Weight loss projects: getting back in the saddle

I’ve been lazy about blogging for about a week, which sort of matches how I’ve been feeling about the Project.  This is fairly normal, actually, though I wish it weren’t so.  

Some psychologists speculate that we have a sort of natural limit or quota in terms of how much “self-control” we may be able to maintain over our behavior. The idea is that if you spend a period of time resisting a temptation or sticking to a hard task, you sort of run the self-control batteries down.  So the thing you have to do is give yourself a bit of time and some outlets for not being so perfect, while your self-control battery “recharges.”  Then you may be ready to get back to whatever you’ve been working on.  

For instance, if you’ve ever known anyone going through treatment for substance abuse problems, you know two things: 1. just about everyone, it seems, in CD treatment seem to be smokers (though less now than years ago), and 2. the general rule of thumb in most treatment programs is don’t try to quit smoking while you’re busy trying to quit drinking or using drugs or whatever.  It just seems to be too hard to start controlling everything in your life at once.

This past week I’ve had actually a great week in maintaining my workouts, and their quality (and my strength on the weights, aerobic conditioning, etc.) is improving.  Fell down over the weekend on the food diary, but was partly derailed by reading some articles and suggestions dealing with changing diets to a less carb-based, more plant/protein/legume diet.  Have to look at that some more, but part of the many suggestions were to give yourself one day a week to cut loose, eat whatever.  Not sure how much I agree with that, though we sort of let ourselves do it over the weekend.  And somewhere in there (along with the weight gain last week) I think my energy for food recording and blogging flagged a bit.

But that happens.  The real key, of course, is to get back in the saddle.  You fall off the horse, get back on.  You have days you don’t want to do it, get back to it the next day.  Breaks aren’t all that bad, as long as they aren’t permanent.  I find it helps to keep the “big picture” in mind — if I imagine looking back, maybe in a year or two, after getting to my target weight goals, I’ll very probably have a bunch of lapses, periods when I cut back, vacations where there was no gym, parties and dinners out and days when everything will have gone to hell.  

But the general, overall trend should be that every time, I got back to the plan, and that most of the time, I did an adequate job of sticking to the program.