Hi Brooke, Happy New Year to you and your precious family!

My question is regarding exceptions. I followed a super clean protocol for the past eight months and lost all the extra weight I had.
Over this period I experimented with a joy eat once a week, then once a month and over the last three months I allowed no joy eats because I took your advice to be super precise with my protocol, and it worked.

Now I entered the maintenance mode and allowed myself exceptions once a week and I see that it causes me to spend extra time and attention at managing and allowing urges all over again after I have my exception.
I am confident in my ability to manage them but I asked myself the other day – do I want to allocate some of my energy to keeping managing every week these urges back again? And my answer was no. It’s not worth it to me to spend time and brain juice on that.

Most of my friends and family think it’s unhealthy and orthorexic of me to choose to maintain my clean diet but I feel the restriction frees me of possible compulsion along the way, of weight gain, and of time spent on allowing urges and chatter.
Am I wrong in my attitude?