No More Excuses

I’m a couple of weeks in now since I started this blog, and to be honest I’ve not made a ton of weight loss progress yet. However, I’ve made some small changes and stuck with them, and now it is time for a new set of goals.

I’ve actually been reading a lot the last couple of weeks, because I felt it was more important to work on the mental side of things than start with a strict diet or exercise program. The only time I’d ever lost weight and kept it off for nearly a year was when I was mentally in the right place to start my new lifestyle, but I’ve lost my way a bit.

There are a few different ways that happened, but the main one simply this: excuses.

So today I’m going to renew my commitment to this lifestyle change, make new goals, and reinforce my new mental exercises. Let’s do this.

No Excuses

This one is probably the most important one, which is why it is the title to the blog post. After a lot of self examination I’ve determined my biggest problem is simply that the portion of my brain that is addicted to food–my inner fatty I call him–will make up, or take, any excuse to get out of doing what I logically know I should do.

I read a book recently called Never Binge Again by Glenn Livingston Ph.D. Though I don’t quite agree with everything the book has to say, a large part of it allowed me to think in different terms about my addiction and how to combat it. He talks about something he terms “The Pig”, and this Pig’s job is to undermine him at every turn.

It is essentially a thought exercise to enable you to separate the urges of your reptilian brain, which controls a lot of the compulsory behaviors we do. By understanding and isolating these thoughts for what they are, we are able to exert control over them.

At least that is the theory.

The reality is that I already know that voice, but My Inner Fatty really wants to go along with it. I’ll jump on anything as an excuse to overeat or try to undermine my new habits, because ultimately that part of my brain is so addicted it’ll say anything to get what it wants. Since it is me obviously, a good deal of these sound like they make a lot of sense, but when examined fall apart.

Things like:

• “Well, Mary cooked this bad dinner, so we’ll just have to start again tomorrow.”
• “Well you already ate bad this morning, might as well just start again Monday.” 
• “Hey, you know you are going to fail, why are you even trying?”

So I’m going to stop listening to these excuses, and answering them with affirmatives of why they make no sense.

• “So what? You can’t wait for everyone else to be on board. Eat the meal, but practice portion control instead of using this as an excuse to pig out.”
• “No, we start again the next bite we have. If we let each isolated failure stand by itself, and not snowball, it won’t ever become a problem.
• “I’m going to succeed this time, because I’m taking steps to understand why I fail, and address them before I ever start.“

By learning to understand and address these excuses as they come up it’ll go a long way towards separating my obsession with food, from the actual needs of my body by employing logic in order to shut down Mr. Inner Fatty himself.