Dear Lauren,

Well, that was pretty fun, huh? Full-fat salad dressing and a tall Blue Moon on Friday night, accompanied by at least three servings of cookies and cream Edy’s once you got home?

A double serving of pumpkin pancakes on Saturday morning, once everyone was gone? If no one saw you eat them, they don’t count, right?

And who can forget the seven beers you had over the course of Saturday, three of them high in calories? Not to mention the extremely greasy pizza you had later, and the slice of banana cream pie once you got home. You made the pie “for Jeff’s birthday”, right? Funny that thus far you’ve eaten more of it than he has.

Okay, so we’ve been over Friday and Saturday—what the hell happened on Sunday? After having a healthy, filling lunch you proceeded to lay in bed and snack ALL day. By 4 p.m. you were eating vanilla ice cream out of the carton. Another slice of that damn pie. Pretzels. Then a slice of leftover pizza. And a small bowl of cereal.

And the icing on the cake? No workouts since Wednesday. Despite your attempt to stick to a manageable workout schedule this week, you let life intervene. Jeff’s friend was coming into town, so you needed to clean, get groceries and run errands. Then it was Jeff’s birthday, so you couldn’t possibly find time to do a 30-minute DVD.

Now the new body fat scale you treated yourself to has arrived, sitting like a cruel joke in its unopened box. Remember how you were excited to start watching your body fat go down?

I’m not intending to beat you up here; you and I both know making yourself feel like shit won’t help the situation at all. This was a slip up, and you can absolutely recover from it. You used to eat like that every weekend, remember? You often went weeks without working out, didn’t you? And on Saturday you sure got your heart pumping by walking around town and lugging groceries five blocks home. Old Lauren would have waited until a car was available.

So we can turn this around, okay? First of all, start tracking. Right now. Get it on paper. Secondly, make a healthy dinner and work out tonight. And then weigh yourself tomorrow on your fancy new scale. Are you up? Probably. But you need to see the damage if you want Saturday’s weigh in to be a success.