I have constantly praised the power of habits in the context of my efforts to get into better physical shape. So what happens when a major source of my daily habits is forcibly-removed?
Since I left the day job a month ago, my weight has crept up by two pounds, even accounting for daily fluctuations. This is nothing to be upset over all on its own, but it is worth exploring the causes.
We are just coming off of Easter, which means I am ingesting a seasonally-adjusted amount of marshmallow peeps. And I start my day later because I’m not going to an office. I dick around on-line more before breakfast, so all my subsequent meals fall later, too. Sometimes I don’t have enough appetite to eat dinner before rehearsal, so I end up eating dinner after rehearsal, around 10:30pm. Eating that close to bed is essentially telling your body “please store all of the following as fat”.
I have only managed to average one gym visit a week – which is far, far better than none, especially since I’m usually not as limited by time as before. But since most of my days have no structure, there is nowhere to install the gym visit and make it automatic. It is a conscious effort, and as we’ve discussed, conscious efforts always cost more than unconscious ones.
And without the office, I’m not taking those twice-daily walks on break times. All those thousands of laps I strolled around the office park may not have melted the most calories of my various activities, but they were by far the most consistent, the most automatic, which made them immensely valuable to my metabolism.
The obvious solution to a loss of habits is the creation of new ones. This is going to happen whether you work at it or not; but if you don’t work at it, you stand a good chance of ending up with unhealthy habits. My new “work” day is very undefined, and prone to interruption because of random meetings I take, or the random days I get shanghaied back to the old office for a half-day of “consulting”. And I know that bedtime has a way of drifting on me when oversleeping isn’t going to cost me money.
So maybe that’s where we’ll begin – bedtime. If I can regulate that within reason, there’s a good chance wake-up time falls into place on its own. We’ll see what we can do after that.