Discouragement...

This morning was rough from the start. I didn’t want to get out of bed so I hit the snooze one extra time. Since then I’ve just kind of been dragging. Got to the gym and got started 20 minutes late. I didn’t so much attack things this morning as just went through the motions with my weight training. The cardio work out was outright tough and even the episode of Married with Children I watched on the little TV attached to the elliptical machine was lackluster. With all said and done it was just a blah workout, and that feeling has followed me throughout my morning so far. The weather is a perfect complement to the glum feeling too. Grey clouds are hanging low in the sky, bringing with them wind and occasional, completely random, smatterings of rain. It’s enough to make you put on some Morrissey and look for the nearest razor blade to remind yourself that you can still feel. That’s right, I said Morrissey, and you little EMO kids can take your My Chemical Romance and your Fallout Boy and piss right off. Okay, feeling a little better now.

The feelings themselves aren’t really the issue. Everyone has off days, and the weather outside can have all kinds of ill effects on a person’s mood. The problem is the discouragement that comes along with it. Personally, I’m at a very tenuous point in my life change here. I’ve started to see some results and not just a few tenths of a pound difference on the scale. My clothes fit better, I can see muscle definitions in places that I thought muscles feared now to tread, I feel much better in general, and my energy level is much higher. I’m still pretty far from my goal. To be fair, I had quite a long way to go, but I can’t tell myself not to get discouraged because I just got started. I also can’t fight it off by convincing myself that the end is in sight. I think that makes this a really hard time for a lot of people, you’re kind of at this middle ground where it’s just as easy to give up or cut back (the first step to giving up, truth be told) as it is to move forward. Days like today make that even harder. With everything being so blah, and the specter of a major gluttonous holiday looming just a day away what’s the point? Cutting back to just going to the gym three days this week isn’t going to hurt, right?

Wrong.

Admittedly you won’t see some huge negative impact the first week you decide to slack. Hell, you may not see any negative difference at all. As a result, hitting it so hard next week doesn’t seem like a big deal either. The week after that? Well, Christmas is only a few weeks away so I’ll get back on it after that. Maybe after New Years. All this sound familiar? If you’re actually reading this, then you’ve probably played out this little glutton’s drama more than once, undoing any progress you’ve made and making all your hard work a complete waste. You also know that with each week you put things off getting back on track is going to get harder and harder. So you’re going to have to be doing this every day for your entire life then, right?

0 for 2.

It’s not going to be like this forever, just until you reach your goal. Right now you’re trying to undo what are likely years (at least) of bad habits and poor decisions in regard to your health. Once you get where you want to be then all you have to do it maintain. Unfortunately there is no maintenance plan that includes watching Netflix and eating Cheetos for three hours a night, however maintaining weight and health is a lot easier than getting there to begin with. This part is hard, that is a no shit honest assessment. It’s a frustrating road and there are going to be loads of times where you just want to pack it all in and drown your sorrows in a pint of ice cream and deep fried don’t give a fuck, but even that serves a purpose. You are retraining yourself to make good health an ingrained part of your lifestyle. You also get the satisfaction of knowing that even though the weather was shit, you were tired, and the ghosts of turkey day delights to come are pole dancing around in your head like some kind of culinary porn you still dragged yourself though it and got yourself one step closer to where you want to be. You can’t be on it 100 percent every day, no one can, but you still made the effort and did what you had to do. You kind of kick ass like that.

Unless you didn't, in which case you can go join the EMO kids crying it out over there in teh corner.