A 45-year-old fat man trying to find his inner skinny dude.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Resilience

I think if you stop paying attention, it's easy to slip back to eating poorly and eating too much.  I sometimes feel that I only have so much discipline available to me.  I can work out and pay attention to my family and my job, but food will falter.  Or I can do the food, but maybe I'm distracted by being obsessive and am not present for the family.  Or something like that.

It can be hard, in other words, to hold it all together.  At least it's hard for me, because food has basically been my drug of choice for so long.  Oh how I wish I could quit eating altogether.  I'd be set.  Really.

But that won't happen.  So I am trying to be mindful of what I'm eating.  One Hershey's kiss in the office won't be a problem right?  Well, no.  But for me, one does not really exist.  Those things come in families.  Plus, a plum (and I do like a good plum) is about the same calories, with more fiber and less fat. 

Trigger foods.  I've found that with these, I'm better off without.  One slice of pizza leads inexorably to as much as I can get.  Same with some appetizers.  Sometimes it's true of candy or other sweets.  My defenses weaken as the day goes along.  I'm fine in the morning, but after dinner, I often feel the desire to eat, even though I'm not hungry.  I try to pay attention to hunger, to confirm whether I really need something or if the desire is just to eat. 

It's the same with working out.  I am ready to go in the morning.  If I haven't done it by five or six, it probably won't happen.  So there's that.

I'm amazed at the games I can play with myself.  I'm happy when the part of me that cares about me can win over the part of me that, having gotten comfortable, doesn't want to move.  Because I really do care.  I have good reasons to.

1 comment:

  1. You know, it's like those acrobat people that juggle spinning plates on top of poles. You have to keep running around keeping them all spinning, and it's really easy to miss one (or just let them all fall!) And it seems like you have to have EVERYthing in place for WL to work.

    I guess the sensible thing is to work on one or two at a time until they are second nature and no longer in danger of falling if your attention is distracted by another plate.

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