Behaving Badly & Coming Clean

I'm not happy with myself right now. The best way to describe my behavior in the last two weeks is destructive. How else would you categorize repeatedly doing something you know is bad for you, that you know will make you feel terrible? To do it once is foolish, but forgivable. To continue is asinine and simply destructive.

Yes, I'm talking about poor food choices. But lately it's been much more than a bad choice here and there. I've been verging on an all out bender of bad choices and I feel miserable and I'm starting to get to that place where I don't even care, which is a horrible place to be staring down. I promised myself that I was never going back to that place, ever.

The best that I can do at this point is be totally honest about it and keep trying to do better and try to find my give-a-damn again. I'm honestly a little perplexed about why this happened. I know that it's the holidays and that they're rough for a lot of people, but I don't really think it's a valid excuse. Maybe it's the winter blues coming on and knowing that it'll be a while before I'll get to go home again? I know I've been feeling lonely and bored and unfulfilled lately and in the past when I've been feeling down I've always turned to food. Old habits die hard, as they say. Unlike the past, though, I'm not finding any comfort in these bad foods, they're just making me feel worse, but I keep making the bad choices. It would almost seem like I want to be miserable - why else would I keep putting myself through this? It's not only the mental side of feeling bad, I physically feel like hell. Even though the scale hasn't changed I feel fat again. Lazy, lethargic, slovenly, sluggish, bloated, tired...fill in the blank with any number of unflattering adjectives and they'll come only slightly close to how I've been feeling.

I know that this is a long journey and it's not always going to be all high moments, sunshine, and rainbows. I realize that the valleys and darkness are inevitable and necessary but I don't like being stuck here and it's getting harder and harder to climb back out. I have trouble reconciling how I can be so strong one minute and so weak the next. I can make hundreds of good choices, but even one bad one seems to completely reset the counter to zero and the further I get away from zero the more crushing it is to watch the numbers flip backward.

I could blame many things on this struggle. Blame is easy to place, except when you know it should be on your shoulders. I could say that I'm struggling because there has been a complete breakdown of any semblance of a support system, but that gives away all my control. It suggests that I was only successful because of other people. My support system was definitely a driving force for me in the beginning and it absolutely made it easier to keep pushing forward, but the choices were all still mine. No one else could work out for me and no one else could eat for me. It just made it more rewarding to have people to cheer you on. I recently even experienced my first negative reactions to my success from people that I love and who I know support me. I know they didn't mean to, but their remarks hurt me just the same. It was the first time that I felt bad for changing, like I'd upset the balance and like I shouldn't be so proud. I'm angry that I let them make me feel that way. And how did I respond? Not by forging ahead, but by making decisions that lead me backward.

I know that I'm smarter than the way I've been behaving. I've proven that I have the knowledge and the tools to succeed. I will not go backward. I can't. I've worked too hard. This self-sabotaging behavior is stupid and inexcusable and I need to stop acting this way.

The new year starts next week, and though I had hoped to be 100 pounds lighter by Monday night, I'm not upset that I won't meet that goal because I knew it was ambitious when I set it. I don't plan on making resolutions either. I've done that for years and never stuck with them. Tuesday is just another day, a day that is nothing more than a flip of the calendar page. There's nothing any more significant about that Tuesday than the one that just passed. Why should I wait for an arbitrary Tuesday to be THE day that I start living well again? Why not tomorrow? Why not the next minute? Every minute I let pass just gives me more rope to hang myself with, metaphorically speaking. If I say that I'll start doing better on Tuesday, that gives me the rest of the weekend to make bad choices. If I decide that my next choice will be a better one than the last one I made, there's much less time for me to screw up.

I've been destructive lately, but laying it all out in the open is the first CONstructive step toward change, which I'm all about. Now I can go forward with a clean conscience and start cleaning up the rest of my life, again.