I knew that a day like this would come. I have felt my healthy eating habits starting to slip for a couple of days now. I started grabbing a snack here or eating a little extra there. I took what was once a very calculated process for consuming food, and reverted it back to a mindless act of consuming whatever was in sight.
There are usually several factors that contribute to me slipping back into my old habits. The one that I think led to this particular failure was my lack of routine, a danger normally faced when the weekend comes. Without a routine in my day, I don't have a good handle on the environment around me. I especially don't have a good sense of what time it is, something that is critical for me when measuring my food intake.
On a work day, my time is naturally broken up into smaller, more measurable chunks; drive in, morning at work, lunch, afternoon at work, drive home, time with kids awake, time with kids asleep, and my time for bed. They break up the day pretty nicely, and it gives me a good framework I can refer to when determining how much I should eat and when I should eat it.
On the weekend all of those references disappear, and I totally lose track of time. It causes me to fail to monitor what I should be eating and when. I always feel hungry throughout the day, but I use those time blocks to tell me when I should eat and when I should ignore my hunger pains. With the time reference of my routine gone, I lose control of the situation and let my programming take over. That spells disaster.
Today was a bad day for me because I ate way more than I should. While yesterday I felt a little guilty because I had a large meal where I probably ate too much (even though I didn't eat it all and that is a victory in itself), today was far worse. The whole family was sick and I was so wrapped up in trying manage the situation that the entire day was shot. Throughout the day, I caught myself eating more than I should, snacking when I didn't need to, and eating junk that I have not allowed myself to eat for nearly two weeks. Looking back, it was very disappointing.
It just goes to show how much control a programmed behavior has over you. Just when you start to walk away, you take a quick look back, and it pulls you right back in again. Reflecting on the past week, I realize that it took quite a bit of work to ignore these behaviors. I had to force by body to do what I wanted it to do, while ignoring what my program wanted me to do. The battle is epic, and you realize that it is going to take a tremendous amount of energy to overcome these habits and bring about change. It is no wonder that so many of us fail.
At this point, I typically give up trying to do something different and revert back to my old ways of eating food. But this time, when it feels like I am about to slip back into my old habits, I remind myself of the process required to create habitual change.
Life Lesson #6: Correcting a bad habit requires chiropractic treatment
This life lesson may be a bit obscure, but I use the reference with students all the time when we talk about trying to correct a poor habit they have in their marching technique. When you go to a Chiropractor to deal with something in your body that is out of place, the typical process is to diagnose the problem, prescribe a physical treatment, apply the treatment, then setup an appointment to immediately return to reapply the treatment. At first, Chiropractors normally want you to come daily or every other day for the same treatment. But after a few days, they start to spread the interval between treatments out for longer stretches as time.
The idea behind this method is that when you have a joint has been out of place for a long period of time, when put back in place, the joint has the tendency to immediately return to being out of place again. As you put it back in place over and over again, the time that it takes to fall back out of place increases. With repetition, it will take longer and longer for the joint to fall out. After several treatments, the length of time it takes the joint to fall out of place increases to the point where the body finally accepts the right place as the correct one.
Take you hands and clasp them together. Everyone has a natural way in which they clasp their hands, mine is left over right. Now switch (for me right over left). Feels unnatural, doesn't it? Now squeeze your hands together. In fact, squeeze them hard several times. As you keep squeezing (say up to 10 times), your hands will start to feel a little more natural when clasped in the opposite position. Now that it is starting to feel more comfortable, go back to clasping your hands your natural way. Feels funny, doesn't it? Almost as if it was now the wrong way? Squeezing the hands represents us applying the treatment to something that doesn't feel normal to our body, trying to get it to accept the new way as correct.
In my case with eating, I am only at the beginning of the process, so I have to reapply my treatments every day to keep me from reverting to the way I used to eat. While difficult now, I know that over time, the amount of treatments I have to make will be less and less and the time I will need to do them will grow longer and longer. Eventually, my behavior will change, and I will finally be to the point where the new way of eating will feel natural.
Unfortunately, I lost the battle today and my eating habits have slipped out of place again. I have to forgive and re-apply my treatment. 11 days is actually very good and I should be pleased with that. Hopefully it will be more than 11 days before my next slip. If it isn't, I will have to accept that and continue to reapply my treatment until my body know that the correct way of eating is the natural one.
Don't give up yet! Keep on trucking.
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