The Cycle

Diet

Here’s what I do – what I’ve always done.  I decide to start on a MONDAY! Why that is so important to me,  I’m not sure,  but it always starts on a Monday for me. (side note  - I already screwed up my Monday this week,  so I am actually starting Tuesday.  It bothers me…but I’m trying to push thru. Full disclosure – I was supposed to start 2 weeks ago. I hate starting over all the time.)

Starting on Monday leaves the prior weekend open for anything and everything – drinking,  eating.  And not JUST eating whatever I want, but eating even more than I need to because I’m thinking “as of tomorrow I can’t eat any of this…” So that’s the normal pre-diet binge.  If that happened on a rare occasion, I suppose it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but here is what ultimately happens: I’m good for about 3 days.  I stick to the program a little and something comes up – happy hour, dinner with the girls, Easter candy has hit the stores… whatever.  So I cheat.  And once I cheat I’m pretty much done.  “Well I already messed up today, so let me just eat whatever.” Eventually what happens is I veer off path completely until the following MONDAY when I swear I will start over. And we already covered what happens the weekends before Monday comes. So there you have it.  As I type it out I can clearly see how self destructive this behavior is.

Evilness

Exercise

This is fairly similar to the diet cycle.   I have tried many many many workouts and seen on tv stuff (will go into detail later).   I start many things and stick to none. (I’m hoping this public display helps me stick with my current plan.  If it ends up like the rest, maybe nobody will know anyway! We’ll see how it goes.) The past year or so I have been printing out blank calendars each month and filling in each day with the workout I need to do.  This idea is that the visual reminder will keep me on track. So what happens when I miss a day? Well, I don’t quit completely…yet. What I do is carry on to the next day, but in my head I still need to make up that work out.  So I either do that workout the next day or plan to combine with another day’s workout,  so nothing is missed. And then if I miss two, the extra workouts just keep piling up until I’m overwhelmed with “make-up work” that I just stop everything completely. “I’ll start over on Monday.” I understand that the more reasonable thing to do would be to just let it go and carry on with the schedule, buy my brain doesn’t work that way.  I will continue with my calendar printouts, but the goal this time is to just print it out ONCE a month! No restarting in the middle.  I may spend more time planning a workout schedule than actually working out. No, I do – I actually do spend more time planning.

Color coded and organized!