New Years…F*ck That!

Resolutions, something we all make don’t we! They are on the same level as motivation, all bullshit and they both fade as fast as they appeared. I resolved to not eat Doritos again, yet alas two days ago I ate a family bag in the stylings of Homer J. Simpson. Emotionally based decisions are never a good idea and boy did I attach emotions to those chips! The best decisions are made consistently, especially when you don’t feel it!

I’m in a bit of a mental health crisis right now where I feel lost, purposeless, despondent, and just generally low, my dorito orgy was part of my old coping strategy of eating to numb myself. Did it feel good? At the time, yeah, it did, but the question we need to ask to ask is what is the real reward for this choice? Sure, it soothed me at the time but my body suffered for it as I counted 3000 calories onto my daily limit.

What’s wrong with soothing oneself? Nothing inherently wrong per se, but people (including myself) will soothe themselves usually with something that has a negative association attached to it. If any of us are trying to change a part of ourselves and we partake in something that gives a one-two jab counter to that change, then isn’t that thing a negative? I’ll give you an example, when I was training heavily in 2000 I knew this woman that wanted to reduce her leg size as her quads were massive. She did what I thought was normal by adding more leg pressing and squatting movements to her routine, but fat wasn’t the issue here, the size was directly attributed to muscle, so as she trained harder the legs grew until she was eventually told by one of the trainers to stop leg work for a month, or reduce it greatly. All she had to do was stop the intense leg workouts, or train to keep form but reduce size.

Even a positive can be a negative as you read above, food on the other hand is dangerous because unlike exercising a muscle group, food will lead you to dangerous weight levels. So what’s this have to do with New Years? Everyone superficially decides to change something, but why wait? If it’s important, choose it now, if we all wait until the new year, then it’s not that important and thus it will never happen.

Exercise, well, weight training mostly is one of those animals that cannot be tamed. You can train for years and (most of my lifting buddies will tell you) at least once a week training is the last thing they want to do, but, they do it anyway! We can make decisions all we want but without the consistency (yes, a cliche, I know) to do the work, the decision is as empty as that pack of Doritos is (now siting empty somewhere in landfill).

Consistency isn’t the problem though, one of my friends who was obese told me before he died that he had no issue with eating often, he had issue knowing when to stop. The lie we tell ourselves is that we have no consistency, we do though, we just focus it on negative input, if everyone who was addicted to porn had the same compulsion to exercise we’d have half the obesity levels, don’t you think?

I made a choice to make a choice when necessary, not wait for the new year to come, don’t make resolutions guys, make decisions.

Thanks for reading