Day 1 (For Real).

Okay, today is the day I am getting things back on track.

I have refined my daily schedule a little more. There is no junk food in my apartment. There is no wine in my apartment. I have pretty clean food to eat this week. I have vitamins and supplements on the way. I have engineered what should be a relatively low impact work week. My running gear is all set out and ready to go for this afternoon. There are books to read set out in my living room. More than all that, I have tentative plans to travel with vaccinated friends to a beautiful lake house in June, which means that I have a whole month to clean up my life and maybe even lose a little of this quarantine weight before I spend time around people again, so that maybe I don’t have to feel so terrible about my body.

So I have a plan and a goal and a timeline. 

Does it get better than that?

I even moved my dusty sit-up bench into my home office where I work all day so that I have to LOOK AT IT all day long. I know how I am and I can make myself do sit-ups if the thing is right there all the time. 

What I have learned over the last few months (having several bad moths and one good one) is that I do genuinely feel better when I living cleaner. I love me some potato chips, I love me some red wine, but I also love being someone who can go trail run a 10k without any real preparation. I like being someone who doesn’t pull their pants up over their little belly bump while they are sitting at the computer. I like being someone who can carry groceries up the stairs without feeling a little winded. I think that I would like being someone who is comfortable talking his shirt off around other people (a type of person I have never been even once).

I’m in my 40s now and this is when the decisions you make really make a difference. I was really fat in my early 20s and I managed to work off that weight. In my 30s I learned that I like to run and backpack and be outside and I learned how to eat better and pay attention to food and that combination of things helped me stay at least a little lean. Now though, I work an office job, I have weathered the anxiety and depression and loneliness of the last year, and I can feel all of that made physical in the way my body looks and feels and so I can’t just keep doing what I did in my 30s, this body won’t let me coast on that anymore, so I have to become actually serious about this stuff. So let’s consider everything so far this year as test runs; the good months and the bad ones, they helped me to figure out what I need to be doing.

Now is the time to actually do it all.

I need to use both hands to keep my work life inside its box and I need to keep myself motivated enough to stick with the clean living long enough that it becomes habit. That will probably take a few weeks to get rolling.

You want to hear something silly? I have even printed up little signs and posted them around my apartment. They are not motivational, so much as they are reminders that I have plans, goals, and a timeline.

Does it get better than that?

.

.

.