLorean with a flux capacitor, I will have to settle for what I have written here.

Find time for the people who will be gone the soonest. Now, if we are being honest, I would absolutely go back knowing what I know. I understand I might be tinkering with the space-time continuum, and I have made my peace with that. Yes, I would probably look into a few investments. Apple. Walmart. Amazon. Netflix. I am not a saint. But that is not actually why I would go back. I would go back to sit with my parents for a while. Hug them more. Ask them questions I never thought to ask. Ask them about their parents and grandparents, their cousins, the family stories that were actually told. Because they were told. I just was not paying attention the way I should have been. Storytelling is how families survive themselves, and I let too many stories go in one ear and out the other because I was young and thought there was plenty of time. The same goes for a few friends and family members I did not know I was running out of time with. In 1986, I did not know there were only ten years left with my dad.

Pay attention. Most of life does not announce itself as important when it happens. The random Tuesday night dinner when everyone somehow made it to the table. The walk with the dog. The conversation with your dad the night before he died, not knowing it would be your last. The family story you have heard a dozen times before and assume you will hear a dozen more. The big moments are easy to spot. Graduations. Weddings. Births. Retirements. Life has a way of putting those on the calendar for you. The smaller ones require more effort. They slip by quietly, and only later do you realize they were part of something larger. Take the picture. Ask the question. Stay a little longer. One day you will discover that what looked like an ordinary day was actually a gift. The trick is noticing it before it is gone. Turns out Ferris Bueller was right. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Take the trip. Both of them. The one you cannot afford and the one you can. You will find reasons to wait on both, and the reasons will sound responsible and they will be wrong. Think about what you actually remember. Not the gifts. Not the things. The trips. The British Isles with my parents and grandparents. Switzerland for a dear friend’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The thirteen-hour drive to Mackinac Island with my family, and somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin one of my sons looking up and announcing, “You people are the worst family ever. You people are not my family.” I remember all of it. If I had it to do over, I would rethink every holiday, every birthday, every Christmas morning. Less stuff under the tree. More stamps in the passport. Experiences last forever. Most everything else ends up at Goodwill.

Travel does something else too. It exposes you to different cultures, different people, different food, different ways of looking at the same world you thought you already understood. It hardens some of your beliefs and softens others, and both of those things are good for you. French wine tastes better in France. And most of all, you learn that a mother in South Dakota loves her child just as much as a mother nearly everywhere else in the world.

Ask her out. In my wildest dreams I did not think she would say yes. She said yes. We are married. There were others along the way, there always are, but she was the one, and I almost talked myself out of asking because I was certain I already knew the answer. I did not know the answer. That is the part nobody tells you. You are a terrible predictor of outcomes involving your own life. Ask anyway. Apply anyway. Start the business anyway. Have the conversation anyway. The worst outcome is rarely as bad as you imagine, and the wondering lasts considerably longer.

Read more than you think you need to. Not for school. Not to finish. Read because, like travel, it opens your mind and calms it at the same time. It expands curiosity and makes you better in ways that are hard to measure and impossible to fake. Every good book teaches you something. Find an author you enjoy and spend time with them. Doris Kearns Goodwin taught me about leadership through Lincoln and Team of Rivals, perhaps the greatest lesson in leadership ever put on paper. Oddly enough, my favorite book of hers is not about Lincoln at all. It is about growing up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the 1950s. David McCullough took me to Paris in The Greater Journey. Michael Lewis taught me to see the world differently. Mitch Albom reminded me that kindness still matters. John Grisham kept me up far too late reading The Firm.

Books are inexpensive travel. They let you borrow someone else’s life for a few hundred pages and return to your own a little wiser than when you left. Ted Lasso once quoted Walt Whitman on this subject: be curious, not judgmental. There is essentially no evidence Whitman ever said that. But the line made me curious enough to go read some actual Whitman, which I suppose proves the point entirely. I have learned something from almost every book I have read. Some lessons were profound. Some were useful. Some were simply that Clan of the Cave Bear is still not making my top ten.

