I grocery shopped.

I cooked.

I ate some Brussels sprouts.

I might be headed back in the right direction again.

Maybe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation over the past several weeks. I don’t know how to find it. I can’t remember how that first spark felt when I decided to do this thing. It makes me question how you start that flame or how you reignite the flame that’s gone out. I’m not sure.

Maybe at this point it’s a process of slowly doing small things that create motivation for other things. At the beginning I jumped in whole heartedly and it worked but I’m not sure I can do that again.

At that time I didn’t have a whole lot going on in my life. It didn’t matter to me what I was doing in the evening because I rarely had plans. Deciding that working out was the event of the evening was easy because there wasn’t much of an alternative. Read or read while working out? Watch TV or watch TV while working out? Crochet or crochet while working out? Yes, I did master that.

The choice was easy.

I’m in such a different place now that it’s much harder. I’m not willing to turn my life upside down and go back into isolation. Hopefully that’s not what it takes to lose the last 80 or so pounds because I won’t do it.

Maybe, though, just maybe I can get myself back in gear without having to do that. Maybe I can take baby steps instead of giant leaps and get there, albeit a little bit slower, but still get there.

Thinking back to how I got in the game in the first place, though, I realized that it started with my head and not my body. Before I tried to make any changes, eat better, or exercise at all; I read. I read a blog which led to me read another blog, and then some more blogs, and then I picked up The South Beach Diet. After a few weeks and a few dozen blogs, I finally started to cut down on my sugar. Then, after all that, I jumped in and committed. Eventually I got around to full throttle effort but there were still a lot of baby steps in the meantime.

So, I immersed myself in the idea of weight loss. I looked at what it would really take and decided on a method. Then I worked on believing that I really could do it. All those blogs with all that sweet weight loss success boosted my confidence in my ability to do what once felt impossible and what feels impossible now.

Going Forward, What’s the Plan?

1. Immerse myself in books and thoughts about weight loss and healthy habits. Get my head in the game so that my ass can follow.

2. Make some of those easy healthy choices so that I remember how much better good food tastes and feels. Cook my favorite meals like I did today.

3. Remove the mental pressure to succeed. When I started this, I thought I was going to fail. I was pretty open about that. My goal, though, was to see how far I could go before that happened. I took away the pressure and little by little realized that I could succeed.

4. Move when I feel like it, don’t when I don’t. Again, this is part of taking the pressure off. At some point, I will feel like it again and then I’ll get all “exercise is fucking awesome!” It just happens that way. I don’t have to force it.

5. Blog again. Blogging has been huge for keeping me in that mental space. I’m not really ready yet to face the scale again. I probably haven’t gained much or any weight but I’m not ready to be held totally accountable again.

So there will be no goals and weekly weigh-ins still for a little while but I’m hoping to little by little get myself back in the game and start making progress again… or at least be amusing in the meantime.