This post was originally sent to my private email list on September 17th, 2022.
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A flight from Boston to Los Angeles should take about six hours.
The trip itself is 2,590 miles.
But this wouldn’t be true if your plane was even slightly off course.
Within minutes, your new destination would be San Francisco. An hour later, Portland. If you continued veering slightly off course, you might as well make accommodations in Calgary, Canada.
At which point, your trip to Los Angeles would take another 3+ hours, 1,206 miles, and several hundred dollars.
Not ideal.
Nobody would argue with this.
But in the world of dieting, we settle for “close enough” all the time… then get pissed we didn’t end up where we wanted to go.
Here are some eye-opening examples:
- Being 200 calories over your target 4-5 days per week (which isn’t hard to do if you’re snacking or eyeballing your meals) can add 6+ weeks to your diet
- Being 400 calories over your target 3-4 days per week can add 12+ weeks to your diet
- Being 600-1,000+ calories over your target—most people’s norm from Friday-Sunday—can add THIRTY weeks to your diet
Yuck.
This isn’t to say you need to be “perfect,” just like a plane doesn’t have to go in a perfectly straight line to its destination.
But if you’re not course-correcting very often, you can’t throw a fit when you end up in the dieting equivalent of Calgary.
No offense, Canada.
Sam
