Bad Habits
I've spoken about health and weight loss efforts a few times, but I've also mentioned that I try to avoid posting too much about it because I don't want the topic to consume my blog; if I wasn't careful it would and I don't want that.
However, this has been weighing on my mind the past week (at least, if not more) and I would bet there are other people in the same boat. So while I work through this through writing for myself, maybe other people might be interested. You never know, right?
The gist: I'm trying to lose weight, to get down to 240 lbs for my first goal. After that I will adjust and set a new goal. I haven't set a specific date I want to hit this number by, because I think it would be a little demoralizing when the date goes by and I haven't hit the goal. I've fallen into this trap before - never again, thank you very much.
My only goal is to lose 0.5-1 lbs per week. To accomplish this, the primary method is calorie restriction - I've talked about this before so I'm not going to go over it again. But I'm also trying to add exercise to this, in the form of personal training (to reduce fat and gain muscle, which doesn't always help with scale weight) and trying to add extra cardio work.
That's all well and good, but lately I've been neglecting my calorie counting. I've fallen out of the habit again, or I've developed the bad habit of starting and stopping. Whatever way you want to look at it, I'm not logging consistently. Most often what happens is I start at the beginning of the day, and then something happens (usually I eat an unplanned meal that I can't account for exactly) and I don't finish logging. And then I fall off completely for a day or two. The weekends are especially bad for this.
I don't know what the solution is. It's easy to say "just start logging" but that can almost be equated to saying "just smile more" to someone who says they are depressed. (I say "almost" because all I mean is that it's not as simple as that, and not to say that these two things are equal.) What I did in the summer was to slowly build back up to daily logging - and it worked, until it didn't.
As I write this I haven't logged my breakfast. And it's a super simple breakfast, that I logged already this week - so I can just copy/paste the entry from the other day. You know what...I'm going to do that right now!
...
Done. Maybe this is the start of a new habit, of a streak that I actually want to keep. Would it be helpful if I shared my logging streak publicly? Would anybody care, or ask me about it if I haven't posted it?
Perhaps I could just put it at the bottom of blog posts the same way people put those "100 days to upload" stats at the bottom. I'll have to think on it a bit.
Update: I decided I would share my tracking habits publicly. I have a page that I will be updating at least weekly. You can see it here.
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