Tag Archives: light-bulb moment

Consistent Inconsistency

In the here & now, , ,

consistent

When I was little, my mum used to call me Contrary Mary. She always said it in a jokey way of course but she wasn’t fooling me, there was definitely an occasional undertone of you’re now getting on my last good nerve… I think what frustrated her was how the child who was placid and easy-going one day could do a good impression of the devil child the next. I’m not moody, in fact I don’t have a moody bone in my body. That’s never been the issue…I’m just inconsistent, and my normal can differ from day to day.

I can see how annoying that would be to someone who’s not me…to be fair I’ve driven myself nuts over the last few months especially with the way I’m never quite sure what frame of mind I’m going to wake up in from one day to the next. I’ve noticed it far more since I’ve been dieting, but that’s probably because I’m more tuned in to what’s going on in my head. I’m getting fairly adept at separating my own thoughts from my asshole voice, although knowledge isn’t always power, right?

As soon as I open my eyes in the morning I can generally suss out whether I’m going to sail through the day, or whether I’m going to have to navigate a pathway through the thorns. It’s been a bit of a mixed bag this weekend just gone, in fact Saturday and Sunday were like night and day – Saturday I struggled. God, how I struggled. It seemed like I was locked horns with the asshole pretty much all day, due to fatpantsgate.

Yesterday was completely different, I mean it was effortless. I ended up going to bed last night with one smart point left unspent. Shall I say that again, in case you missed it the first time..? I had leftover food budget that I chose not to spend. I mean what’s that all about? That never happens. I always wring every last drop out my food budget to ensure I get maximum possible chewage, and yet yesterday I left a point on the table. Maybe I’m coming down with something.

So that’s the frustrating thing, right? Why can’t every day be like yesterday? I mean I’d have this cracked in a heartbeat if I didn’t have to waste time arguing with myself. The inconsistency definitely makes it harder to deal with, because after a couple of really good days the asshole voice can take me unawares. If he’s chewing my ear constantly it’s easier to tune him out.

Oh my…I think I might have just put two and two together in my head as I was writing this. Saturday was the last day in my dieting week…there were scant points available as a fallback position when the asshole voice gained a bit of ground. The pressure was on, and I freaked out. Sunday was different…the start of a new week, a whole week’s worth of new points to go at if I so pleased, therefore no pressure and no problem. Give it your best shot Asshole, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough…

Interesting. In order not to face the kind of pressure that freaks me out I need to have points in the bank right up to the very last minute of my dieting week. You know, make sure I have enough for an emergency hobnob at all times.

Noted 🙂

 

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Who Saw THAT One Coming!

In the here & now, , ,

exercise

Well, I’ll be damned! Who’d have thought it..? They said it would happen…to be fair, you lot pointed out that it would happen, and I nodded along of course, because you’re a bunch of wise old beans who know stuff. But genuinely, on the inside, and with my hand on my heart I didn’t believe it, not even a little bit. And yet. Here I am.

Did you notice, yesterday? At the risk of repeating myself, I wrote this…

I’ve missed walking this week – my sore hamstring and pinched nerve have given me more than a couple of challenges, but I’m slowly feeling better and it’s a gorgeous day out there…as soon as I’ve put my last full stop on the page, me and the furry one are going to go out and have a bit of fresh air. It might be a bit slower than normal, and it might take a bit longer but I’ve had a touch of cabin fever over the last few days, so it’s time to motor. That’s going to be up there flirting with a ten.

It was only when I was reading the post back to myself last night and looking at your messages, including an ‘I told you so’ email from one of the posse that I realised. It might have snuck up on me by stealth, but there I am in black and white, referring to something which falls completely under the heading of exercise in a very positive manner, as in I’ve missed it and I’m anticipating that I shall enjoy it to the power of ten. Bugger me!

Those words weren’t planned, they just tumbled onto the page with the rest of what I was thinking about. I wrote them without really thinking about them, and even as we walked, I didn’t realise that the Asshole voice was conspicuous by his absence. There was no nagging to hang an early left in order to cut the distance down from the route I had in my head. All I thought about yesterday, even as I was  gently encouraging my still-a-bit-tender hamstring up the big hill at the start of our walk, was how good it felt to be out in the fresh air, and not hobbling around at home feeling guilty because I wasn’t moving much.

And actually, whilst we’re on the subject, that’s another revelation. I didn’t fist-bump at the opportunity to sit on my backside all week and rest. To be fair there wasn’t much sitting going on anyway, given the bruising 🙁 but I genuinely felt frustrated that something had come along to disrupt the momentum that I’ve been building up over the last few months. I was even careful with my food plan to compensate for my lack of activity.

