Thursday, July 23, 2009

Old habits die hard?

Thursday is here and tomorrow I will post an "official" current weight, I do not expect it to be anything great but if I can get in under 340 I will be happy with it. I have been going over my calories a bit all week because of having this cold and me not counting the honey in my hot green tea nor any of the oranges that I have been eating throughout the day so not so bad but still above. I would like to try and get out on my bike after dinner tonight and hit the same route that I rode last time which involves going up this pretty big hill and I want to make it all the way to the top without a foot hitting pavement this time around. My week has been pretty much uneventful and there are a couple goals but I would say that this paragraph pretty much summarizes how I am feeling and doing right now, with that let me switch it up and say that I just got a reality check not more than 20 minutes ago as to just how much of a tight rope has to be walked with my "habits" (old and new) even after all of this time eating right and moving more.

I was making my lunch just a bit ago and an old habit popped in for just long enough for me to literally stop and think "wow did I just almost do that?" and I smiled and corrected what I was about to do. I have to eat low fat for a spell and decided that I would make a couple of toast & tomato sandwiches to have for lunch, I do not know if toast & tomato sammies are something that everyone eats as I have had people ask "a what?" when I mentioned it, it is basically just 2 slices of toasted bread with a light spread of butter (smart balance in my case) sliced tomato and black pepper and voila a toasted & tomato sandwich. My grandmother would eat these all of the time and I sometimes like to make them for something light but in my fatter days I would make them a bit different and its not exactly light when you eat 3 or 4 of them.

Back about 200 pounds ago what would happen is this, open the bag of bread (white bread) pop 2 in the toaster and while it was toasting grab Mayonnaise and a couple tomatoes from the fridge, ~pop~ pull the toast out and place 2 more slices of bread into the toaster and start slathering mayo onto the toast, lay some maters down and bamn! the first sammie was done. By the time the first sammie was done being created the second toast was finished so in went more bread and the process repeated but there was never more than 2 sammies done at a time because while the third set of toast was in the toaster I would be eating the first sandwich, ~pop~ 3rd set done and I had already went half way through the second sammie and in went the 4th set of toast. Between finishing making the 3rd sammie and eating the second the toast would pop up and I would make the 4th sammie, fill a big gulp cup with whole milk and walk into the living room to eat the remaining tomato sammies along with my bucket O milk, that was then.

Just now when I was making myself lunch I started the toast and just like back then I gathered the rest of the stuff, Smart balance spread, a tomato and black pepper. I started slicing the tomato up and ~pop~ toast was done, I pulled it out popped two more slices into the toaster and started making the first sandwich. Immediately after the lid went onto the first sandwich I took a bite and went for more bread, this was the "wow did I just almost do that?" moment, the bread had already been tied up and put back in the cabinet as the "new habits" are who took 4 slices out of the bag but I guess its been so long since I have made toast & tomato that the old habits kind of just started acting on their own. The tale ends with the previously fatter man taking his 2 sandwiches (one with a bite taken out of it) into the living room with a big gulp cup of home brewed green tea and physically smiling about what had just occurred but man! I guess old habits are hard to break.

Now I don't think for a second that I was even close to making a third sammie past the motion of my hands towards the bag and the bite that I took, but the fact that my instinct was to immediately take a bite from the freshly made sandwich and go for more bread proves that there is more to losing weight than just following an eating/exercise plan. So much of being over weight comes from years of following bad habits, the mental part of being among the more rotund people on our planet plays a HUGE role in whether a person is able to lose weight on a constant basis or not. I have been eating better since January 2008 and not more than 30 minutes ago saw first hand that old habits are hard to break whether I caught it or not.

All of these months later I find myself even if ever so slightly, still battling old habits and have a feeling that this lifestyle change will never truly be 100% without effort. With that said I am still a firm believer in you get what you put into something and if a person does not want to at least try then they have failed before they have even started because I did have the option to make that third toast & tomato but instead I recognized that I instinctively took a bite and went for more and corrected it and that is where I think a lot of people fail when trying to lose weight.

I did not want a 3rd sammie, an old habit popped in for a split second and back in the day it would have been made and eaten without a second thought, something to think about.

Thanks for following along and don't forget that H2O!

As Ever
Me

3 comments:

  1. funny how those old habits creep back. i tied my shoes in double knots last week. i used to do this because bending down to retie them if they came undone was so embarrassing...

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  2. My opinion only: old habits are the very reason that maintenance of weight loss is soooooo hard!

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  3. I love tomato sammies too but I put light miracle whip on mine which gives it a kind of tangy taste

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