I baked reading into my syllabus every semester, mostly through Wall Street Journal articles, but it was intentional. I wanted my students curious about the world beyond the classroom and beyond the case law. Whether it worked I cannot say with any certainty. Some of them listened. I choose to believe more of them did than I will ever know.

Start saving. Now. Not instead of living, not instead of the trip or the experience or the night out that becomes a story you will tell for thirty years. Alongside all of it. Compound interest is the closest thing normal people get to magic. The problem is that magic only works if you start early. Start by at least matching what your company puts in. Then think about more. Ten percent of your pay is a good number. You will not miss it, and I say that knowing you think you will. Every time you get a raise, increase your savings rate by half. If you get a four percent raise, save two more percent before you ever see it. The math on compound interest is not complicated, but it is unforgiving. Time is the one ingredient you cannot buy back. You do not need to save everything. You need to start. There is a difference, and younger me confused the two for longer than I would like to admit.

Move your body. I want to be clear about something. I have never liked working out. The gym, the weights, the person grunting next to you at six in the morning, none of that was ever me. But I do like moving, and it turns out that is enough. Walk. Swim. Bike. Dance. Tai chi. Golf without the cart. Run, if you are that particular kind of crazy. It does not have to hurt and it does not have to be impressive. It just has to happen, and it has to happen again tomorrow. I have now walked more than thirty million steps, one day at a time, and I did not do it because I love exercise. I did it because I love moving. The body keeps score longer than we think it does, and small, consistent habits compound the same way investments do. Small. Consistent. Long term. The math works the same way in both places. Trust it.

Worry less. I mean this practically, not as a bumper sticker. You are lying awake at 2am about the student upset about his grade, the client upset about his case, the beneficiary upset about not getting enough money. You cannot fix any of it at 2am. And if you are being honest, most of it was never yours to fix in the first place. I used to tell my students there were three kinds of problems in the world. Your problems. My problems. Our problems. And most of the problems keeping people awake at night belong firmly in that first category. Not mine. Not ours. Yours. The sooner you learn to hand them back, the better everyone sleeps, including you. So plan for what is actually yours. Adapt when you need to. Handle what is genuinely in front of you. But the 2am rehearsal of every possible outcome, that is just energy leaving the building with nothing to show for it. I stumbled onto a meditation technique once where you imagine a river and you place each anxious thought onto a boat and watch it float away. You keep going until the river is empty. The first time I tried it I was skeptical. By the fifth boat I was nearly asleep. Five minutes of watching your thoughts drift downstream will do more for you than two hours of staring at the ceiling. Put it on a boat. Let it go.

Take the chance. This one is broader than the trip and the girl, though it includes both. I mean the job you are not sure you are qualified for. The idea you have not said out loud yet. The conversation you keep rehearsing and never having. The version of yourself you have not introduced to anyone yet. Younger me was careful in ways that younger me thought were wise. They were not wise. They were fear with better posture. I tried to tell my students that, in so many words, every chance I got. I am not sure they believed me. I am not sure I would have believed me either. And if it does not work? Pay attention. Failure usually has something to teach you. More often than not, the breakthrough is sitting just on the other side of the thing that did not go according to plan. Some of the best things that happened to me came immediately after something I thought was a setback. At the time I could not see it. Looking back, it seems obvious. Looking forward, it never does.

Forgive yourself. You will make mistakes. You will say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong moment. You will lose friends, money, and maybe a job. Some of it will be your fault. Some of it will feel like your fault and will not be. Either way, carrying it does not fix it. Learn what it has to teach you, resolve not to do the same thing twice, and put it down. It just makes everything else heavier.

There is a particular cruelty in advice. It arrives, almost without exception, after the moment it would have been useful. Four years ago I wrote something called The Last Lecture, my final words to my students at Augustana on my last day in the classroom. Reading it now alongside this is an interesting exercise. The curiosity is still there. The belief in showing up is still there. But that piece was written from the front of a room to people just starting out. This one is written from inside a life, to myself, with the benefit of forty years of evidence. What strikes me most is that the advice is not all that different. Which means one of two things. Either I have not learned as much as I thought, or the fundamentals were right all along and the only thing that changes is how personally you feel them. I choose to believe it is the latter. And I suspect that everything I just told younger me applies just as much to the students who sat in my classroom over the years as it does to the man who stood at the front of it.

