Falling off the wagon

So it has been a while since I blogged and there is good reason. I have totally fallen off the wagon and I didn't want to admit it. But now I am coming clean. Making amends and getting back up there. Over the past few weeks several things have made my careful consuming difficult to maintain. I am going to write about these difficulties, not in an effort to make excuses for myself, but in hopes I can get back track after admitting what has led me astray.

It all began about four weeks ago when my schedule began to get very busy at work. I was also scheduled to give two presentations in one week and my good friend (she is one of the other bloggers)came in town for a few days. My life got very busy very quickly and I simply lost it.

Trying to maintain the rules I set in place for myself takes a fair amount of planning and time. It seems when my time gets limited and the stress level rises the first thing that goes is cooking. I do the majority of the cooking and during this time I was working 10 plus hours a day so cooking wasn't on my radar. Of course cooking involves shopping (my least favorite thing to do) and we were just scraping by. We were trying to avoid eating out but convenience won out. We tried to use gift certificates and did so but we also began bending the rules. If our businesses bought dinner, it didn't count! Rationalizing crap like that began to become the norm. When my friend came to visit, we totally blew it and ate out whenever we wanted. I also traveled to Indianapolis whiout meant I was going to eat out.

We also blew it with TV. I am not sure what really happened there, other than when we are tired we just want to sit and vege out in front of the tube. Not surprisingly, it actually makes us more tired because we stay up later watching bad TV but we don't have to think. We still tried to limit it but we went over our allotted amount for each week. At one point, I think we just said screw it, we are so far gone let's just give in to being totally careless. I must admit, it felt gotarbell careless for a while!

Does this situation feel familiar to anyone? I know Mike and I aren't alone in trying to maintain a change in behavior but instead face numerous obstacles. I see it happen all the time in my practice. Changing a behavior is hard. I know it is hard. And we are trying to change many at once as well as changing behaviors we've been mindlessly doing for years. I guess it was predictable this would happen but now we have to jump back on and figure out what will help us stay committed to this project.

We didn't buy anything during this time. That's the good news. The only issues were eating out and TV. I will write more about what I learned and what I need to do to avoid this in the future in my next entry. For now, no more rationalizations, no more bending the rules and no more excuses. Admission complete, now back to being a careful consumer.