When you got back on

It'll happen. A morning in the second week, or the third, when the fear from chapter 7 is loud and the cupboard is right there, and you get the scale out and step on, and the number does what it always did. Or a weigh day that turned into two, and then the week. Or, on the average, you looked. Here's what to make of it.

One morning on the scale isn't the habit back. Lally's volunteers from chapter 21 missed days and the habit formed anyway, and the same shape applies in reverse. A single step, on its own, is a single step. What turns it into the habit is the second morning, and the second morning is much more likely if you decide that the first one proves the month was pointless. It doesn't. It proves the habit is still there, which you knew, and that a specific morning got past your plan, which is information.

So look at the morning. What was it? A bad night, a big dinner, a comment from someone, a photograph, a pair of trousers. Whatever it was, it's the trigger you hadn't planned for, and it goes into a when-then plan by tonight. When I've had a night like that, then the scale stays in the cupboard and I write down the fear instead of the number. That's the whole repair.

Then look at which belief walked you to the mat. It'll be one of the chapters. Usually it's chapter 7, the fear of losing control, and sometimes chapter 5, the wanting of a good morning after a careful day. Reread the one it was. Not the whole book. The one chapter, so that the argument is fresh at the point the habit found the gap.

What you don't do is settle up. The lapse doesn't earn a punishment any more than a bad morning did, and it certainly doesn't restart the four weeks from zero. The month continues from where it is. If you weighed on day eleven, day twelve is day twelve.

And if the number you saw when you got back on was a bad one, and the swing arrived in full, read chapter 3 once more before breakfast. It was water. It was always water. The fact that you felt it anyway is chapter 11, and you're not weak for that. You're a person who read a number about their body, which is what the number is for.

If you find that you're back on every morning and have been for a fortnight, that's not a lapse. That's the habit, and the decision in chapter 21 is there to be made again, possibly with a different option this time. Readers who couldn't hold the weigh day often find the break easier, because a cupboard is a simpler rule than a calendar.