I'm Gonna Pay For This Tomorrow

Tuesday nights I have class which means I don't get home til around 10:30PM. Since my goal is to get up at 5:30 and do my 30 minute cross train at Curves, I really should have immediately gone to bed. But did I? No. I can't go to bed with the latest Biggest Loser epidsode taunting me from my TIVO. So I stayed up and watched the entire episode. Now it is late and 5:30 seems not too far from now. And I am very tempted to set that alarm for 7:00 and just forget my goal to get my Curves workout it.

Then I remembered a post I wrote about doing things anyway, even if we don't want to. Here it is. And I just had to laugh as I read through this post and saw that in this post I mentioned another post I wrote about a similar topic - disciplining your inner child.

This is the longest I have ever kept up with any sort of journalling. And for the first time, I can really see how it helps you to notice your recurring behaviors or thought patterns...mine being that sometimes I give in too easily to the more painless choice when the going gets tough.

So tomorrow my alarm will go off at 5:30. And I am going to be tired. And I am going want to keep sleeping. But I am going to get up and I am going to exercise anyway. I'll feel better and sleep even more soundly tomorrow night for having gotten a work out in.

Day 3: Do It Anyway

Today's reading was an extension of the idea of committment. Basically if you are COMMITTED to losing weight, you will stick with your plans no matter what and do what you need to do even if you don't feel like doing it. If you are committed you DO IT ANYWAY regardless of whether you want to or not.

This brings to mind parenting a child. I don't have a child, but I once was a child as we all were. I can remember lots of times I didn't want to do something that I needed to do. Good parents will make you do it anyway. Conversations I remember were something like these:

"I don't wanna go to school today."
"It doesn't matter if you don't want to, you have to go anyway"

"I don't want to take the medicine."
"If you want to get well you have to take it anyway."

"I don't want to brush my teeth."
"Unless you want your teeth to fall out you have to brush them anyway."

What kind of parent would say, "Oh, you don't want to go to school? OK, you can just stay home and not learn anything." A crappy one, that's what kind.

It's time I did a better job parenting my willful inner child that doesn't feel like doing the things that are good for her. After all, in the end I was quite grateful tht I was sent to school, given my medicine, and made to brush my teeth. And in the end I will be grateful that I did what I needed to do for my health even when I didn't want to. (Strangely enough, I just remembered I wrote about disciplining my inner child in a previous blog post....hmmmm, maybe I should take my own advice once in awhile.)

Some health and weightloss tasks I tend to not feel like doing are logging my food, packing healthy lunches for work, cooking healthy dinners at night, and getting up before work to exercise. So tomorrow, even if I don't feel like it, I am going to do the following things anyway:

• Log every bite of food
• Get up at 5:30 and do 20 minutes of cardio (by the way, this was a goal for today to and, yes, I did it!)
• Pack a healthy lunch to take to work.
• Take a chicken breast out of the freezer tonight so I can bake it with some veggies tomorrow night for dinner.

What things do you not feel like doing but need to do anyway???

Disciplining My Inner Child

The past couple of weeks I have been stuck in a really bad cycle of bingeing. I’ve just been eating whatever I want, whenever I want, in whatever quantities I want. I go to the grocery store with the intentions of stocking up on fruits, veggies, yogurt, lean meats, oatmeal, and all the other makings of a healthy diet but once I get there I find myself trolling the various aisles just looking for something that will taste good. I will go up and down the bakery aisle to see if there is some fabulous pastry, bread, or cooke that must be tried. I wander through the freezer section, admiring the various flavors of Ben and Jerry’s debating: do I get the tried and true Chocolate Fudge Brownie or go for something new? Or maybe I should choose fudgecicles or Eskimo pies or ice cream sandwiches. And often I don’t choose. I just get them all.

When I take the time to think about and write about this behavior, I realize that I am acting like a spoiled, overindulged child. If there is such a thing as an inner child, mine is definitely in need of some discipline, some tough love, if you will. My inner child wants everything and wants it right now. Even though I know my health is suffering, my happiness is suffering, my physical comfort is suffering, I cave in to the whining tantrums of this bratty, greedy child. (“But everyone else gets to have ice cream!”) Why do I do this? I guess that much like a real child throwing a tantrum in public it is just a whole lot easier to give that child what she wants in that moment to stop the tantrum. This solves a short-term problem but just continues to exacerbate the long-term problem.

So what is the solution? I don’t have any children so I am unpracticed at the art of disciplining a child. Dr. Spock I am not. But I do know how to Google! So I found an article by Merry Wallace on the Discovery Health website that gives some ideas on what to do and what not to do when disciplining a child. I thought a lot of her suggestions could be used to tame my own bratty inner child.

Here are a few of the ideas from the article and how I can use them to create some discipline for myself.

1) State your limits clearly and firmly – Today you are shopping for healthy foods, not extra treats.
2) Discuss limits in advance – I equate this to having a shopping list prepared before heading to the store.
3) Use rewards to encourage a particular behavior – If you complete your shopping trip with no extra goodies in your basket, you can buy some sugar free gum at the checkout counter.
4) Acknowledge wishes – I know you wish you could buy some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream but it is not on the list for today. Maybe another time you can get some.
5) Externalizing a rule (You will decrease the battle of wills if you objectify the reason for the rule) – You cannot buy ice cream or other treats today because if you eat them you will feel physically sick, you will prolong the achievement of your weight loss goals, and you will be disappointed in yourself.
6) Maintain realistic expectations – Changing behavior is hard and if I slip up I will not berate myself. I will forgive myself and try to do better the next time.

I am really going to try to keep these things in mind the next time I go shop. After all, what is more annoying than a kid in a grocery store throwing a fit?......especially when she is 38.