In defence of my blueberries.

Last summer I drove home from five days at a youth camp and unpacked a cool bag with squashed, wrinkled blueberries rolling about in the bottom of it. They had worked their way out of their container somewhere around day two and had been travelling loose ever since. I sat on the kitchen floor and looked at them, along with roughly half of everything else I had packed.

I had been well prepared. This is the part that still makes me laugh.

I knew the days would be long, and I had thought it through like the planner I am.

Tins of mackerel. Eggs. Peanut butter. Olive oil. Greek yoghurt. Berries. Enough vegetables to feed a small household. I was staying off site, in an actual bed, because camping is a “been there, done that” experience, thank God (the things you do for your children🙄). So I had the space and amenities to feed myself well.

And for the first two days, I did. I made my own high protein breakfast, ate my chunky salad bowl for lunch, and felt rather pleased with myself.

Then the days got longer. I was helping with the food for twenty or so young people, which meant pasta and wraps and sandwiches and pastries from early morning until late, and by the time I got back to where I was staying each night, sweaty and dusty from the 20,000 steps I'd walked that day, a shower and sleep were the only things I had any appetite for. Somewhere on day three I stopped opening my own bag. I ate standing up. I ate whatever was nearest, which was usually whatever the teenagers were eating. That was how the rest of the week went.

But I had been doing so well! 20 week streak and all! That's what made the blueberries hard to look at.

And that was not where it ended. From camp I went almost straight into my birthday, then a family wedding, then a trip home to see my mum, each one a good thing I would not have missed. But I did not properly reset until October.

Five days became two months.

I wish I could tell you this was the first time it had happened. Honestly, it had become a fairly predictable pattern. But what I have since stopped believing is the story I told myself each time:”I’ll start again when things calm down”

But things do not ever really calm down, do they? There is always a camp, a wedding, an unplanned trip, a sister who needs you, a work crisis that arrives without warning. So the plan has to work in a busy week. Because for you and for me, that is most weeks.

In every serious study of how people change their habits, this lapse is expected and close to universal. What separates the women still going a year later is what happened in the following week, and whether anybody was there to notice.

In my case, nobody did. Well, to be fair to the people who love me, my husband may well have noticed, but had he been unwise enough to mention it, I would probably have taken his head off! A prophet is not without honour, and so on..😂

But on a more serious note, the people closest to us are often the ones least able to say it, because anything they say lands on twenty years of history and meets our defensiveness head on. So what I’ve found is that there has to be somebody whose actual job it is to notice, with permission agreed in advance.

So, two small things this week.

Decide your floor before you need it: Your floor is the smallest version of eating well that still counts on the week you are running on fumes. Mine is a tin of mackerel and something green, eaten sitting down. On the worst days that is the whole plan, and doing it keeps the week. Decide yours while things are calm, because the week you need a floor is not the week you will invent one.

Then tell one person, and give her/him a job: Not a vague "I'm trying to eat better." More like: if you don't hear from me about this for a week, send me a message. You don't need to ask why. Just let me know you noticed. Choose someone slightly outside the daily fray, for the reasons my husband could tell you about. It is a small thing to ask, and surprisingly hard to say if you have spent twenty years being the one who notices.

And when your own five days come, and they will, you do not go back to the beginning. You pick up at the floor, on the next ordinary Tuesday.

None of this is really about food, by the way. A floor and a witness will hold up any new thing you are trying to build: the walking, the early morning prayer, the business goal you set in January, the course you have not opened since. Whatever yours is, decide its smallest version now, and tell somebody. 

Health in your body, peace in your soul, purpose in your step.

Lolu :)