An interesting thing happened today. It was a lazy day (I slept in until 11AM, and kinda took the day off from productivity). Later in the afternoon, I got a craving for a DQ Blizzard, and coupled with the stir craze I was starting to feel from being trapped in the house all day, I hopped on my bike and rode down to the nearest Dairy Queen to kill time until the rest of my podcasting crew arrived for our recording. To my dismay, I opened my wallet to find that I’d left my credit and debit cards at home, and that I had no cash on me.
I was initially frustrated, until I remembered that I’d set aside an “anti-spending envelope” to stash my extra cash and cards in unless I needed them, for EXACTLY THAT PURPOSE. This taught me a couple things. One, that I need to create more failsafe mechanisms for when, not if, my willpower fails when it comes to dietary concerns, or other things. This one worked, but there are still other areas of my life which could use “just in case” -type measures.
Second, it showed me that I’ve failed to establish a progressively rewarding system for managing my diet. Unlike my task-completion Quest game, time-tracking, or Fitocracy’s ingenious level-up progression for workouts, I haven’t created a system where I can tangibly see the effects of me sticking to my diet. Sure, over a longer scale I’ll feel better and see the changes on my body, or even see that stats change on my monthly body composition tables, but that doesn’t help my dedication to the cause on a day-to-day, temptation-to-temptation basis.
So here’s my new idea. Every time I’m barricaded by one of my failsafe measures from buying or indulging in some form of junk food, I’ll put away a small amount of money (if I bought it, it’ll be the amount that food item would have cost) away. At the end of the month, I’ll allow myself one big purchase (something other than junk food) with the money I’ve put away. I’ll track the money put away on one of my spreadsheets, so every time I resist a temptation, I’ll be able to see that result of that money going towards something else. It’s still preliminary, but I’ll tweak it as I go.
Other than that, I had a couple of stumbling blocks in the rest of the previous week too. I missed another class on Thursday, albeit a different one than I missed on Tuesday. Lesson learned: when I go to campus, I am to STAY THERE until all my classes are finished for the day. The temptation to just stay home and make justifications for skipping is just too large if I go home in the middle of the day. If this requires that I pack my own healthy lunch ahead of time, so be it, but I will not continually miss classes like I did last year. It’s not an option.
Anyways, those are my thoughts for the day! Thanks, as always, for reading.
I Exceed My Own Grasp 