Here is the thing I did not expect when I started writing this. Most of this list is not finished business. It is current business. The people who are still here will not always be. There are trips not yet taken and chances not yet seized and worry that still needs to stop. The body still needs to move tomorrow and the day after that. The math on all of it still works, but only if you start. I wrote this as advice to a younger version of myself and somewhere in the middle of writing it I realized I was also writing it to right now. That is what the social media posts never tell you. The question is not really whether you would go back. The question is what you are going to do today with everything you already know.

Most of the chances I took turned out better than I deserved, and most of the ones I did not take I cannot quite stop thinking about. The balance sheet is not even close. My life is good. It could have been good sooner, and with less hesitation. But it is not too late for any of it. Not for me. Not for you.

Do the thing. Take the trip. Ask.

One Saturday at a Time

Four years ago the scale read 186. Today it tells a different story. This is the Forgiveness post — the hardest of the three to write, and the most honest.

Four years ago this spring, I stepped on a scale and it read 186. I had worked for almost two years to get there, and the work had shown up everywhere. New clothes in sizes I had not worn since college. Old energy back in the legs. Knees that did not complain when I stood up from the couch. The person in the mirror looked like someone I recognized again, which was not a small thing, because for a long stretch before that I had been avoiding mirrors the way some people avoid their inbox on a Monday morning.

Today the scale tells a different story. Not the one I want to tell, and not the one I had hoped to be telling four years later. Nothing dramatic happened in between, which is the part that took me the longest to understand, and the part that matters most for what this post is actually about.

I changed jobs somewhere in that stretch. That is probably a post for another Saturday, the one about the difference between academic life and the financial world, between a calendar that breathes and a calendar that does not. I will write that one later and spare you the full tour for now. What matters here is that the new work sat me down, the old rhythms did not fit the new life, and I did not build new ones fast enough. The body did what bodies do. It adjusted to what I was actually doing, not to what I meant to be doing. Turns out bodies are excellent listeners. Mine heard every excuse I made and took detailed notes.

The return was not a week or a month or a quarter. It was four years. It came on slowly, in small unremarkable increments, the way these things almost always do. There was no decision to point at, no bad stretch I can circle on a calendar and say this is where it went wrong, no villain. Just a slow drift, measured in pants sizes and the steadily growing list of things I did not want to look at too closely. That is the hardest kind of regression to explain, because there is no story in it. A bad month has a shape to it. A bad year has a cause you can name. Four years of gradual drift has neither, which is probably why so many people end up carrying some version of it quietly, with no good way to talk about it even when they want to.

Three weeks ago I wrote about why I started. Last week I wrote about what the scale does not tell you. Focus, then Facts. I told you there would be a third one, about Forgiveness, and here we are, which was always going to be the hardest of the three to write honestly.

I would love to report that writing those first two posts fixed something, that putting it in public and naming the framework and telling all five of my readers exactly what I was going to do was enough to break the pattern. That is the version of this post I wish I could write. It is not the one I am writing, because the last month has produced no meaningful progress, and that is on me. I know what to do. I am not doing it. The focus slips somewhere around Monday, the facts become negotiable by Wednesday, and by Friday I am telling myself the week was unusual and next week will be different. The weeks are never unusual. The weeks are the point, and pretending otherwise is how four years happen in the first place.

There have been family matters this spring that have required attention, and I am not going to write about them here. There has been travel. There has been what I consider the particular stress of spring, which always seems to arrive with more on the calendar than I remember agreeing to. None of that is an excuse, and I am not offering it as one. I mention it only because pretending the last month happened in a vacuum would be its own kind of dishonesty, and this post has no room for that.

