Keep Doing It

For years I would play a game with my weight loss and gain. I would commit to a healthier pattern of eating until I lost enough weight to feel better about myself. Shortly after my pants got a little loose I would revert to old behaviors and forget about the good things that brought about change. Naturally, this cycle would continue to repeat itself over the years. It's funny to look back and see how quickly I would shift from eating a salad to dipping my Oreo cookies in bacon grease for a snack. This created a toxic cycle of moving from moderately decent decisions to old practices and back again.

This isn't just true of our dietary habits unfortunately. There are times when we commit to new ways of engaging in our relationships, transforming our thinking, or processing stress through constructive behaviors. Once those new practices start to deliver mild improvement we often start to ease up and forget to keep doing the positive things that brought change to begin with. We either think we've got the old habits completely under control or we just get lazy. Before we often realize it we are right back in those old haunting choices that led us down a path of destruction. We've stopped doing the right thing and have slipped into negative routines like putting on a well-worn pair of shoes.

The key to continued forward momentum is to keep doing the new, right things even if we think we've got it under control. That might mean eating salad for a little bit longer than we would like, but the long-term changes are worth the commitment to better living.