The 90%/10% Rule!

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When I first started following Dr. Taylor’s MAP, I was very disciplined and didn’t even think of having a cheat day. When you are faced with a life or death situation, motivation is high. As the months passed, however, and holidays and birthdays kept coming up along with all the celebratory food that goes with them, I wanted to know how much I could “cheat” and it still be ok.  I really did enjoy eating the new way I was learning, but once in awhile a person wants to splurge! At least, I did!

Dr. Taylor told me that when it was my birthday, he did want me to enjoy a slice of birthday cake, and when it was the 4th of July, have a piece of pie to celebrate, but then get right back to the normal diet.  He called it the 90%/10% rule – it’s what you do 90% of the time that determines your health, the 10% doesn’t matter.

So . . . fast forward several years later when I had been following this very healthy lifestyle and was cancer free . . . I was struggling to stay as disciplined.  I didn’t have the weight of every day being life and death anymore, so I did all kinds of calculations to figure out how to follow this 90%/10% rule!

Um, let’s see what this would look like:

• One bite out of every ten bites of food could be chocolate!!!
• One day out of every ten days of healthy eating could be eating whatever!!!
• If my daily allotment of food usually equaled around ten cups by volume, one cup could be anything I wanted!!!

I tried to look at it any and every which way I could!  My real problem was that I’m like the alcoholic when it comes to sugar:  one small amount only fuels me to want more! It’s always been very difficult to enjoy a small dessert and be satisfied.  Even though I was given permission to cheat 10% of the time, I was finding that this didn’t really work for me.

Now fast forward 22 years later and I have found that I need to eliminate sugar most all the time and try not to think about how much I can “legally” have.  Forgetting about it all together works much better for me. I try to instead focus on all the delicious, healthy food that I will be eating each day. I’m not saying this is always easy, but overall I find it’s a better mindset to aim for.  Making sure to include lots of good fat in your diet helps with cravings tremendously!

A funny (now!) experience of making a super healthy dessert back in the early days:

I found a recipe for some kind of apricot balls that contained only super healthy ingredients; things like ground apricot kernels, dried apricots, flaxseed, etc.  I don’t know where the recipe came from and don’t have it anymore, but I was so excited to make this dessert! At this time, I had been on the healthy diet for approximately 3-4 months and hadn’t cheated once!  Some of the ingredients I had to order from our local food co-op that came once a month. One of them was on backorder, so it took two months to get everything the recipe called for! It was an easy recipe that called for a cup of almost all the ingredients and one teaspoon of the little things, like sea salt.  I needed to run a few errands and so commissioned my daughter, Katherine, age eight, to mix everything up while I was gone. Since the recipe was very easy, what could go wrong?

I pulled back into the driveway after finishing the errands, and Katherine came running out to me with a worried expression on her face.  She blurted out that she was so sorry! “Sorry for what?”, I asked. She asked me if I remembered that the recipe called for one cup each of the first five ingredients, or so.  I answered yes. Then she said that she had been so focused on the one cup of everything that she had put in one cup of salt instead of the one teaspoon it called for! My heart sank as I asked if she had already stirred it in, hoping there was a slight chance of saving some of the dough.  Yes, she had already stirred everything together!

I would love to say that I handled this as a very mature adult would with lots of grace for my daughter and hardly any self-pity for me . . . I was not that mature . . . I might have gotten tears in my eyes . . . I might have made my daughter feel guilty . . .

I would handle it better today!!!