Mantra Monday: Stay Strong, Little Root

I just logged onto Facebook and briefly thought of setting my status to Christie is... "sick of counting calories."

Right at this moment, I am. Sick of it. It gets very tedious and I feel like it's a lot of extra work and sometimes I would really like to be lazy and that's it.

So there.

(Whine.)

But getting to that lazy place is very familiar and it scares me a little. I have been here many times and have a pretty good idea where I am. I am at the fork.

One of the many. Hmm. Pretty interesting metaphor come to think of it.

Oh yes. I have been here many times. I was here when I saw the "fat" picture of me and the signs pointed one way to "This way to get fatter" and the other way to "This way to healthy". I got stuck again after choosing the healthy path and there I was, at another fork. Those signs said, "This way to the same exact place that looks just like this one" or "This way to healthier" and I bucked up, trudged on and got healthier. And oh so much happier.

A couple more forks with a lot of winding roads and I have ended up here, in the final 10 pounds and pretty good shape, but still not as toned as I want and still with some serious babybelly and cellulite and spinning my wheels nonetheless. I have lost three of those 10 but really they just come and go at their own leisure and I know they're not really off. They're just off for today. Which means I must do more to get them off. Really off.

And that's where counting calories comes in. I was all gung ho the first month or two. Every day (mostly) I would abide by my allotted calories and faithfully log them, even going through extensive research to find out how many calories certain restaurant foods were. Everyone in my life got so accustomed to my counting calories that they would ask me, "So how many calories do you have left today?" Or they would make sure I would be able to count them in some way if they were making something. And you know how hard it is when not everyone is on board with your weightloss efforts...

But now I just feel like stopping. The tediousness of logging each coffee, the milk and sugar, the pats of butter, the teaspoons of ketchup. Not to mention measuring it all out at home just to be able to count them.

It just gets so darned boring and repetitive that I just.want.to.pull.my.hair.out.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And it also makes me want to cook boring bland foods just because they're easier to count!

Have I sold you yet on calorie counting?

Stay with me here.

I guess my point is that there will always be a fork in the road when it comes to becoming healthy and it is completely natural to feel this way. The real test is what you do with it. At each fork in the road is a choice and there will always be a road that is much easier to take. But then you have to think about where that fork will eventually lead. Will it lead to that place where I am unhappy again? Where I am trying to stuff myself into a spandex outfit for a triathlon that I am supposedly "training" for? And if I am indeed in "training," which is the only way I seem to talk myself into being able to maintain a success in being healthy anyway, wouldn't it therefore follow that I too must eat like I am in training? Because who wants to wake up on race day carrying all those extra pounds that I could have lost if I had just sucked it up and gone out of my way, just a little, to do it?

How much extra work is it anyway? So I write down what I eat, then I put it in the computer. Period.

Is that really a big deal?

The answer is no. But sometimes being lazy clouds my focus. Sometimes I get scared about success and sometimes I can't even picture success. I have gotten to "good enough" but can't seem to push myself to "fan-effing-tastic!" Because what happens when I get there? Or worse, what happens if I get there and am only there for 5 seconds before old habits consume me and I am back at the starting point? *shudder* Ok, that's a scary one.

I, for one, am more sick of the yo-yo than I am of counting calories. I cannot ever go back to that place where I would cry in the fitting room, never come out of my house, never socialize or have any confidence in social settings. Oh how I couldn't stand myself then, and even worse, how I started to believe that's who I actually was!

Sometimes I have to stop, take a breather, look around at the current fork in the road, and make a conscious decision to choose.

So I'm off to visit my calorie-counting site which hasn't seen me in a few days. Because the more difficult path is the only path that will lead me to the happy healthiness I've been striving for anyway. I still have four weeks left to stuff myself into my triathlon unitard so there's still some time left to make some progress. And that's what will have to keep me focused: the end goal. And the fact that the unitard is on its way to my house as we speak. I just hope I can convince myself when I log off to overcome this fork. At least until the next one. Repeat: Stay strong, little root.

So what about you? What is your personal fork in the road and how do you convince yourself to take the right road?

I'll tell you one thing. I absolutely know without a doubt that I couldn't do it without the support of this virtual world of online dieting; the ideas, the pats on the back, the encouragement. If I didn't have that, I'd have stopped at the first fork a long time ago.

Mantra Monday: Stay Strong, Little Root

https://babytealeaves.blogspot.com/2009/08/mantra-monday-stay-strong-little-root.html