If you are anything like me, you have tried to make drastic changes all at once, and you failed. I admit, I have been a pretty heavy party animal for years. I've overindulged in too much.
I would overeat. I would over drink. I would smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. I would smoke pot several times throughout the day...and then I would overeat some more. All the while, doing nothing positive to improve my health. I would come to a point where I would tell myself, "I need to lose weight," so I would try to stop everything at once, and start eating chicken and broccoli. Next thing you know, I was binging on all the bad, and gave up on trying to do good.
I mentioned before that I had been focusing on the wrong thing. Losing weight. Now that I have redirected my focus to my health, I'm more interested in doing a little at a time to make the changes necessary to give my body what it needs. It's been about 3.5 yrs since I quit smoking, and since then, I've accomplished very little else.
You know I have been working on eating more nourishing foods, and that I've been trying to practice yoga daily. What else have I worked in? I have slowly been weening myself off of alcohol. Sounds bad, doesn't it? Weening? Can't I just quit? Well, yes and no. I'll admit that I have a bit of a dependency. I don't like to admit that, but I actually started drinking almost daily, when I was 15 years old and have taken it "easy" one time since then. That means I have gotten drunk, regularly, almost half of my life.
A lot of people would probably say that I'm an alcoholic, and I need treatment, but I don't believe that to be entirely true. I just needed to change the way I view alcohol. In the past month, I have chosen to have a few drinks, but also chose not to get drunk. I drank on 3 occasions, where in a month's time before, there may have only been 3 days that I didn't drink. And guess what happened when I had these few drinks? I felt like I was doing myself a disservice the next day, and I could also feel the negative impact it had on my body/mind because I have been doing other things to feel good about myself! Before I felt bad and unhealthy so drinking was a way for me to ignore it. and in turn, I cared less for myself. Now that I can say I'm caring for myself, the drinking piece just doesn't fit in.
I don't know that I necessarily have a plan to quit drinking completely. To me that's not a realistic goal right now. But, I will say I don't have the desire to drink daily or feel the need to get drunk. If it fades all together, that would be a good thing. For now I am just focusing on improving my over-all well being and cutting out alcohol "most of the time." Though some people may criticize me and say that I need to quit completely, is really nobody's business but my own. The same may apply to you whether it's alcohol, chocolate, soda pop. You need to eliminate the negatives on your terms, at your pace. I believe the more gradual you approach the changes you want to make, the more successful you will be. If it takes a month, year, or five years, it's still far better than not making the effort to change anything at all. In hindsight, I clearly see all the years I wasted because I gave up ALL the changes I couldn't make at once, therefore I have remained stagnant.
I will continue with the changes I am slowly making, then I will work in a few more. I have a lot of work to do!
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