I participated in a work-related training session before for that was all about the moment of truth in customer service. The moment of truth is that moment when a customer is venting their complaint to you and you have a split second choice – you either give them your attention and listen until they are done talking and then proceed to troubleshoot the issue, or you get defensive, don’t pay attention, and go in a direction that won’t benefit either your customer or the company.

When you have a weight loss goal, you will run into many of these moments of truth in your journey. These are those times when you suddenly feel hungry for food because you were triggered by an emotion (emotional hunger), you’re tired and you want to eat for a pick-me-up, or you’re bored, frustrated, or any myriad of situations or emotions you find yourself in when you want to use food for reasons besides physical hunger.

While it won’t derail your progress completely if you go off your plan once in awhile, if you’re doing this every day, or even every week, you’ll probably quickly get discouraged with your weight loss progress because all of those times will add up. Additionally, if you are addicted to sugar and flour like I am and you indulge in those ingredients, you very easily could set off a binge, which could lead to feelings of guilt and turn into a week long, month long, or longer binge of unhealthy eating – just from that one slip.

What’s great though, is that you have the power, you have the choice when you reach your moment of truth. You can either say, “what the heck, I’ll have that just this one time”, or you can stay the course, especially if you know that you have a hard time with eating “just one”.

I reached a moment of truth this afternoon – I was tired emotionally and physically, I was getting hungry (physically), but what was really happening was my emotional hunger was rearing its head. I thought about giving in and eating something that wasn’t on my plan, but I knew if I did I’d feel really bad about it because I made a commitment on Tuesday that I’d Twitter through the rough times and stay the course. Besides that, I’m am learning new ways to cope with emotional hunger, but that doesn’t mean that I these feelings haven’t stopped coming up yet.

In my moment of truth I sat here and decided to go to twhirl and tweet about wanting to emotionally eat:

Tired and need a break – this is the kind of time when I want to emotionally eat, so I’m tweeting about it instead. about 7 hours ago from twhirl

After I did that I felt like I’d “put it out into the light” and was no longer alone in my desire to emotionally eat. You see, when I keep these thoughts to myself, it’s much easier for me to talk myself into straying.

In the end, twittering about it helped and then I ate my healthy, clean meal. After I was full I was so happy that I hadn’t gone for any of the other stuff, yeah!

My purpose in sharing this with you is to point out that these moments of truth come up many times when it comes to weight loss, and while I’m not talking about being perfect, the more times you give in and stray from your course, the harder it will be to reach your goal. It’s in those decisions you make in each moment of truth that determines how successful you will be in your weight loss and fitness progress.

In the end, I’m happy I took the step and committed to making myself accountable with Twitter but even more so, I’m happy that I honored my goals today.

What about you? How often do you have moments of truth come up regarding your weight loss and fitness, or in your journey to stay off the addictive ingredients? How do you deal with them to stay your course towards your goals?