Doing it badly still counts as doing it

There are evenings when the weather has made the decision for me.

I had planned a proper walk, the sort that requires shoes, a coat and the vague belief that I am a woman who enjoys fresh air. Then the British rain starts coming down sideways and the walk quietly removes itself from the calendar.

The old version of me would have taken this as official permission to do nothing.

No walk meant no exercise. No exercise meant the day had failed in that department. Once a day has failed in one department, the others may as well close early too.

Now I sometimes walk up and down the stairs five times every half an hour during the evening.

I look less like a determined woman improving her health and more like someone who has gone upstairs, forgotten why, come back down, remembered and repeated the entire process all evening.

But it gets me moving. Breaking it into tiny chunks makes it easier, and by the end of the evening I have done considerably more than the absolutely nothing I had been planning to enjoy.

Better than the apocalypse

Meals have their own version of this.

Sometimes I am busy, tired and completely unwilling to plan, shop for or prepare the meal I imagined when I was feeling organised and morally impressive.

My husband may be eating a creamy curry with rice and naan. I might have the curry too, but with less rice and no naan.

Or I have the chilli in a genuinely smaller bowl, with less rice and some vegetables added to make it more filling. And I mean visibly smaller, not so fractionally reduced that somebody needs to fetch a measuring tape and provide expert testimony.

Neither option is the lightest meal I could possibly eat. Both are still better than deciding I have already failed and eating as though the kitchen will be repossessed in the morning.

That is what I mean by better than the apocalypse. It is the choice that may not be particularly impressive, but avoids the dramatic chain reaction in which one imperfect meal somehow becomes permission to stop trying altogether.

At the beginning, I resented these choices.

They felt like consolation prizes. If I could not make the best choice, I wanted to believe the slightly better one was too pathetic to matter. There was something almost insulting about being asked to feel pleased with a smaller portion of chilli. I had not won a medal. I had merely stopped eating before the saucepan was emotionally ready to let me go.

I kept confusing “not ideal” with “pointless”.
They are not the same thing.

The middle choice still has a direction

I used to think progress was made by excellent decisions.

The full walk. The carefully planned meal. The neat calorie total. The day logged with the smug accuracy of a small accountant.

But most of my real life happens somewhere below excellent.

It happens in the shorter walk, the ordinary meal, the smaller bowl and the food log I would rather leave mysteriously unfinished because the evening became awkward.

Logging an uncomfortable day honestly can feel like making a written statement against myself. The numbers sit there, unhelpfully factual, while I build a legal case for why several mouthfuls should not count because I ate them standing up.

I log them anyway.

Honesty with myself is what has made this attempt different. I record what I ate, accept what it means and deal with the consequences instead of hiding from them.

In the past, I could quietly ignore the inconvenient parts and then feel genuinely angry when I did not lose weight, as though my body had failed to honour an agreement I had not actually kept.

I do not want another restart.
Being honest is how I stop needing one.

A meal can be higher in calories than I wanted and still be reasonable. A walk can be laughably short and still be movement. A better choice does not stop being better merely because an even better one was available.

I would never put £5 into a savings account and say, “Well, I meant to save £10, so this is useless. I may as well withdraw another £10 while I’m here.”

Yet I have done the food equivalent more times than I care to admit.

Saving £10 is better than saving £5.

Saving £5 is still better than saving nothing.

Both are better than ending the week £10 further behind because anything short of the ideal offended me.

One slightly better choice will not transform anything overnight. Repeated often enough, though, these choices become the difference between moving slowly forward and repeatedly making the job harder.

It counts because I did not abandon it

I am not pretending every choice is equally useful. Five trips up the stairs are not the same as a long walk. A smaller bowl of chilli is not the lightest meal I could eat. Honesty does not require me to promote every compromise to perfection.

It only requires me to stop calling it failure.

Sometimes the full version is unavailable because I am tired, busy, hungry, fed up or trapped indoors by rain with personal grievances.

On those days, I can still choose the smallest useful version actually available.

I can do it badly on purpose. I can let it look unimpressive. I can log the awkward meal. I can make the choice that is merely better than the one I was about to make.

Doing it badly does not mean I have stopped doing it.
And that counts. So, so much.