As January comes to a close, the freshness of the new year starts to dissipate. The idea of new beginnings and renewals tends to fade. Resolutions have been forgotten, left at the bottom of our pile of to-do lists. By the beginning of February, only half of the people who made resolutions are still following through. That percentage drops into the single digits as the year comes to a close. The resolutions are long forgotten until next January comes around.
If you go back and reread my last post, “January,” I shared that grand gestures and big changes to our lives in the form of sleep, stress, nutrition, and exercise are easy to execute but very challenging to sustain. Unless we live in a bubble (although these days during COVID that takes on a whole new meaning) we are bombarded with experts’ opinions of what we SHOULD be doing. We hear what THEY say, but often don’t find it relevant or doable for our lives.
Not all of us make resolutions or find January as a time for renewal, but we have started making some changes. Resolutions and “shoulds” only work as well as our desire to achieve them or the guilt that might have been bestowed upon us. For those that have begun to make small, realistic, positive changes, stop for a moment and ask yourself why you made the resolution or why you made the changes. Why should a solid night’s sleep be a priority? Why should we eat better or move more? What drives you outside to go for a walk or run? What moved you to purchase a costly piece of exercise equipment? We will all have different answers.
For example, if you use the Peloton app (with or without the bike), you need to create a username. This username is posted on a leaderboard every time you join in an activity. During live rides, instructors will give shoutouts to users who have hit milestones or who are celebrating birthdays. Peloton leaderboard names are a way to stand out or to identify yourself. It stands to reason if you have a catchy username you’ll get noticed faster and possibly get a shoutout by an instructor. Often, the names are curated by the user with words of motivation or inspiration. However, there are many usernames that include some sort of food or alcoholic beverage. “Will spin for ______ (fill in the blank -wine, whiskey, ice cream, or cookies). Without mentioning specific leaderboard names, you get the idea. Is that the “why” those users are working out? To burn a couple of hundred calories so they can drink more or eat more? Do you look at the (probably not very accurate) calories you burn on an exercise machine or on your smartwatch and then directly correlate that to a type of food you want to eat caloric content? You should know that this type of zero-sum equation doesn’t really work. Instead, we hopefully do this to keep our hearts strong, our minds clear, and our bodies from aching.
What motivates you? What is your why?
My why is a fairly serious one for me. A dear family member has a diagnosable eating disorder - compulsive overeating that they have been struggling with since my childhood. For the past 35 years, I have been very aware of this. They still struggle with the disorder, one I know started much before I was aware of it or was even born. Some years the battle has been won, but other years, it’s been all too easy for the medical disease to take over. When I was still a teenager, they spent a month in an inpatient hospital program that helped for almost a decade and then something triggered the eating disorder again. The roller coaster (the gain weight/lose weight cycle) ride began again. Bariatric surgery was another drastic measure, but that only helped with the physical aspects of overeating. The underlying psychological issues were still there making the behavioral changes much harder to achieve. The compulsions are ever-present. It is and always has been heartbreaking to watch the extreme highs and lows over the years. There is a long term physical toll on the body from years of being obese and a mental toll of the years of unhealthy behaviors and self-esteem issues that go along with it.
I feel utterly helpless in this situation. Nothing that I offer will change this person’s relationship with food or how they view their body. But there are things that I can do and have done for myself and my family. Because of my exposure to eating disorders from a young age, I have never wanted to follow a diet. Studies have shown that diets work well until they don’t and then you put yourself on a gain weight, diet, lose weight, stop following the diet, gain weight cycle. I’ve also stayed away from engaging in any extreme exercise. I’ve kept myself on a steady path. You know the saying, “everything in moderation, including moderation.” Sure, there were times when I might have eaten more and worked out less or trained for a race and got leaner, but never to the point of straying far from the middle ground. Overall, though, my goal is to eat well (most of the time), keep active, and be a positive role model for my family. The choices that I have made are sustainable and will hopefully allow me many, many more years of being active.
Not everyone has such an emotional “why” story for the reasons they choose to eat better or exercise more. Ask yourself, why are you here? What drives you, what moves you to do what you do. What is your why or whys? Once you find your why, your motivation, you just might find that you don’t need January or New Year’s resolutions to make small changes that can have positive effects on your life.
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