The Numbers Game

So I think you might know (from my annoying attempts to promote it) that I have an email newsletter that comes out every other week. (And if you don't ... and want to subscribe ... here's how/where!)

Last week, I wrote a particularly insightful missive about finding your healthy weight. The gist of it was that experts say you only have to lose 5-10 percent of your current weight to make a huge difference in your health ... cholesterol numbers, blood pressure, blood sugar, all that. And that maybe, as we in the media celebrate people who have managed to lose half their weight or more (aka The Biggest Loser types), we are discouraging people because they think they have to live a boot-camp existence just to get healthy.

(It read much better than this summary, I promise.)

Why am I telling you all this? Well, after the newsletter went out, I got an email from the CEO of my company. The Big Cheese. I don't hear from him much so as soon as I saw his name pop up, I clicked. As all good managers do, he started with some nice comment about the newsletter. And then the dreaded BUT. It turns out that I had written ... in BOLD type, no less ... that you "only" have to lose 50 to 10 percent of your current weight to make a huge difference in your health. That sneaky little zero ... damn it! How did it get in there, and how did I miss it? My boss was OK (or so he said) ... just pointing it out. And luckily I had written it correctly two other times in the piece. But I am STILL red-faced over that one. Mortified. Struggling to move on.

See, if you've read my book, you know I'm a huge perfectionist, and think that perfectionism is one of the unrecognized reasons why Fat Girls are Fat Girls. We abandon entire exercise plans because we miss one day. We will eat an entire box of cookies because we give in to our cravings and eat just one. And some of us, like me, shy away from challenges, afraid to make a rookie mistake.

Now that I've worked through my journey, I am much less likely to allow perfectionism get the best of me, especially when it comes to eating, exercising, and staying healthy. It's the other stuff, though, that I struggle with more: Owning my mistakes at work. Opening myself to criticism without spiraling into self-loathing. My tendency is still to wallow in my own inadequacies, to think that I'm never enough. But this whole FFG journey has given me many of the tools I need to combat that, to forgive myself whether it's for a typo or cookie binge, and move on.

I didn't get a chance to send out a correction--our web administrator thought it would confuse the thousands of email newsletter subscribers on our list. I wanted to. I wanted to own up to my mistakes, to admit that I'm not perfect, because as I see it, that's part of my program. So I'm confessing here (good Catholic that I am). Owning it. And moving on.

Lisa D