What I usually do next, after a stretch like that, is spend a few days beating myself up about it. Quietly, mostly, but thoroughly. I run through the week, count the missed walks, replay the snacks I did not need, the water I did not drink, the extra serving, the dessert, and make a long internal case against myself that no actual courtroom would have let me bring. The lawyer in me knows better. The rest of me does it anyway. It does not change a single fact about the week that already happened, and it almost always makes the next week harder than it needed to be. This is the part they leave out of every motivational poster. The part where you know exactly what you did and you sit with it anyway.

That is the thing I have come to understand about Forgiveness, and it took me longer than it should have to get here. Forgiveness is not lowering the standard. It is not telling yourself the week did not count. It is not pretending the facts are something other than what they are. It is just the part where you stop prosecuting yourself long enough to get moving again. The setback already happened. That part is finished. The only thing still in front of you is how quickly you put the case down and start the next day.

Here is what I have learned after enough Mondays and enough fresh starts to know the difference. The people who make it back are not the ones with the most discipline or the most willpower or the best plan. They are the ones with the shortest recovery time. The ones who can look at a bad week honestly, set it down without ceremony, and show up the next morning anyway. That is the whole game. Not the falling. The getting up. And how long you spend on the floor in between.

The struggle is real, and I am not going to dress that up or sell it as something it is not. The fight continues, and I am not going to promise it is going better than it is. Forgiveness is the part that lets the fight continue at all, because without it, four years of drift becomes a reason to stop trying, and with it, four years of drift becomes a starting point. The same way it was a starting point in November of 2020 when I took that picture and looked at my face and decided I was done. The starting point is wherever you are standing. It is never where you wish you were standing, and waiting until you are somewhere better before you begin is just another way of not beginning.

So this morning I walked. This morning I also hope to play golf, weather permitting. This afternoon I will make choices about what I eat, and some of them will be the right ones and some will not. Tomorrow I will do it again. The ebb and the flow is not the obstacle. The ebb and the flow is the shape of it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. Focus got me here. Facts tell me what to do now that I am here. Forgiveness is what keeps me here, on the days when here is not where I wanted to be by now. Four years. One Saturday at a time.

Why I Started — And Why That Still Matters

In November 2020, I took a picture to make people laugh. It didn’t go the way I planned. What followed was the hardest and most important journey of my life. Some of it has slipped. Here is why I am starting again, and why the reason I started still matters more than anything else.

