Maintaining

I am a person of habit. Every morning I eat a bowl of cold cereal and drink a cup of coffee and a full glass of water. I usually repeat what I eat for lunch every day too. Usually dinner is where I make variations, although I find myself making the same meals the next week, and the week after that.

There are benefits to eating the same foods all the time. It’s easier to log what I’ve eaten. It’s easier to stay on course, as I’m trying to eat within a certain number of calories per day. I usually exceed my calories when something out of the ordinary changes my eating, not when I’m in my regular routine.

Likewise, it’s easier to stick with exercising when I do the same exercise each time. I have my favorite walk or my favorite gym equipment. I don’t get sore the next day because my body is used to those exercises. It’s just somehow easier to repeat the workout I have grown accustomed to doing.

This all works well if I am cruising along on a healthy course, but what about those times in life when I’m on the wrong course physically? I certainly have experienced unhealthy ruts and it feels almost impossible to break out of them. Day after day has gone by without breaking an aerobic sweat perhaps. Each evening around 9 o’clock I would pull out the ice cream container maybe. Habits have a way of going on and on, especially if they’re unhealthy.

The hardest time to work at being healthy, I believe, is during the first month when all of the new habits are being formed. Right now I am in a healthy routine and it’s much easier to maintain my focus than it was to create it. I want to remember how difficult it was at the beginning, however, because I wouldn’t want to lose this rhythm and have to start forming the good habits all over again.