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Life cycles

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

15:42 / 03.08.07

First of all -- I'm in pretty good shape, so I'm not looking for drastic "must overhaul my life" type advice.

But for years -- my whole adult life, really -- I've been living a cycle of
[eat really well / exercise frequently / feel good]
that gives way to
[eat okay / don't exercise as much / feel okay ]
with regular dips into
[eat crap / don't exercise at all / feel okay-to-lousy].

Generally I'll be "good" for about three or four months, "okay" for three or four months, and "crap" for one or two months. Then after six to eight weeks of "crap," I'll pull myself up by my bootstraps and kick it back into "good" gear (sometimes after a couple of middlin' weeks in "okay").

I'm just rolling out of a bout of "crap," and looking at my next 30+ years of life as well as the past 30+ years, and wondering how I'd look/feel/be doing overall if I'd managed to hit "good" 10 years ago and just stay there.

I find myself actually sort of envying a co-worker who generally has to avoid sugar and refined flour or she gets crippling migranes. Not really jealous of her, obviously, but lacking the fundamental willpower to steer clear of junk food without a compelling medical reason.

I like me more at the "good" end of the cycle. I have more energy, I'm more creative, I spend less time glazed over in front of the computer/television and more time reading, writing, playing, being interested and interesting. But there's an inevitable slump that kicks in after a few months of "good."

I have the feeling it starts with sugar and letting my good dietary habits lapse, but it's hard to pin down if that's symptom or cause. I've never been much for rigorous or particularly faddish diets (I still swear by the Hussman approach, but haven't been able to make it work with my office-worker and frequent-business-trip lifestyle).

So I'm just now trying to get a handle on all this stuff; starting to figure out where these cycles begin and end and admit to myself that after 15+ years of this old routine I may need to get some outside insight on what makes this happen.

First and foremost: anyone else seeing this same cycle in their life; more importantly, has anyone broken out of this, and do they have any particular insights as to causes and how they did it?

17:00 / 03.08.07

I suppose what makes the cycle happen is simply this; that bad behaviour's seductive, in a way the virtue isn't. So you're probably always going to be like this, to a greater or lesser extent.

Don't worry though - you've got much the same problem as most of the guys who matter in the Western world. What's the point of thinking about the environment when you can start a war instead, and so on.

17:20 / 03.08.07

I think for me I've done this in a sort of spiral approach. Each pass around I get rid of a bad habit for life but I tend to knock them off one at a time rather than being able to go monk/nun 100% at once. It does mean I don't pick that habit up again and I am shedding them regularly but it takes time and support. For example exercise wise I'm doing mych better keeping it regular because I have a group I really enjoy to go play with.

My 'bad' food things are so not bad from other people's POV because I've long since stripped off junk food in one of those passes way back. For me the last few things to go are probably in the monk/nun will power set which I'm ramping up to.

I had a doctor tell me a good handful of years that slow steady change is better than fast all at once change and I think it is working for me. I take on one bad habit at a time and try and get tools and support for it. I needed to make social adjustments to avoid some of the big ones. There's a tendancy to try and lump the cleanup all in one go but it sometimes takes too much effort to sustain whereas if you pick one thing and let the new behavior become habit it sticks and you can move onto the next.

I've massively improved my life this way but I'm still in progress and probably always will be.

18:35 / 03.08.07

Maybe you're making too-drastic changes... I consider myself to have a healthy lifestyle, but it's been a slow ramping up for about a year. The kickoff was giving up meat, and now I'm at a point where I eat almost all whole foods and almost no junk food (with a pretty strict definition of junk).

A lot of the motivation for me came from doing research and educating myself on nutrition. Initially this was just to make sure I didn't become ill being veggie, but it evolved into wanting to rid my diet of processed foods, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc. Once I entered a mindset where I realized that some things were good for me, others were so-so, but many were essentially *not food*, I didn't have as much desire to put not-food things in my body anymore. I think this is different from just saying to yourself, this is "bad for me" - you can rationalize that a little bad is ok sometimes. But *not food* - well, why would you eat it?

I think what also helps for me is that I love food. I love layered spices, fresh veggies, the taste of whole grains - you aren't going to find those flavors in fast food. If you can change your palette over time, things like chips, french fries, "snack foods" - start to taste really flat and dull. I get cravings for sweets at night but make sure I have fruit in the fridge, or some homemade cookies - Oreos cannot compare with a ripe peach, or fresh baked rhubarb ginger cookie, I mean it.

As far as exercise goes, for me it has to be totally integrated and utilitarian or I'm not going to do it. I had a gym membership for a year and went dutifully, but I hated every moment of it. Exercise has to be reasonable and I don't think it has to be that much. So, if SO and I go the bar, we walk over. Once in a while we go on a bike ride. We walk around the farmer's market every Saturday. I do some manual labor at work. That's it for me - anything more organized and I won't be able to stick to it.

13:57 / 05.08.07

I actually think the gym's a really good idea, but then I enjoy going to the gym.