Plans

What does it mean to me to be fully "over" overeating?  Done and finished with it?  Because, here's the thing:  I am really, really good at abstaining from it for 1, 2, 3, 4 months.  Longer than that, I just can't sustain.  In the past, I've been satisfied with those kind of durations.  But here I am, May of 2012 and while I know a lot more than I did 1, 2, 3, or 4 years ago, I'm still engaging in overeating.  That's disappointing, to have dealt with the fallout for such a long time, accumulating the wisdom and experience and yet not being able to put it all together for a lasting solution.  Permanent abstinence.

I suppose I could be equivocal about it and say that I must not have yet learned enough from the experience.  But that's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy; once I have figured out how to get over it, I will get over it, and have learned the most important lesson of all, and so I will have learned enough.  While I'm on the subject, though, I can say that I've learned a tremendous about of things, and because of that, I'm grateful for the experience and wouldn't hesitate to say that it's a severe kind of mercy that gives us these difficult things in our lives to learn and grow from.

The point that I am trying to make is that I feel ready to commit to optimizing (or maybe there's some other geekster hipster mobster blogger kind of word I could use but whatevz) my life so that I can have a permanent recovery from overeating.  (side note: just typing out the phrase 'permanent recovery' gave me pause; it's going to take a lot to convince myself that it's possible).  Right now I'm feeling willing and able to start afresh on overcoming overeating.  The crux of the challenge is about carrying with me the lessons learned from each episode of overeating with me as I transition back to what I affectionately call normal life. After each episode, it's super clear and oh-so obvious as to where I messed up and it's fresh in my mind.  Those lessons inevitably fade and I repeat the same mistakes.  How do I avoid making them again?  I'm no self-help guru but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I can write down a few (and I do mean few) guidelines and really really stick to them, I will have lasting success.

So, here they are:

#1. Do not weigh myself.  

#2. Do not keep track of calories burned or calories consumed.

#3. Manage my decision making energy (aka willpower)

#1 is the easiest, as it's quite binary: I either step on the scale or I don't, simple as that.  And, I don't have a scale at home, so the only time that it comes up is when I'm at the gym or when my owners take me on the plane and they have to weigh me in my kennel to make sure I'm not overweight baggage.

#2 is a bit trickier, I can turn off the kcal burned display on my watch, but not on my powertap, but it's sometimes hard to turn off my brain from mentally tallying up calories burned vs. consumed.  Hard, but not impossible--and the longer I do it (or rather, don't do it) the easier it will get.

#3 I'm reading this awesome book  and learning all about how we make poor decisions because our decision making capabilities get worn down, zapped, etc, by prior decision making situations.  So I need to figure out how to reduce the number of irrelevant or unnecessary decisions I get wrapped up in so that I have the energy to make the right decisions when it really does matter.  This topic is worthy of an entire blog post, oh wait I mean a whole book, but that's what it boils down to. 

So that's it: I'm telling myself that if I stick to these three things, I will have lasting success, permanent success in overcoming overeating.  Here we go.