Have a "bad" Day

Today I woke up feeling great, I still don't feel to bad.  I ate a small breakfast and then had a pickle for a snack hours later.  When it came lunch time my friends were wanting to grap a bite before going to college to pick up our books and stuff. We stopped at a local restraunt.  I ate a small meal that I didn't think would add up to too many calories.  After getting done at school I came home and put what I had eaten in my food log.  It added up to a lot more calories than I had thought.  I still haven't eaten dinner and my boyfriend and I have a date tonight and he is fixing dinner, he will get mad at me if I don't eat due to eating too many calories at lunch, he already thinks it is dumb to count the calories I eat, he says just to watch what I eat and how much and I'll be fine. Help...how do I get out of this "bad" day feeling like I have failed at my dieting????

your boyfriend is partially right in my opinion. while it's not dumb to want to track your intake for the peace of mind, when in doubt you can still always fall back on your own common sense to serve as your guide on days when you'll obviously exceed. if you're not more than doubling your allowance in a consistent, negligent pattern over the course of a significant amount of time, you're not going to make a dent in your goal. it's the same as assuming you'll somehow run faster tomorrow because you ran an extra mile today.

Its ok to have a bad day. :) Go ahead and eat with your bf. Just try to be careful but don't flip out about it. Its ok to have a bad day once in a while but don't let that become an excuse. Just try harder the next day. We're not perfect so don't expect perfection on your diet either

I always feel the same way, that because I have one bad day I feel like I've somehow "failed" at my dieting. But a counsellor once told me that this "failure" is only true if your diet means eating a perfect amount of calories for one day and at the end of this day, you're finished with your diet.

The fact is that dieting isn't just a one day endeavor. It's a continuous process going from day to day (for many, many days >.<), and you will have both good and bad days. But there is no need to flip out and feel like a failure on your bad days. Just go and enjoy your dinner with your bf. And if you're still feeling guilty tomorrow, just be a little more careful :) Good luck! 

  I've had a bad day today too. I don't even want to enter what I ate in my food diary. It started out okay, with oatmeal for breakfast and a Lean Cuisine for lunch. I wanted to supplement my lunch with some vegitables (I work in a nursing home which provides meals, but I didn't like what they were having for the main course today) but the server left to get more forks and they're gone forever when they leave so I didn't feel like waiting around. Then, when it came time to have my afternoon snack of an orange, I couldn't find it anywhere (????) So I wound up eating a cookie that was lying around the office instead. Home for some processed crap for dinner (Tv dinner...I'm trying to get away from them because of all the salt, although the calories are not bad) then I ate a cupcake and just now, a handful of M&M's. I probably didn't eat more calories than I should have, but I wasn't healthy today. I don't think even one vegitable or fruit passed my lips the whole day.