Even as I write this I’m shaking my head in wonder…I could almost use a cold compress on my forehead to help me cope with this amount of sensible. I didn’t do any of that through gritted teeth, or resent the hell out of having to tighten up my eating. I did what felt right, under the circumstances, and without really thinking too much about it in order to adapt and find the balance in a tricky situation. Me! I did that!! In a perverse kind of way, I’m grateful for the injury because it helped me see.

Every now and then, it’s good when someone helps me lift the veil off, you know? It makes me realise that bit by bit I’m changing. Honestly, I’m far more excited by the changes I can feel happening on the inside than I am about the fact that I’m four dress sizes down…my body has changed shape countless times over the years, but my head never shifted in the way it looked at things. This time, that’s what’s going to keep me in Skinny Town, right?

Two more pounds off this week…I feel strong, steady and very sure-footed. Come on!

 

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What Goes In One End…

In the here & now, , ,

ideas

It’s funny you know, there are so many things that we’ve chatted about over the last few months where I’ve come to realise that life and diet kind of mirror each other, you know? It’s almost like there’s a set of life rules which apply to all situations including food and lifestyle choices, which I always regarded as something completely separate.

I’m going through the process of applying tags to all my posts at the moment so they feed into the tag cloud I made last week, and reading some of the older posts reminded me of some of the moments where things started to fall into place for me. Unpicking the flawed thought patterns in my head is an ongoing process which has been utterly priceless on this journey so far, and I find myself drawing comparisons all over the place now, often subconsciously which goes to show just how determined my head is to weed out all the crap.

This week, out of nowhere, I found myself staring one of my more familiar mantras square between the eyes and wondering how I’d never drawn the parallel before between life and diet. I bang on about it all the time, and yet I’ve never joined the dots.

So one of the things that I live and breathe in my day job is leadership development. When people first start cutting their teeth in leadership roles, one of the things which sometimes trips them up is where they start holding people accountable for the results they get without giving any thought to the input which was at the root of someone’s success or failure in any given project.

Of course you have to measure and evaluate whether someone is achieving results, but you can’t coach and develop their output, can you? What you can do as a leader is coach and support someone in how they do their job, so the quality of their input is better. In turn that has a direct effect on their results, which get better. Every time.

My mantra therefore is that you manage the input, and measure the output. Don’t hold people accountable for just the results, right? The results are what they are, actually they’re just a by-product of what someone has put in at the front end…accountability starts and ends with the behaviours which feed those results at the business end. And I was listening to one of our senior managers playing that back to someone in his team, and the penny dropped…how is that different in the context of our efforts to lose weight? It’s not! Of course it’s not, in fact saying it out loud makes me feel like Queen of stating the bleeding obvious.

I should worry less about what the bitch in the bathroom is going to tell me, and focus all my energies instead on what I’m bringing to the party. The number I drop at the end of the week is a direct result of my input over the last seven days, right? With the odd blip here and there, but by and large there’s a direct correlation. The number is what it is, the bits that I’m accountable for are the choices I’ve made around what I’m putting in my mouth and how far and how fast and how regularly I’m moving my body.

I take care of the input, and the bitch in the bathroom’s only job is to report back on the number. Providing she’s on the correct tile, obviously.

Of course it’s never just that simple is it…if it was I’d have earned my string bean stripes donkey’s years ago. It’s complicated by the Asshole voice who’s on a mission to derail the input and my own occasional willingness to listen to him over holding the line and getting it right every time. However. Instead of saying I’m going for three pounds down this week, what I should be saying is I’m going for a 100% clean eating week with exercise every day and I’m going to resist any asshole suggestions that don’t support the cause.

So…I’m going for a 100% clean eating week with exercise every day and I’m going to resist any asshole suggestions that don’t support the cause.

Watch this space 🙂

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In The Company Of My Thoughts

In the here & now, , ,

thinkOne of the things I’ve come to value the most from my time spent walking Charlie dog is the time and space it gives me to think. Those of you who’ve followed my journey from the early days won’t be surprised when I say that some of the ways in which my mind connects the dots can be a bit random, but you know time spent on musing even seemingly random stuff occasionally leads to a nugget of insight.

So we’ve just returned from one of our usual circuits of the town. On the way up the hill there were no insights worth a mention, my mind entertained itself quite happily with a succession of interesting topics to ponder, for example if sweat is what it looks like when your fat starts to cry, then my fat is very clearly very upset today because despite it being much cooler outdoors, by the time I got to the top of the hill I was glowing.

Then I got to thinking about where does your fat actually go, when you lose it? I mean, I was looking at a picture on-line this week about what one pound of fat actually looks like, and its big, you know? So if you lose like two pounds a week…where is it now? It’s like it melts away by magic. One week those two pounds of fat are inside my skin, and the next week they’re not.

