WLS support and inspirational information

I've got her book: The Rules of Normal Eating. Also, I am going through the 50 tips and doing a blog entry on each one. I think they are very useful.

This reminds me of what I wanted to post... here's a question for everyone:

What's the first good habit that falls by the wayside when you are going through tough times? I just had a stressful couple of weeks and all my work to get to bed earlier just blew up in my face. The first two nights after I was particularly upset, I was up past midnight again.

This upset me, but I was also happy that it wasn't my good eating or my food diary that I dropped. That gave me a lot of hope for the future and it showed me that I've changed. I remember going on my first diet when I was 13, losing 15 lb. and looking fantastic. Then I went back to school in the Fall and all the kids were still mean to me. I remember very clearly thinking: why did I bother to lose all that weight and then going back to eating junk in between meals and double portions at meal time. (And putting it back on plus friends.)

I'm glad that didn't happen this time. I think it's because my eating is now tied to my triathlon goals and those are more important to me than pretty much everything except my family. Now I just have to feel that way about sleep. It is part of my training to get enough sleep, but it's not as direct as doing my workouts and eating properly.

"Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher" -
Oprah Winfrey

A friend of mine said something similar... Surround yourself with people who believe in you more than you believe in yourself.

This made me realize that I need a new job. I am surrounded by people who seem to be actively willing me to mess up rather than people who believe in me. So screw them!

Here is something interesting about habits. It turns out that it's a lot harder to break a habit than you'd think. This is because, with a new habit, you are not just trying to set a new behavior but also trying to erase the old behavior.

If you think of yourself as a big hill of sand, when you drop a marble on top, it randomly falls down a path and makes a slight groove. The next time you do that behavior, the grove gets deeper. Then, when you randomly drop the marble the next time, it's much more likely to go down the path with the groove than some random path. Now you've got a habit.

So then you decide to change your habit. Not only do you have to make the marble go down a different path, when it wants to go down it's same old groove, but you also want to erase the old groove. So you go down the new path and you get a faint groove and the old groove gets a little less deep. If you keep up with the habit, eventually the old groove wears away and the new groove gets established.

But what most of us do is do the new habit for a little while but then one day we aren't paying attention and we drop into the old habit. Now, we've made our new habit's groove more shallow and BOOM our old habit's groove can be as deep as it was before!

Once I learned this, I made two changes in my behavior/thinking. First, I try harder not to slip up when I'm establishing a new habit. I realize now that going to bed at 1am one day after going to bed at 11pm for 10 days in a row is going to really mess up my new habit. So I try harder not to go back to the old ways.

The second thing I've done is to be less hard on myself. I realize now that one day of 1am bedtime can mess up my habit so when it happens, I don't despair and think it's hopeless. I remind myself that I'm now essentially starting over so of course it's going to take a while longer. Before I would slip up once, not thing anything of it, and then find myself slipping up over and over and give up. Now i don't give up because I understand what's happening.

I hope that made sense!