Sunday, March 21, 2010

Practice makes Perfect

Here is a post I made today on the Fuhrman forums expressing my view on learning, practicing and putting your stumbles into perspective:

Learning to eat healthy is like learning to play a music instrument or a sport--I mean really learning, not dabbling. When you are really learning a musical instrument, you practice every day. Practice consists of repeating exercises and songs over and over until to get it right. Making mistakes is expected---practicing over and over until you get it right is the solution. You don't apply moral judgments to yourself when you get the song wrong---rather, you expect to get it wrong until you practice enough to get it right. Now, the mistakes can be frustrating in both cases, but that's different from applying moral judgments to yourself. Anyway, my point is, as long as you are practicing daily and working to get it right, you are making progress! Each mistake should be thought of as a learning opportunity: how do I manage a similar situation next time? What you don't want to do is drop out for 3 months and go on an unhealthy food binge. In that case, just like if you don't practice your instrument for 3 months, not only do you not learn, you unlearn and have to relearn when you start up again. So if you blew it yesterday, you just need to keep practicing, like the rest of us. We're all practicing every day!

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