This morning I had a session with my personal trainer, and as we haven’t seen each other for a while he asked me how I was getting on. Now, I’ve had what I would consider to be a really great few weeks, in terms of my focus on exercise and activity, and there have been a few other notably brilliant things of late – for example, I started to get a cold last week, and within 2 days I was back to normal health; I think that as I get fitter, my immunity levels are a bit stronger. Also, I threw out two pairs of size 18 jeans, and bough two pairs at size 16. It’s been a really great few weeks, and I'm so pleased.
However, my eating has been dreadful. I mean, worse than dreadful. When replying to Craig at the gym, I decided to quickly get the negative stuff out of the way first, then I could tell him all the GREAT stuff straight away, and we could celebrate my general awesomeness, with high-fives and big smiles, or something.
It didn’t quite work out that way. I told him I’d been eating really badly, and hadn’t lost any weight, and then quickly went “BUT!” and launched into all the many, many positive things… “…and also I’ve signed up for some 5km races in October, and I did a great gym session the morning after a hen night out on the town, and I kept a really good record of what I’ve been achieving in my workouts and have started to raise the intensity as a direct result…” etc etc. Finally, when I was done proudly rambling on about my great few weeks, I stopped for breath, noticed he wasn’t smiling and warmly congratulating me, and I narrowed my eyes. He left a short pause, then said: “So why has your eating been so bad?”
Ah, dammit.
He’s right. He’s completely, utterly right, and I knew he was before he even said it. Even as I’ve eaten really rubbishy food, in huge quantities, I’ve thought to myself “this is totally wrong – how are you expecting to lose the last 50lbs?” but continued to pack it all away like I wasn’t sure where my next meal might come from. My oven hasn’t been used for a while, I’ve been eating convenience foods and takeaways, icecreams, cakes, unhealthy options from the work canteen, food that I can shovel thoughtlessly into my mouth when driving, and so on. Vegetables? What are they? Fruit? What’s that? Oh, you mean that stuff they decorate a slab of cake with? …sigh.
We talked for a while, and he's really frustrated with my mentality in this area – I admitted that the way my brain works is that when I focus so intently on one aspect of my life (currently exercise) every other aspect falls spectacularly to pieces. Nutrition, money, work, social life, cleaning the flat, remembering people’s birthdays, etc. He wasn’t accepting that as an excuse: Other people manage, he said. I can’t, I replied.
But really, can I? I know from experience that that’s what happens with me – I make the analogy to jugglers. You have to keep several balls up in the air at one time, but sometimes one falls… with me, I can only keep ONE ball in the air, and all of the others fall to the floor. However, over the years I seem to have come to accept this as my lot in life. I regularly throw that analogy around like a badge of honour. “Ah, yes, but I’m focussing so intently on something, that everything else becomes unimportant to my brain.” – that’s nothing to be proud of! And that’s nothing to excuse what I do.
I SAY I can only keep one aspect of my life going well, and the rest fail spectacularly, but what do I do to stop that? Nothing, really. I sulk a bit, I focus even more intently on the one area I’m getting right, and then, little by little, I fall into a spiral of despair about everything else. I’ve tried counselling; it didn’t work. (“…you have to learn to like yourself. Maybe a boyfriend would help?” – are you kidding me?!) I’ve tried 'to do' lists, food diaries, spending diaries, notice boards, decluttering, and setting rules like “no TV for the first 30 minutes when I get home”… they work briefly, then very soon fall by the wayside. Why? I have no idea. I say my brain naturally fights ‘effort’ (that’s also what my counsellor thought) – but I can’t seem to find an effortless way to change that. In a nasty twist of fate, the ways to change my thought processes are going to take effort to do. It’s a horrible vicious circle, and one I’m all too aware of.
It’s going to take little steps. I know ALL of the theory – healthy eating and good nutrition, I could write my own book, I know it inside and out... I've tried ‘eating the elephant’ theories (little by little, gets the job done), ‘eating the frog’ theories (do something you dislike first, to get it out of the way, leaving you with nicer/more interesting things to do after that), and so on… But now I have to really put things into practice, and conscientiously stick with them, to turn them into good habits, and leave behind old ways. I suspect, deep down, that I don’t believe I’m worth all the effort it’s going to take to become the person I want to be. That saddens me, but what saddens me more than that, is that I’m already using that as an excuse for why I’m not going to be able to succeed.
Now I need to find a way to prove myself wrong.
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