Mid-week doldrums

Not the best couple of days for diet and exercise this week.  Yesterday, a football banquet for my older son ended in a bad cookie fest, and tonight, a party for the Parish Council on which I serve.  Don't get me wrong - I didn't go crazy, and indeed I expect I ate fewer calories than most people do in a typical day (certainly any day involving McDonald's), but it's still more than I want to indulge in, given my goals.

And there's the rub.  I know what to do and how to do it, but getting myself to actually do it (or not do it, in the case of eating large cookie volumes) is the hard bit.  I expect it has something to do with poor self-control, or maybe emotional eating, or even that I really don't care for my goal as much as I want to.  I'm not sure just yet, but that's part of the process of self-psychoanalysis.  The reality is that reasons and psychology change over time, and what was the answer in a previous instance is not the same as the current one.

So the bad news was that I weighed in at 195.2 lbs this morning.  There was naturally a brief moment of panic, but as I mentioned earlier, my weight fluctuates a few pounds in either direction, so I'm not freaking out.  That said, my progress for the last week may not have been as good as I was hoping.  Bummer for now.

I also know that I have a two week cycle - changes in behavior take about two weeks to show up in my physique.  My problem now is that my behavior has not radically changed.  I'm sure that once I see progress, I will get motivated again; it's the first few weeks without seeing the scale budge that gets me demotivated.  Once it starts, though, it happens fast, so I just need to hold on.  Which I will.

Thought of the day: We are often too bound by our own histories, and letting go of the past is a very hard thing to do.  I'm not saying that we should reject the past - in fact, our pasts were the only path to who we are today.  I am saying, though, that our past defines only our present, not our future.  While there is only one path that led us to where we are today, the paths ahead of us are multiple and infinite.  There is only one path to the person we will be tomorrow, but who that person is, we get to decide.