We were at my youngest son's baseball game a couple weeks back and were talking with a coach we know. When the conversation turned to pitchers getting upset when someone hits off of them and then feeling like a failure, he said, "I always try to tell them: If you're getting hits, that means you're throwing strikes."
It struck me as a good analogy for our dealing with nutrition in light of what we know vs what we practice vs what our goals should be. We work so hard to get our eating and health "perfect." We muster the self-discipline to avoid the donuts at work and increase our raw veggie intake--heck, we increase any type of veggie intake--and we bump up the exercise a notch. We might start taking the latest supplement that's in the news, subscribe to a health magazine, and buy new clothes. We do everything "right."
I've never met a person, myself included, who hasn't gotten derailed in his/her quest to improve overall nutritional health by gaining a little weight back, going off the wagon with chocolate, skipping a week at the gym, or getting some criticism when we wanted support or praise. We need to turn our attitudes around from, "I did my best and I still failed" to "I gave it my best and the chocolate bar got a hit off of me. The fact that this bothers me is good. It means I'm still throwing strikes.