They just disappear, sneak away like thieves in the night. I go to bed weighing one number, and I wake up weighing a smaller number but nothing went anywhere, right? I must have spend a good ten minutes on that one, in fact I was so absorbed that I’d reached the top of the hill before the Asshole voice had even chipped in with his usual helpful suggestions about the shortcuts we could take every time we passed an opportunity to avoid having to walk right to the top.

And that’s the bit that provided the key to help me unlock today’s useful stuff. It’s the first time that I’ve actually put two and two together and realised that when my mind is occupied, I’m far less open to an approach or a suggestion from the Asshole. Which sounds really obvious but don’t you often find that things stare us in the face and we’re still blind to it?

I have a really low boredom threshold, you know? It’s one of those things that goes hand in hand with an inquisitive mind. When I’m bored I get destructive and my mind leads me into mischief. I’ll give you an example – on Thursday I was involved in doing some recruitment, and one of the candidates lost me in the first five minutes. By the time we’d completed the interview I couldn’t have told you how he’d answered the majority of our questions, even though I’d written down his answers on autopilot.

What I could have told you, was how many times he said the words in terms of during his one hour interview. I was bored, and my mind started fixating on the wrong thing. My in-terms-of ometer leapt into action and I counted them all, with a mental ker-CHING every time he said it. Seventeen in-terms-ofs, if you’re interested. And, don’t even get me started on the four little hairs sprouting from the top of his nose, which I’d have paid good money to tweeze out.

So that’s what I mean…because what he was saying wasn’t holding my attention, my mind wandered off and started poking at stuff it had no business with. And I think the Asshole voice recognises those moments where my mind is suggestible, and that’s when he moves in for the kill.

It’s hardly breaking news, I get that. I’m sure some of you are thinking well yes, so what – eating because you’re bored is a well known thing and you’d be right, it is. I’ve heard plenty of people say that, in fact I’ve more than likely said it myself. But only in the context of doing, and not thinking, right?

I can be completely knocking it out of the park being busy doing stuff, but if my head isn’t similarly engaged, that’s the chink in my armour, right there.

Just another little post-it note to self, to add to my collection. Knowledge is power, right?

 

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2016 Now Open For Business

In the here & now,

newHands up, who loves getting new stuff? I do, and it doesn’t even matter what it is, there’s something about a new thing that makes me want to look after it. Remember at school when you got to the end of your dog-eared tatty exercise book, full of wonky handwriting that you only half concentrated on because you were usually multi-tasking and watching the drama unfold in your favourite soap whilst you were doing your homework?

Whenever my book ran out and the teacher gave me a chitty for a new one I used to get so excited. Page after page of smooth white paper with no tatty corners or red pen circling spelling bloopers. And no doodling! Most of my school books ended up with a car crash on the front cover, you know the kind of thing…a succession of boys’ names in crossed-out love hearts complete with arrows and my attempt at cherubs.

To be honest my cherubs usually looked more like gargoyles, but when I look back at my chequered love life, even in my teenage years it had disaster written all over it so you know what, maybe when the plan for my life was written in the stars they were fresh out of cherubs? Just sayin’.

Anyway, I used to start out in my new book with my very best handwriting. I drew my margins using a ruler instead of the usual straight-as-a-dog’s-hind-leg slash with a pencil, and I’d try really hard to keep it pristine. Right up to the point that something spoiled it…all it took was an ink blot, or a bent corner that I’d squashed as I rooted around in the bottom of my school bag in the hope of finding a loose hob-nob. And once it was spoiled, I stopped caring. I mean it didn’t matter any more, because it was already spoiled, right?

I’m having a bit of a light bulb moment as I write this, because if I apply the same principle to the way I’ve thought about dieting over the years, it’s exactly the same. And I’d put bets on the fact that some of you are nodding along. It’s been a consistent trigger for me, probably the biggest one I’ve got. I’ve had a cheat? Ah, well that’s the diet down the drain then, no point carrying on with it today, I’ve blown it. I’ll start again on Monday.

I need to process that revelation, and wrap my head around how to boot the asshole out of my thought process…re-engineer my thinking, you know in favour of something less destructive. I could agree a new set of ground rules with myself, like if I get right back in the saddle and follow up my moment of weakness with three clean days, those three days will act as an eraser to rub out my mistake and then some, like it never happened? Because the reality is, it probably would,and nothing needs to be spoiled…that’s just the asshole voice, doing what he does best and distorting my perspective.

I’m so optimistic about this year. Right now, 2016 is stretching way ahead in front of us, like a brand spanking shiny new slate to write on. There’s no stains on it, no crossings out and no dog-ears in sight. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to look after mine, make sure that it stays shiny and unspoiled.

And if it doesn’t? Well, I’ve signed up to the new rules. So no need to panic, we’ve got it covered 🙂

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