The mental part of this ‘journey’ is a real thing and probably one of the more important aspects of the success. When I started this back in January, I wasnt in the best place mentally. I had just come off of what I would consider were not the best couple of years for me. I was leaning pretty hard into trying not to feel any of that and trying to find that numbness in the bottom of a liquor bottle. The solutions are never there (queue up the jokes about alcohol indeed being a solution – because science).
In so many cases, and we can see this when we turn the TV on to see these incredibly obese people make changes in their lives or attempt to make changes and get stuck in their way because they are addicted to food or they use food as a coping mechanism for handling the stress in their lives. Im guilty of that. I admittedly love food. I love how food brings people together, even when the relationship they share is complete shit. I love that food can bring comfort when you’re having a shit day.
The problem is that too many of those events strung together generally leads us to a bad place and starts to develop bad habits and routines that lead us into places we dont want or need to be. We gain weight. We start to feel shitty. We start to feel more stressed. Our sleep gets worse. What we’re using to cope isnt necessary helping us at that point.
Change is hard and many of us dont like it because it requires a lot of effort to get to where we need to be. Its worthwhile effort when we know the destination is going to be infinitely better than where we are now. Mistakes are going to happen. Its unrealistic to think that the process is linear. Its not. That line is squiggly as fuck and it overlaps like crazy. Its like a telephone cable (for those of you who still remember when the receiver was connected to a giant cord) that gets all wound up in a tangled mess. Corded earbuds do the same thing. Just a giant tangled mess. Sometimes this can go that way too.
This is why I try to keep things simple. Plan ahead, but not too far ahead. Have a process in place that is simple to follow. Make food ahead and commit to eating said foods. Write down everything you’re ingesting and be honest about it. Every drop of sugar, and every bite of food. You dont really know if you’re not putting pen to paper (so to speak).
Motivation is what gets us started, but discipline is what keeps us going. This shit is hard. So keeping things as simple as possible helps to develop good discipline. Planning helps. Not every plan works. But thats why you write stuff down, so you can see the execution of the plan. This is why I weigh myself every day. Between food logging and the scale, I get to see whats working and what doesnt. I have the advantage of having a constant glucose monitor, which helps in the control of my blood sugar. For my own journey, thats incredibly helpful to me as tool for evaluation.