Day 3: 100 days challenge - Do it anyway

Watched Biggest Loser last night. As much as I don't like Miggy and her dramatics, I do admire her for doing what needed to be done in the face of huge odds. She managed to drop 5 pounds after a week that included an emergency appendectomy and a proscription against all exercise except walking. This is a very good example of someone who is committed. She is also a poster child for today's topic - Do it anyway. She had every excuse in the book to just walk away in defeat, but she didn't.
Kudos to Miggy!

Today's Lesson from "100 Days of Weight Loss":

1. In your diet or exercise plan, identify a task you don't feel like doing, and then do it anyway!

I don't like getting out of bed early. I like being up early, but I don't like the act of actually getting up out of a comfy bed. I've been doing it anyway because I've discovered that once I'm up, I enjoy the early morning, and I am more productive the rest of the day. When my alarm goes off, I get up. Period. Of course getting up early is much easier when I get to bed at a decent hour. It has been my habit to go to bed at midnight. I like that hour. There are no demands on my time. I can do what I want and watch what I want. Even though I would rather stay up until midnight, I am now going to bed at 11:00.

2. Notice how it feels to accomplish a goal by taking a "no matter what" approach to it.

My favorite feeling in the world is finishing a workout. If I don't get up early, I most likely will not get a workout in. Leaving it until later most often results in rationalizing why I should wait another day. Yesterday I only got in 20 minutes. When I was late getting on the treadmill, it would have been easy to rationalize not doing the workout at all since it wouldn't be the "perfect" 30 minutes I had planned. Perfectionism. I will have more to say about that later.

3. In your notebook, make a list of actions you plant to stick with today, regardless of how you feel at the moment.

I'll get to this one later


In addition the the "100 Days of Weight Loss" book, I am also reading a book called The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain. This book focuses on a "cognitive therapy" approach. It teaches one how to change the thinking that leads to destructive behavior. No action is performed without first having a thought. All behavior is preceded by a thought process and a decision. Last night after dinner, I was stressing about something. I ate several handfuls of chocolate animal cookies. I was over my calorie allotment for the day. For the rest of the evening I struggled with thoughts of wanting to eat even though I wasn't hungry. I could feel the negative thoughts flooding in.  "You failed, you might as well eat and start over tomorrow."  Then I remembered something I read in the Beck Diet Solution.

"Every time you resist eating something you shouldn't, you're strengthening your tendency to resist in the future. However, each time you give in and eat something you shouldn't, you're strengthening your tendency to give in.

So whenever you feel the urge to eat something you're not supposed to, think about which muscle you really want to strengthen. If you want to lose weight and keep it off permanently, you need to take every opportunity to strengthen your resistance muscle and to weaken your giving-in muscle."

This makes sense to me because after I have slipped or when I'm confronted with difficult choices, I feel as if resisting is a void - a negative action. To think about actually "doing" something really helps me. Another challenge in weight loss is what to do after a slip-up, be it big or small,. with that feeling of being hopelessly catapulted on to disaster. Having a plan in place for those times (even though we tell ourselves that THIS time there will be no slip-ups,) gives me a better chance of succeeding in the long run. I said in an earlier post, it isn't the slip-ups that do us in, it's what we do afterward that makes the difference. My general response to messing up it to continue messing up and tell myself I will start again tomorrow. To see how irrational that kind of thinking is, imagine that if you fell. Would you tell yourself, "I'll just sit here until tomorrow and then get up and start again." I suspect that the what's going on in my head has more to do with my weight issues than what is going in my mouth. Yes, what I eat matters, but before I eat, I have to think. The thinking needs to change.