Today is the second day of being productive.. Check.
Sometime in 2012 I looked in the mirror one day and thought to myself, I can’t be both bald and fat, I have to pick one. And being that losing weight was the easier, healthier, less expensive and risk averse of the two, I decided it was time to lose weight.
I thought to myself that this is going to be very easy, being that almost a decade earlier I lost 80+ pounds. I did it by becoming a vegetarian and played DDR for at least 3 hours a day (a lot of times continuously). But boy was I wrong about it being easy to do that again.
I went to the area where all my work out equipment is, whipped the dust off, and decided to exercise …the next day. The next day I set a time to work out, but I ate 20 minutes before that time and then I had to wait an extra day. The next day I had an equally ridiculous excuse, but the day after I ran out of excuses. So I put on the workout program people were raving about and I tried it and thought I was going to die.
The day after that, I worked out but couldn’t do half of what I did the day before. Then after that motivation to keep going was effortless. The next days kept feeling greater and greater. Fast forward to 2 years later and I hadn’t missed a single day, I was 40 pounds lighter, but this time with muscle weighing me down. Everything was amazing again, I felt like I was on top of the world, yet again. I was becoming more social, being more productive, and I was a much more positive person. That positivity was contagious, everyone was saying they were enjoying my company more, people could tell I was happy.
Until I pulled my back working out one day and I haven’t exercised since.
Yesterday was the New Year, and I thought to myself, this is a new beginning, why not use this as a catalyst for change. I’ve been waiting for something to spark my life into improvement, let it be the new year. I am going to implement everything I learned in the last year, and I’ll start with my health.
But first, I needed to see what went wrong to be able to fix it. I knew it wasn’t just the injuries that were at fault.
My pattern disruptions both when I tore my MC playing DDR (I know), and when I hurt my back lifting, only broke the chain.
It only disrupted the rhythmic pattern of my motivation, why was it that it took me a decade, and then later on 4 years to wait to fix my pattern disruption.
For that I had to look back at why breaking consistency was so detrimental. I realized now that back then, I no longer was getting my dopamine and oxytocin fix from checking off the days where I was on track off my work out list. Every time I knew I was out of commission for days to come it was game over. My mindset would forget about what my long term is and I needed to feel good immediately by eating unhealthily, which I did in copious amounts undoing everything I learned and worked hard for. In a way my brain turned off, as if with a switch, instantly.
Later I learned that there are environments that put us in these states where our emotions take over and we stop thinking rationally, or at least that part of the brain gets hijacked by the other. I also learned that in order to avoid that, we should avoid the things as much as possible that put these conditions on us, but when they do, we should go back to the good habits as much as possible, and that won’t happen if you give up on your long term goals. Keep them where you can see them every day. And remind yourself that if something happened, be it beyond your control or not, you have something to strive for.
Stay tuned for more specific action items for how to keep your long term goal in check, and I’ll talk a bit more on consistency tomorrow isA.