Today is day two of my Food Journal and I am surprised at how much my food choices were affected by the knowledge someone was going to be reading (and judging!) my eating habits. Who’d of thunk it? lol
I wanted to eat pizza but didn’t because I didn’t want the trainer to read that I ate pizza, just like I didn’t eat a whole whack load of other things today because of the judgement that will be passed on my food choices.
It’s like Big Brother or George Orwell but in a smaller way. 😛
Normally I try to not let other peoples judgements of me affect my behaviour. I mean yeah ok, I know it does but I try to not let it affect me too too much. This time though, I am choosing to alter my behaviour because I know what I want to do is “bad” and having someone figuratively looking over my shoulder keeps me from indulging in the self -destructive behaviours that will do nothing good for me. It’s like having a little coach on my shoulder helping me to resist the foods I shouldn’t be eating. It’s so much easier to decide to not eat something when I know he will be reading my food journal on Wednesday.
Lately I’ve been eating foods I shouldn’t be, I’ve been eating foods in larger quantities than I should be and to top off those oh-so-lovely decisions I haven’t been exercising nearly as often as I should be. This has resulted in me feeling icky, slower than normal, fatter…even though I know my food choices are making me feel this way I can’t seem to stop my behaviour, or at least I wasn’t able to until today. Today though, when I thought about eating pizza, even though I wanted it, I kept thinking “nope cause he’ll read it”. Even though I know I shouldn’t be eating it, and normally that knowledge would be enough to stop me, lately knowing that isn’t enough, buuuut knowing someone else is going to know what I was eating was enough.
I don’t know why I am needing an outsider to help me have self-control over my food but I do and luckily for right now I have one, yay! 😀
Don’t think I managed to eat perfectly today, I didn’t, but I did manage to minimize the screw ups which is nice, lol. 🙂
I didn’t make it to the gym but I did go for a nice walk to the grocery store which I am going to pretend counts as exercise lol I used my Runtastic App to track the walk there, paused it while I was shopping then restarted it on the walk home. I’m cranky with myself because I forgot to restart it right away so the info is a bit wrong because it didn’t track the entire walk home. What I have from it says I walked 3.16km and it took me 1:07:17. It is a pathetic distance and if I was going running or hiking I’d put my nose in the air at such a short distance but hey, I can’t control where the store is lol and I’d like to point out that the walk home had me carrying two fairly heavy grocery bags. Not like I didn’t know I was going to be buying food but I didn’t take in to account how heavy some of the items would be, especially when they are stuffed in to two bags lol
The walk home got me thinking about weight I have already lost. I don’t know the exact weight of the two bags but I know they weighed enough my arms were hurting from carrying them, the straps were digging in to my hands and my breathing became a bit laboured. Not hugely laboured, if I’d been walking with someone I’d have still been able to talk but I was breathing heavier and faster than normal. I made sure to walk the same pace I normally walk, even with the addition of the bags, hoping to turn the walk in to a bit more of a work out.
When I started breathing heavier I started thinking about the extra weight I was carrying, how at one point, not all that long ago that extra weight wouldn’t have been weight in a bag but weight that was on my body. I realized that if I was doing that walk a couple years ago I might have been breathing heavily not because I was holding something but just because my body was that much larger, and more out of shape then it is now, and if walking that distance/elevation would have made me out of breath just from walking how much worse would it have been if I was carrying my groceries back home? It’s an unsettling thought…
It’s easy to forget how far I have come, how much I have changed (for the better), how 3-4 years ago I would have been so happy at the thought of being how I am now. Because now, all I think about is how much farther I have to go and how I never seem to be able to get there. I think about how much I still want to change and how I seem to be at a level that asks more of me than I am able to give. I know I won’t get results without putting in the work, I know I won’t reach my dreams without making an effort, I know I have to do more than I am doing now to get where I want to be but in the day-to-day act of living I seem to forget the larger far-reaching goal and I focus on the in-the-moment gratification.
A small sacrifice now will make for a happier future me. I used to know that deep in my bones, I didn’t even have to remind myself when offered something tempting because it was one of the mantras I lived, but lately, sigh, lately I don’t think that automatically, I don’t even remind myself when having to make a choice, I just say “screw it” to having impulse control and eat whatever – or at least that is how it feels to me.
It’s important to remember how far I have come while not letting go of the lessons I have learned along the way and using that knowledge to keep me on the path to a healthier, fitter, happier me. I guess sometimes I just need a kick in the butt to remember! 😛
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 