stay the course, part ii: why not keep doing what’s working?

what i wrote last week about how highway 50’s solid lane lines helped me stay the course snicholsblog.com/stay the course got me wondering,  what else have i experienced about staying the course that might be useful?

and then it hit me: if it’s working, keep doing it. 

look at this list and see how many of these thoughts you’ve effectively used to stop doing something that was working for you:

i reached my goal weight, so i don’t have to follow my eating plan so closely.

i found a long-term relationship now, so i can stop attending therapy so often.

i don’t feel so alone anymore, so i don’t have to visit church this week.

my abs are finally flattish, so i don’t have to do as many crunches

i’m almost out of debt, so i deserve a big splurge

i’m not depressed anymore; maybe i can phase off my psych meds?

my partner finally stopped drinking, so i could stop going to my support group for partners of addicts and alcoholics.

in our self-improvement culture, we talk a lot about what we need to change, what we need to improve, and what we have to do to make that happen. what we talk a lot less about is what not to change.

perhaps the most universal american example of this phenomenon is weight loss and the lack of maintenance thereof. 

almost anyone who has ever gone on a diet has a goal weight in mind, and generally, if we follow that diet, almost regardless of what it is, we lose the weight and eventually reach the goal weight. 

let’s say you weigh 180 pounds (82 kg) and then choose to follow the popular (and relatively healthful for many people) “mediterranean diet” for two months eventually getting down to your goal weight of 160 lbs (73 kg). that’s when the challenge begins, particularly if you’ve been eating in a way that is not sustainable (which is what most diets i ever went on did). 

when we get to that goal weight, many of us, most in my experience, begin to return to the way we ate before (and the research bears this out). typically we have “deprived” ourselves during the “diet,” and since we have been experiencing deprivation, we want to “reward” ourselves for having reached our goal weight. unfortunately, our reward is not usually a pedicure, a bubble bath, or time to ourselves on a couch, our reward is most likely going to be eating something that was not on that diet–often something that hits the salt-fat-sugar trifecta. one reward leads to another, and even if the diet we lost weight on was relatively healthful, and even if we keep eating that beneficial food too, the addition of either higher quantities of the same food or phasing back in the less wholesome food causes us to gain the weight back, perhaps even more than we lost on the diet itself.

gaining weight back after dieting is a subject about which i have significant experience because i was a size 16 (xl) for most of high school, a size 20 (2xl) on my wedding day, a size 26 (5xl) on the day our first child was born and i have now been a size 10-12 (l) for many years. 

how did i reach a size 26?  answer: dieting, reaching my goal weight, and then going off the diet and gaining back every pound i had lost with interest. rinse. repeat. 

how did i finally break that cycle?  with a great deal of support from other people working one day at a time with the power of the universe to break that cycle before me, i stopped eating to lose weight and started eating to live. it sounds simple, but it wasn’t easy. in other words, i stopped having a temporary “diet” eating plan and started having a sustainable plan that moved me very slowly toward a healthy body weight. then, when i got to that body weight (again, with much support from others), i kept doing what i was doing. and this is the most essential part. 

weight is not the only place where this craziness exists in at least my human mind. in some of my circles, they say, “you can’t stay clean on yesterday’s shower.”   and while many of us take a shower every day regardless, many of us give up on habits we’ve established not because they fail us but because they succeed.

next time you hit this point, what else is possible?

please pause and consider. 

perhaps things are going well because of what you have been doing.

this time, maybe stay the course?