Post 100 (and the third today!)

Yay! Landmark post!


And very little of it will be my own content.
There was a Women's Health article a few months ago ("Slim Body, Fat Wallet") that I just re-read and I wanted to share some of it with you. 

His [James Prochaska, Ph.D.] fundamental belief is that the big reason so many people relapse on their New Year's resolutions by (you guessed it!) February, is that they didn't do enough to prepare themselves to take on those shifts. "Change is a process," he says, "not an event. And 80 percent of people aren't prepared when they start." 

So how do you lay the groundwork? Getting ready involves moving consciously through several stages. In what Prochaska calls the "precontemplation" stage, change is just nibbling at your mind, and your job is to raise your awareness of the benefits of changing. That might mean thinking about the cool vacation you could save for when you no longer have those big credit-card bills to contend with, or the thrill of fitting back into your favorite skinny jeans.

Then comes the next stage, "contemplation," when you are seriously thinking about making a change. When you're at this stage, it helps to focus on how the pros of taking some kind of action outweigh the cons. Sure, you might miss your morning full-fat latte and your Friday-night pizza outings, but seeing the pounds melt off is so much more gratifying. "People who can't see a good balance of pros over cons are likely to give up and say it's not worth it," Prochaska points out. When you can list twice as many pros as cons, you're good to go!

I think this is a worthy exercise and something I'm going to endeavor to do -- to see more pros than cons.  I'm generally a positive, upbeat kind of person, but I think this will help me put my head in the right place.

The article ends with this:

Remember: Change is a process, not an event, as Prochaska says. It takes time, and you're likely to hit the occasional setback or bad day. When (not if, but when) that happens, take a deep breath and remember that these are changes you want to make for the long-term. If on a particular day you find you don't have enough willpower to attack both challenges, look at it as a sort of muscle fatigue and ease up. Count calories today. Stick to your budget tomorrow. And over time, you'll build up enough strength to reach both goals.

Now, I don't get many magazines, as I don't like being wasteful and/or becoming a magazine collector and I don't think that they're always putting good information out there.  But this made me wonder if all my failures in the past to stick to change have been because I had no idea what I wanted the end result to be, or what I wanted my lifestyle to resemble.

With that, the sun just came out and it's time to get my ass in gear!  What to do today... what to do...

[[Edit:  my nutritionist posted this link.  20 Worst Drinks in America 2010]]