One Good Change Begets Another

For years I have been making a whole lot of mistakes in how I take care of myself, like most of us juggling work and life and kids and marriage. Convenience took priority over best practices and the thought of doing what I knew would be best was completely overwhelming to me.

I tend to be a pretty all or nothin’ kind of gal, so typically I would get all inspired, decide to abandon all of my bad habits at once, and completely burn myself out with how much work it took to do everything right.

This time around things are different. Probably because instead of being motivated by guilt or some vague feeling that I should be more virtuous, I am motivated by my mental and physical health crisis.

The first thing I did was go to my team of doctors to figure some things out. We ran a million tests, I got some new prescriptions, we talked some things over, and made a plan to get me healthy.

One thing the doctor did that was really helpful was to forbid me from following anybody else’s workout program. No couch to 5K’s, no workout guru’s, no P90X (Ha!). Given my health history we’re talking rehab here, so he told me to listen to nothing and no one but my own body. Workout programs are for another day. Today, I need my own muscles to tell me when they’re ready to move faster, my own lungs to tell me when they’re ready to breath harder, and I shouldn’t rush the process. Still, my history with working out is so traumatic, that no matter how often the entire team of doctors told me it was necessary, I ignored them all and went on for weeks longer.

The first actual change I made was to give up soda. And you guys, I never ever would have believed I could have done it. I have frequently said in the past that I would walk around with a Coke IV if I could. But I’ve gone for months with only an occasional Coke if I’m out for dinner. I can’t claim any virtue here, the magic trick was that once on Zoloft, Coke suddenly tasted metallic and overly sweet. And now water no longer tastes like dirt. I drink so much of it now that we actually went out and bought that water cooler. In other news, watch out for low flying pigs.

Without the caffeine and with the Zoloft, I was facing energy flagging that was truly epic. Like, go into your closet to get dressed and lose the will to stand up so you squat down and stare at your shoes for half an hour, kind of energy flagging. A bunch of my friends who are acquainted with Zoloft promised me that exercise would make everything snap together, so I took a deep breath, laced up my running shoes (that have never gone running), and revisited that advice from my doctor.

For weeks now I have woken up, gotten Atti ready for the day, and then spent 30 minutes on the treadmill listening to podcasts and playing sudoku on my phone to combat the boredom. I haven’t lost an ounce, but I am noticing little improvements here and there, and I’m no longer spending hours a day contemplating the tread of my shoes.

I am also a sweater (sorry) so that means that every day I workout, I have to take a shower. And then since I’m undressed, I have to get redressed. It doesn’t make much sense to get back in your pajamas after a shower, even if you do work from home.

The exercising is also making me actually hungry, so I’ve been eating regular meals during the day.

And before I knew it, half of my big list of bad habits was tackled. But not because I felt bad about having the habits, but because each one made more sense for how my life was going. One by one each habit stopped working for me, and it became easy to move on from it.

Every time I’ve tried to fix up my bad habits before, I got stalled out. But this time, by making one change at a time, solving one problem at a time, I’m ending up fixing my bad habits in a way that might just stick.