March Madness: To Succeed, or Not To Succeed…

(I am about to brave the snow to hit up the grocery store and am blogging to get me in a making-good-choices space.)

As part of the March Madness challenge I am asking myself, and you: what makes you succeed?

For the purposes of this entry, success is defined in terms of weight loss at the weigh-in.

I succeed when…I make a point to go to the gym and don’t succumb to the call of the couch.

I succeed when…I track everything I eat.

I succeed when…I say “No.”

To food pushers.

I succeed when…I eat dairy.

Bwwaa? You ask. Is milk that helpful with the digestive process? Does it have magical properties? Both are possible options. I suspect this is more of a spurious success. As a lactose intolerant person I am often reticent to do the dairy thing. But, if I take lactaid, I can totally digest cheese or yogurt. If I am eating dairy, it is generally because I am closely following the good health guidelines.

I succeed when…I STOP the for/against argument that goes on in my head about whether or not to make a bad food choice.

If I get into a debate with myself about whether I should, for example, buy Oreos, the “for” side always wins. I exercise a lot so that always seems like a good reason to consume stupid amounts of cookies. When I recognize and halt this discussion, I succeed.

I succeed when…I plan for tomorrow’s success today. (I totally stole that turn of phrase from Shanny.)

Specifically, I succeed when I do a bunch of cooking Sunday to get me through the week. I live alone, so there is no one else to do the cooking for me until I get a beautiful, topless man servant. When I pack lunches, and have a few back-up dinners in the fridge I succeed. I tend to go to the gym after work, and have volleyball 2 nights a week in addition to that, so if I don’t have a good food choice waiting for me I make poor choices.

I succeed when…I snack!

I am not a big snacker. A notorious p4p pre-WW behaviour was to go hungry in the afternoon time and then overeat at dinner. So, when I have a healthy snack at 2:00-3:00 in the afternoon I don’t get the post-work hunger spike that leads to poor choices.

I succeed when…I am well rested.

Overtired p4p makes POOR decisions. She’ll eat out, nap instead of gym, etc. and she feels more like eating chips than alert p4p. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I succeed the least when I am not well rested.

Hopefully going into this week aware of what makes me succeed will facilitate my success.

Yours in varyingly constant vigilance,

p4p

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