Why consistency matters more than perfection
There's a pattern worth naming: a single lapse, on its own, does surprisingly little damage. But the way people react to that lapse often does far more. One skipped plan, one bad meal, one missed day gets treated as proof that "the whole thing's failed," and that all-or-nothing thinking is what actually derails things, not the lapse itself.
In practice, it looks like this: someone eats badly one day (a work event, a bad night's sleep, whatever) and instead of just picking the plan back up the next morning, treats the slip as evidence the plan doesn't work, or that they've "ruined" the week, and the small deviation becomes a full abandonment. The gap between a bad day and giving up entirely isn't really about food. It's about the story told about the bad day.
Consistency-focused approaches sidestep this by design, because there's no perfect streak to protect. If the plan was never "never miss a day," then missing a day isn't a failure of the plan. It's just a day, and tomorrow's meal is exactly the same as it would have been anyway. There's nothing to feel like you've broken, because nothing was ever framed as unbreakable.
That's really the practical case for consistency over perfection: not that consistency is a nicer-sounding virtue, but that it removes the exact trigger (an intact streak) that turns an ordinary bad day into a bigger derailment than it needed to be.
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