It's amazing how it easy it is to be thrown completely off track for what is essentially a "better yourself" program. At one point you become entirely committed to the ideology you are following to better yourself, finally achieving the discipline you used to lament about lacking. For me, this was improving my physical form. For years I had been banging my head against the rock of "I want to be better, but I love video games and food, dude." That persisted until I suddenly decided I wanted to completely change my diet, jump rope daily, and follow two programs that got me to do 100 pushups and 200 sit ups in one go.
40 pounds down later, three things happened: my return to education, winter holidays, and one hell of a bout with flu. The education schedule and demands on top of my job and desire to have some semblance of free time strained my ability to maintain myself until it was obliterated by a pretty nasty cold that threw me off for a few weeks, which then rolled easily into the gorging of the holidays. I was flanked and conquered before I knew what had happened.
+10 pounds. Yeah, alright, I know some people will look at that and scowl, thinking that +10 pounds isn't that bad. But that isn't the point. It was the fact I had backslid off the best routine I had conjured for myself, period. I struggled for months to get back into it, finding my motivation gone.
I had also stopped keeping my notebook lists. At the start of the original improvement crusade I purchased two small notebooks to keep lists in. Lists for anything: things I wanted to remember, things I needed to do, things I wanted, and practically anything that I believe required a note. I had separated the two books into "Shit that needs to get done later" and "Shit that needs to get done now." I had never got so much crap out of the way or remembered so many decent ideas (the best ideas I get are at work, where I originally had no place to write them down and completely forgot about them when I got home later). But, for whatever reason, regulating myself by these lists was tied to the original self-improvement routine. I stopped "getting shit done."
+5 pounds. Shit, okay, a trickle of motivation detected. I felt like I was desperately scanning an endless map for a vital resource node to continue my war effort. I started slow, again. I did not want to scare myself away from a new routine. A treadmill had been purchased and left predominately derelict in the garage, so I decided to start using that in lieu of the jump roping. I still like jump roping, but I am liking the change of pace and the lack of getting cracked in the toes by a leather rope (I prefer to work out barefoot in all things. Go go Californian mentality.).
-5 pounds. Woof, fantastic. See, I started at 254. I led a crusade down to 214, then rolled back to 224, and then spite fed myself to 229. Being back at 224 is almost like seeing the incarnation of hope showing itself at dawn. I end goal has always been 195-200, depending on how much 195 makes me want to kill myself. I want it, now. I want that shit. Gimmi dat shit.
The next situation is reworking my eating habits. I had started fixing my eating situation when I was on a fairly normal work schedule that allowed me to spread out my eating without worry of many major shifts. I had literally shifted all my eating daily towards something like this: Fruit/yogurt in the morning when I wake up, fruit/yogurt when I leave for work, fruit/nuts/carrot first break, single serve cobb/spinach/BLT salad at lunch, fruit/nuts/carrot next break, and eat low when I got home if someone decided to conjure a dinner. If I became hungry later, I would snog down a fruit/yogurt/nuts/cheesestick/turkeyslice mixture to shut my organs up.
See, the hardest part has always been not eating late at night. I have something that could almost be called a compulsion in regards to getting ready for bed. I want something to eat. Something to taste. Some sort of food. Back then, I had shifted that to eating a fruit or yogurt or something. Lately I had started drinking milk and eating a granola bar. But some nights it's just bad. I need to return to the old functionality or attempt to shut down the desire entirely.
Now, on top of that, my work schedule has mutated a lot since before. I am now working till midnight often, which absolutely shits all over the original eating habit, especially in regards to not eating at night. Getting home around 12:40 and having absolutely no desire to sleep for 2-3 hours does not lend itself well to not having some sort of food. I believe the solution is going to be stocking myself up with very light foods to satiate the desire.
Once I can get my eating habits back under control and maintain the daily cardio, I have to focus on the 195-200. Achieving those numbers, I will start working on putting on muscle and definition. Gotta, gotta, gotta. I'm still a little worried, though. Classes start again, the holidays are always on the horizon, and sickness is unavoidable. We'll see if round 2 will be better, considering what I have learned.
