Avoidance Is One of My Favorite Pastimes

I have been avoiding blogging.  The idea of writing another “waaaah I’ve been slacking off but now I’m better” post seemed about as fun as contracting Pink Eye.  I’ve had a few weeks (2 weeks?  Maybe 3?) of low motivation.  I cheated on my “No Eating out for the Month of November” not 1 time, but 4 times.  Predictably, one episode of cheating led to three more, all within a week-long period.  It felt a little binge-y at times. Case in point:  I “secretly” got two big slices of pizza for dinner one night and ate it in my car, huddled in my winter coat, and that’s when I asked myself what the Hell I was doing.  This seemed like first scene of a really bad Lifetime movie.  Who was I trying to fool or please, and why?

Recall this nerdy graph from a previous post:

Yes. I am a giant nerd.

Accordingly, the snowball of my slackertude has been rolling downhill over the past few weeks and gaining momentum.  I went a week without cooking a single recipe, just scrounging around and overeating things from the pantry like spinach dip and mounds of tortilla chips.  One week I only hit the gym twice.  Worse, I’m behind on all of my readings and assignments–too far behind to catch up by the end of the “semester.”

Part of my recent low motivation—aside from the wintertime/ daylight savings Blahs that everyone is experiencing—is being overwhelmed by never catching up on the coursework, and my fear that I’m not really changing; that I’m just taking two steps forward and two steps back, over and over.  After all, I’m behind on both the objective goals for my courses and my past favorite measurement of my sum total worth as a human being, my weight.  I’ve lost maybe 4-5 pounds total since starting all this. I know, I know: it’s still something.  The numbers are still moving, which is what I told myself I wanted.

The stinker is that I am leaving in 8 days for my Ph.D graduation ceremony and Christmas break.  I will be seeing many family members and friends; I will be immortalized in lots of photos.  After all this effort over the past 3 months, they will still see me at the highest weight of my life. Grrrr.

I keeping jumping on and off that merry-go-round (per Nerdy Graph above), which shouldn’t surprise me.  The reality is that I am going to keep making the same mistakes, at least for awhile.  I’ve spent years acquiring bad habits and less-than-helpful patterns of thinking.  I know from my psychological training that success in breaking bad habits (whether behaviors or thought patterns) doesn’t come from a single flash of insight.  It comes from persistence; from repeatedly messing up and getting back on track, over and over, until the mistakes become fewer, and being on track becomes the rule rather than the exception.

So I am regrouping.  I am coming up with a plan to wrap this semester up, and will update you later tonight or tomorrow night with a full course update and plan for moving forward.  I will strive for something a wise, old man named Axl Rose once taught me: “Just a Little Patience.  Yeeee-aaahhh….”

Preach to me, O Wise HairBand God! (courtesy MoyArt Maximus on behance.net)