I began this blog to talk about how and why I was able to recapture my life by losing weight. The inaugural post was titled “Fat, Fifty and Fatigued,” and I meant every word of it. I do regular check-ins to see if I am happy with where I stand from a health standpoint. The honest answer lately is no. Since leaving academia to return to the financial field, some of the weight has crept back. The schedule changed, the rhythms changed, and somewhere in the transition the habits I had built started to erode. So recently I decided to begin the journey again. To get back to where I was, and maybe further. To do that, I need to go back to where it started. It all started with a picture.
The picture was taken on a Thursday, a week before Thanksgiving, 2020. It was warm enough that wearing a hoodie felt like a small act of rebellion against the season. I was teaching from my home office, which meant I could wear whatever I wanted, and I wanted everyone to know it. So I took a picture and posted it. Look at me. No tie. No commute. Just a guy in a hoodie, conducting class from his living room, winning the pandemic. And then I looked at my face in that picture, really looked at it, and the joke stopped being funny.
That was the moment. Not a doctor’s appointment, not a conversation with anyone who loved me. A selfie.
That picture was taken in the middle of one of the strangest falls any of us can remember. The country was a mess, and I was not in great shape either. The election had been called but half the country wasn’t ready to accept it. COVID was getting worse, not better. And every time you turned on the news, someone was talking about who was most at risk. They kept using the word comorbidity. I had to look it up the first time I heard it. It basically means the conditions that make you more likely to die. Obesity was on the list. High blood pressure was on the list. I had most of the list, and I felt it every day. Every night when the heartburn woke me up. Every time I caught myself in a picture and looked away. I was not just overweight. I was a walking risk factor and I had been for years, and until that Thursday in November I had been very good at not thinking about it too hard.
My oldest brother died that September, two months before I took that picture. Both of my brothers were born with extra DNA that hindered their development, leaving them vulnerable not just to viruses but to complications most of us never have to think about. COVID found him anyway. I was still carrying that loss when I posted the hoodie picture, still in that strange suspended grief where you go through the motions of normal life because there is nothing else to do. One week after I made the decision to start losing weight, my other brother came down with COVID. There were some touch and go moments. We made the call to get him to the hospital where he had a fighting chance. Unlike my oldest, I was able to visit him. He was there for a couple of weeks, and then he came home. He is still with us today. And somewhere in those weeks of waiting and visiting and hoping, I kept going. Because I had just watched COVID take a man who had no choice about his vulnerabilities. I had a choice. I was not going to waste it.
At my peak, according to my scale, I weighed 252 pounds. I had never said that out loud before I wrote it in 2021, and even then it felt strange to put it in public. There it is. I didn’t want to be a statistic. I didn’t want my family to lose me the same year they had already lost so much. So I started.
The timing helped, and if you read last week’s post, you already know why. A semester doesn’t wind down gradually. It collapses. Around Thanksgiving the intensity breaks, the calendar starts to breathe, and for the first time since August there is actual white space. That is what I had in November 2020. A picture I could not stop thinking about, a grief I was still learning to carry, and for the first time in a long time the capacity to focus on something I could actually control.
By 2022 I was at 186. Everything got better. The knees stopped hurting. The acid reflux that had woken me up almost every night for years was just gone. I bought new clothes in sizes I hadn’t worn since college. I felt like myself again, or maybe a version of myself I had given up on finding.
And then, gradually, some of it came back.
The financial world doesn’t have semesters. There is no Thanksgiving wind-down, no January slow start, no built-in breathing room. The days got longer, the schedule got tighter, and the habits I had built around a particular kind of life stopped fitting the new one. I didn’t lose the plot all at once. It happened slowly, one small compromise at a time, until I did a check-in one day and didn’t like what I found.
Here is what I know now that I didn’t fully understand the first time. Losing weight is hard. Keeping it off is a different kind of hard, and nobody really prepares you for that part. Motivation comes and goes. Discipline gets tired. The only thing that actually holds is knowing your why, specifically enough that you can find your way back to it when things go sideways. I have done this long enough to know that is true.
My why hasn’t changed. I don’t want to be a burden. I want to be around for the people who count on me. I want to feel the way I felt in 2022, when the knees didn’t hurt and the clothes fit and I had enough energy to actually show up for my life. That was true in November 2020 and it is true right now. The number on the scale has changed. The reason has not.
Focus. Facts. Forgiveness. That is the framework that worked for me the first time and it is what I am coming back to. Focus means knowing your why and keeping it close. The Facts piece means understanding what actually works, not what you hope will work. Forgiveness means accepting that setbacks are part of it, that starting over is not failure, it is just what comes next. Over the coming weeks I am going to walk through each one. If you are on this road too, I hope something here is useful. If you are just starting, welcome. You are in the right place.

Word count: 944 words.

Sireadh Toileachas

It has been some time since I have blogged. I have many excuses. Work is busy. Life is busy. The dog ate my computer. But the truth is I have not made writing a priority.

Those that have followed this blog (all 5 of you) may notice I have changed the title. The new title is Sireadh Toileachas – which means seek happiness in Gaelic (Scottish). I changed the title for a few reasons. First, change is good. Though I am uncomfortable with change, my life is better when I include change – hopefully for the better. Second, Scotland is in my blood. According to Ancestry DNA, I am 18% Scottish – also 28% England & Northwestern Europe, 14% Irish, and 5% Welsh. 23andMe classifies me as 58.7 British & Irish – clearly they don’t know there is a difference!!! Also, my middle name is Scottish. Third, I recently returned from a trip to Scotland and remain in love with the country.

But the most important reason, is I haven’t been as happy or healthy in recent months. The title was no longer accurate. A new title is needed to better reflect where I am. Further, the new title describes happiness as a journey rather than a destination.

