by Mark Szabo
Have you ever let some small thing totally derail your day? This used to happen to me all the time when I would “try” to eat healthy. Like, when ordering breakfast, I’d absent-mindedly have grabbed, paid for, then consumed an entire chocolate chip muffin with my morning coffee.
It’s not the muffin that’s bad, it’s what happens after eating it. Guilt. Shame. Beating yourself up for being a “bad eater.” And then the absolute worst thing happens: “Well, now this whole day is shot. I might as well eat all of the stuff I know I’m not allowed to eat.”
It isn’t the all-or-nothing mindset. It’s believing that we must be 100% perfect all the time, or it means we’re bad.
No. Don’t do that to yourself.
Instead, make a game out of it.
See how many “good” meals you can get in a row before eating something “bad.”
When I started, it was 2 meals. Mainly because I was eating those chocolate chip muffins for breakfast every day. For lunch and dinner I did pretty good.
Once I decided to start making breakfast healthier, my “good” streak stretched to 5. Now I was eating the muffins every other day. Progress!
Over time, that streak got longer and longer. Now, I’ve stopped keeping track, but it’s probably around 30 healthy meals in a row before I have an ice cream sundae, or a candy bar, or heck, maybe even a chocolate chip muffin.
Thinking along these lines is a much healthier mindset to have.
We are not one meal; nor are we one day. We are the culmination of all the foods we’ve eaten over the course of months.
With that in mind, what do you want to become?
Will you be made from fresh fruits and vegetables, lean cuts of meat, legumes, mushrooms, and other whole foods? Or will it be from whatever the ingredients are in the factory processed entrees waiting in the freezer?
I decided to live on the healthy side. How about you?
Bear in mind, it wasn’t an overnight shift. I was living on freezer goodies for years. Burritos, supreme pizzas, taquitos, chicken wings, were all lunch staples. If I ran out for lunch, it was a double quarter pounder with cheese, large fries and a chocolate shake. Or maybe a Mexican pizza, two tacos supreme, and a chicken burrito supreme, with a large Baja Blast Mountain Dew. Quite frequently it was also the Chinese Buffett.
Every time I tried to 180° my diet into health, I failed miserably.
I thought I was the problem. What else could it have been?
Turns out, it’s basic human psychology. Our brains don’t like too much change all at once.
“Don’t like,” is probably too soft a term here. It’s more like “everything is crazy! Which way is up? How do I get out of here?”
And that’s exactly what happens. The brain feels like it’s been thrown into chaos, and the subconscious mind takes over.
You can’t fight the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind will always drive you to do the things you’ve told it you want to do. And in this case, the drive is back to “normality.”
At my most unhealthy state, I was eating all of the unhealthy things I mentioned above, while snacking on chips with sour cream-based dip, and washing it down with soda, beer, or coffee, depending on time of day.
And I had the bloodwork to show for it! I was still in my 30’s when my doctor put me on blood pressure and cholesterol meds.
My first wake-up call was when my cousin Marty passed away from a sudden heart attack at 42.
Then Mom’s reaction was, “oh, the 40-year curse got him.” To which I immediately retorted, “the 40-year what now?”
As it happened, the men on my mother’s side of the family had a history of dropping dead from sudden heart attacks in their early 40’s(!)
One of the other things these men all had in common?
Horrible eating habits. Just like me.
Now I was at a point where I knew I needed to change, because not changing was likely to kill me. I was already on meds. My triglycerides were off the charts. (Seriously, the chart ended at 500 and mine were in the 800’s!) My cholesterol numbers were upside-down. My arteries were probably already starting to harden and choke off.
But every time I tried to get healthy, I failed right back to where I started.
What I wound up doing, just happened to be the correct thing to do. I decided to start small.
I switched to black coffee, then I stopped drinking soda. That’s at least two meals every day where I wasn’t drinking empty calories.
Holy cow, did that make a difference!
I went from 240 down to 220 in what seemed to be an instant, but in reality was several months.
My face started to look more like a face again, instead of the generic roundness I had become accustomed to. My 38 pants that I had been debating about taking up to 40’s were now more comfortable to wear.
That little change alone went a long way, but it wasn’t enough to get me down under 220.
I tried to weightlift my way into health, thinking I would burn off all of the extra calories I didn’t need. In this, I became stronger; but the scale didn’t seem to want to budge.
I cut way back on those frozen entrees I had been eating for lunch and got into the 205 range.
It wasn’t until I got serious and studied the nutritional principles that I now coach that I was able to get properly lean.
None of it is hard! In fact, I like to tell my clients that I help them fail their way to success.
Would you like to have a conversation with me to see if I might be able to help you?
This link will let you look at my calendar to see if there’s any time where our schedules align. If there is, go ahead and book the Can I Help You Call 😊 I’ll take it from there.
https://www.eclecticwellbeing.com/Mark1-2-1
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