I’m going to jump ahead now for a couple of reasons. One is, I am writing this blog from Italy, from the little room I have been based in for the last 25 days. With 3 days to go I am chewing on how I am going to maintain the healthy new habits I now have after 27 days away from my ‘normal’ life. The other reason is I feel this is the first question many readers will be asking of me. How do I keep this new found low stress, healthier lifestyle going once I get back to reality?
Its not as hard as you think but one thing is for sure, if you just roll back into town, go to work at the same time with the same mind set and and start chowing down on the same awful food that most of us in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand have forced upon us then most of the benefit of your distracted travel will be lost.
Certainly I don’t want to put back on the obvious pounds I have lost in the last 4 weeks particularly since I can see my ‘gut’ clearly has reduced in size and like it, I like it a lot!
Last time I returned from one of these extended stays in one place I attempted to eat the same foods when I got home, which is easy in one way. The great thing about habits is that they are much harder to shake then to keep, right? Yes they are. So the month away allows easy changes of habits because you are distracted with all sorts of good things. The golden rule of habits then makes it easy to keep these habits on your return. Magic? Yes it sort of seems like it! So above I said “attempted”, the problem being that one of the distractions of say Italy in this current case is that you have available to you an abundance of fresh unprocessed beautiful tasting food for entirely reasonable prices. This is not always the case in the above mentioned English speaking countries which I assume I am mostly writing to right now.
The fact is that there are many high quality foods at home but you have to make a more conscious effort to find them, plan to have them available to you at both work and home and then possibly pay more for them. So getting back to my experience from last year I kept all of my new healthy habits from my distraction break for a while and most I still have but this time I am thinking hard on how to maintain them all. The two that I slowly lost for various reasons were eating better food and a bit less of it and regular exercise. The exercise habit was lost over Winter and I am not sure still how to handle that (based on my mild hatred of gyms) but the food one I know where I went wrong. I was tempted! Tempted just once, but then I went back next week and that time it was twice and then the next week it was every second day and then ultimately everyday… At my office there is a food van that comes around at about 11am everyday and by that stage if I haven’t had my morning break snack and coffee I WILL go out to it and I WILL buy a small packet of crisps which as we know are coated with yummy salt and super yummy MSG and WAMMO I have just created a brand new habit in just half the time it took me to get rid of it in the first place.
So I know my weakness and I know the only way to handle it (this is just one weakness by the way, I have many…). I need to eat a healthy snack before 11 and ignore the loud horn the food van blows that tells my feeble brain its CHIPPY TIME! Its way easier to stay in the office wanting a pointless empty calorie MSG coated snack if I already have a coffee and apple in front of me and I NOW KNOW FOR SURE if I start I WILL not be able to easily stop. Kicking the habit is the really hard bit and spending some time over here has enabled the kicking of the habit painlessly so I am feeling confident I won’t go there again but to be sure I am making a short list (perhaps 5) things to avoid on my return WITHOUT FAIL and framing them and placing the frame on my desk.
Once you feel as great as I do at the moment with my head as clear as it is these decisions are easy.
More about the habits I kicked in my next blog on being distracted in a good way.