I believe it is better to focus on the journey than the destination. I’ll write more about the experience of the journey. This may include a discussion of things I am working on to improve the world around me. This could include things that I have tried that didn’t work. It will definitely include any travel or adventures.

This blog and adventure began with my description of my three steps to success – focus, facts, and forgiveness. Focus on what you want to achieve AND why. Gather the facts, prepare a plan based on facts, implement the plan, and make adjustments. Finally, forgive yourself when you lose focus or deviate from the plan. Forgiveness allows you to restart the journey.

In recent months, I forgot about the importance of these three steps. As a result, I have slipped. Bill Gates gave a commencement speech titled “5 things I wish I heard at the graduation I never had”. He reminded all that life is not a one-act play. So, it’s time to start over and make health and happiness a priority. Over the last few years, I have relearned that life is full of second chances.

I close with an interesting anecdote about the new title. After I decided on the title, I typed the name into a search engine to find out more information and verify its meaning. Unfortunately, my short and chubby fingers accidentally misspelled the title. Instead of Sireadh Toilechas, I typed Sireadh Touleachas. Only one letter different but completely different meaning. Turns out Sireadh Touleachas means “seek help.” While I find this phrase wise and I try to apply it in my life, it is not the title I want for my blog. So for now, the title is Sireadh Toilechas – seek happiness.

Until next time – Slàinte Mhath – look it up.

Forgiveness

“Forgiveness does not change the past but it does enlarge the future.” Paul Lewis Boese

I’ve written about the importance of focus and facts. The why and the how are essential to creating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In future posts, I will write more on each.

Today, I want to briefly touch on the topic that brings it all together. Forgiveness is essential if you are going to succeed. There are too many distractions, temptations, stressors, and other factors which cause us to lose focus. You will stumble and make mistakes in this journey. You must be able to move on when this happens.

According to one dictionary, forgiveness is “to stop feeling anger about (something) : to forgive someone for (something wrong)” Christian tradition talks about the importance of forgiving others who commit sins. The forgiveness allows you to move past the incident in which you were wronged. Forgiving others is essential to a healthy life.

But this post is not about forgiving others. Others didn’t force you to make unhealthy choices. You make the unhealthy choices. You make mistakes. You must learn to forgive yourself when you make the mistakes. Learn from your mistakes but don’t dwell. Learning to forgive yourself slows you to grow your future and move on.

This time of year is challenging. Between the temptation of Christmas parties and Christmas cookies, weight loss is hard. I remember this time last year. I had made good progress in my weight loss journey. Then came Christmas Eve and Christmas day. I deviated from my meal plan. I ate mostly foods that are not healthy. They tasted good but they weren’t healthy.

After Christmas, I stepped on the scale and was devastated. I had gained 8 pounds in a matter of a couple of days. At that moment, I could have given up and said it wasn’t worth it. Instead, I forgave myself for over indulging. I reminded myself that spending time with people that I love eating good food is a good thing. Further, Christmas only comes once a year (except on the Hallmark channel). Fix the problem and move on.

I recommitted to my journey and began anew. I focused on eating healthy again. I explored why such a significant weight gain occurred in such a short period of time. Most of the weight was retained water. I’ve learned that some foods, particularly prepackaged and restaurant foods, contain a lot of sodium. When I eat this kind of food, I quickly gain a large amount of weight. Also, cheese. Really good cheese.

I continued to drink my daily water, eat natural foods, and control my portions. The result was instant. Within a few days, the weight I had gained over Christmas was gone. And I was back on the path to a healthy life. It set me back a week but that’s okay. What is a week compared to a lifetime.

I had a similar experience a couple weekends ago. My wife and I went out of town to visit our son at college. We ate out, drank beer, and had a wonderful time. Yet, upon my return home I was discouraged when I stepped on the scale. But again, I forgave myself and committed to eating healthy again. Things were back to normal within a couple of days.

As you wind through the Christmas season, take moments to enjoy friends and family. Go ahead and eat that cookie. Just don’t eat three cookies. And, if you do eat three cookies, forgive yourself and move on. Your goal should be excellence not perfection.