Starting Over, Part Eleventy-Bazillion

I guess I'm just going to keep posting these kinds of particular posts until I get it through my concrete-like skull. They say repetition is the key, so my apologies if I sound like a broken record. I don't want this blog to be full of nothing but "new leaf beginnings" - but until I can get myself into a groove where I will stay, I suppose this is what it will be.

As if I had a choice.

Hmmmmm.

Interesting thought, that. As. If. I. Had. A. Choice.

Funny thing is, it's all about choices, from the moment you get out of bed until the moment you lay your head back down again for the night.

You can choose to have a bad atittude, or a good one.
You can choose to listen to the voice in your head you know will lead you astray, or to the voice you know is the one of reason and truth (and depending on which voice you choose, you will have a whole other host of choices in front of you, needing to be made.)
You can choose to let your cravings and your moments of weaknesses rule, or you can choose to stand strong, to be strong.

Every single choice will lead to a consequence. The question becomes: what consequences with which are you willing to settle, and what consequences for which are you willing to fight?

So.......how about me? Well, I might feel differently in the morning (and I accept that, and will deal with what comes) - but right now in this moment, there are some very specific things for which I choose to fight.

And, they say, if you are going off to battle, you need weapons. Strong ones. Ones that, if used properly, won't fail you. I am thinking of starting with these:

If you don't write it down, it didn't happen, right?

These haven't been used much lately. Boy, does that need to change.

Neither has this.

Of course, these weapons will work - in their truest sense - only if I also have this stuff in my arsenal:

This is what shopping solely on the outer aisles of your local grocery store looks like.

In this beautiful little picture I hijacked from the 'Net, you will likely notice the complete and somewhat conspicuous absence of chips, cookies, Outback Steak House Bloomin' Onions, chocolate, french fries, cheesecake, pizza, Captain Crunch and whipped cream. This isn't to say that those things are all I eat, but the core issue with them is that when I do eat them (which is still probably too often) - I am not capable of eating them in moderation, because they are all powerful trigger foods for me. So while it is important to indulge once in a while, I think that for now, abstinence is simply going to have to be my mantra. What will I choose to do?

And as for my running life.....well, I just need to find it again, dust it off. I know it's there. Every once in a while, I hear it squeak pitifully, and for a split second, I almost remember how awesome I feel when I'm out there, doing it, nearly every damned day. How I feel when I'm done, sweating buckets and sometimes sore as hell, but glowing and breathless and full of endorphins. How I feel when I cross the finish line of a race that kicked my ass, but it didn't really kick my ass, because I made it across those timing mats. And oh, hey, in case I forgot, Running On Purpose is a running blog. A blog where I talk about my running life. The running life which currently is lying under a ginormous wet pile of ridiculous excuses. What will I choose to do?

I think ya'll probably get the picture here.

This is going to be hard, and it's going to suck, and the reason I know that is because I've been there before, and on top of that I have disappointed myself so may times now that the thought of trying to do this again is almost too much for me. Part of me feels extraordinarily foolish for even blogging about it, because my perception is that everyone around me has heard it before, over and over and over and over. And perhaps they have seen it before, but only for a few days or a few weeks. And when it's particularly bad, maybe only a few hours. And then, nothing has changed, I'm back to skipping runs and workouts and stuffing my face and gaining weight and essentially flipping myself the bird, because that's pretty much what it amounts to.

I am SO SICK of failing. This is a battle I have never truly finished. All my life. Indeed, the only things I seem to be capable of finishing are those stupid slices of pizza, or those galldarned sugar cookies in the kitchen next to my office at work. To me, the finish line will be the day I see the numbers I want on the scale and can finally move into a maintenance phase. I have no earthly clue what it means to maintain my weight, because - and I mean literally - I have NEVER been there. Ever. E.V.E.R.

So, ok, fine, whatever, yadda yadda, yawn blahdeblahdeblah..thdioadhwjke38i9orbngd.

May this be my last "new leaf beginning" post - and every post after this a progress report of my successes, rather than my failures. Or even, if they must happen, a post about my "two-steps-forward-one-step-back" days, because...they will happen. But...better than three steps back, by my reckoning.

So.

What's it going to be?

Time to choose.