Beginning to Break Those Habits
If you don’t like exercise, if you eat popcorn instead of proper meals, if you give yourself a hard time most of the time, these are just things you’ve taught yourself to do with a bit of encouragement from your family and friends. You’ve trained yourself to be the person you are, you’ve practised for it and you’ve succeeded. But now it’s time to put in the same effort, energy and dedication into being something else.
It probably took you long time to build up the complex pattern of habitat you make up in your life. In the case of good ones (like cleaning your teeth) it’s time well spent. But it actually takes more time and dedication to be consistently, destructively dysfunctional than it does to be a winner. After all, good habits are often reinforcing. You smile at someone and they smile back. But being a consistent grouch (for example) takes a bit more effort.
Take Time to Change
The third step is to accept that it took you a long time to be such an accomplished couch potato/negative thinker/junk food addict and give yourself the time you need to change.
If something you do has really got a hold on you (like being seriously inactive, for example) don’t expect it to disappear over night. Just start chipping away, habit by habit, and keep your eye on the goal of becoming slimmer, fitter and healthier.
Take a Break Without the Kitkat
Every habit starts for a reason. And the reason maybe a good one at the time, but perhaps it doesn’t make sense anymore.
Babies only eat when they are hungry but most of us have gradually been persuaded to eat for other reasons. It’s no wonder that food holds a vice-like grip on our emotions and that our relationship with it is complicated. And often the food we eat in non-hunger situations is sweet and fattening and leaves us feeling miserable and bloated. What ever we eat when we aren’t hungry gets turned into fat and stored for later.
You were probably trained to abuse your digestive system from an early age. Perhaps your mother was worried about you not eating, or your teacher tried to comfort you with a smartie when you grazed your knee, or you were given chocolate as a reward fro doing something well. None of those agendas is relevant to you now. Perhaps they never were. But are you still living them to the letter?
And it’s not only personal problems that produce negative patterns. Although it ended half a centaury ago, a lot of our eating habits have been influenced by the war. Our parents or grandparents can remember rationing, even if we can’t. food was short, anything sweet was in great demand and for years afterwards children were taught to empty plates if they wanted pudding. Of course, I’m not suggesting we blame our excessive weight on Hitler or anyone else, just pointing out that if we’re still living by somebody else’s rules it’s time to ditch them and live by your own,
What do you think?