Off Track

Confession: I haven't regularly tracked my food for over a month.  A MONTH!  Tracking is critical to me because it helps me be mindful of what & (more critically for me) how much I'm eating, it gives me information & power. 

When I started thinking about coming clean about my transgressions, I thought it had been a couple of weeks.  I was shocked when I pulled up my tracker--dusty from lack of use--to find that it had been 5 weeks since I had done any kind of regular tracking.  I can blame some of my dalliance on our South Dakota Adventure & some on eating out & some on eating in others' homes...but frankly that doesn't matter.

It's not that I've eaten particularly poorly or made bad choices or binged (although I did steal the brownie that my step-mother sent home for Dave...he's not a big dessert person & its yumminess would have been wasted on him).  To the contrary, I have been pretty content with my tracking-free progress, but therein lies the problem. 

Contentment, in relationship to self-improvement, is just a whisper away from complacency.  Complacency is teetering on the edge of apathy & apathy, for me, is a readily accessible Krispy Kreme drive-thru & 269 pounds.  Time to reign this puppy in. 

The tricky thing is that not tracking is a lot like when I learned to swear.  I vividly remember the first time I ever cursed.  I was in third grade & we were in gym class.  Dear Mr. Balentine gestured over at a rope suspended from the ceiling & calmly explained that we were to climb it.  My 9 year old self quaked in fear & practically without thinking I whispered, "J**** C*****."  It was the most horrible, awful thing I could think to say at the most horrible, awful task at hand & I KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Lord was going to smite me down for my blasphemy.  And what happened?  Nothing.  The world didn't come crashing down on me & I wasn't smitten (but I did have to take a stab at that stupid rope, a fate worse than being struck dead, if you ask me).   No one even heard me, so there were no consequences in the slightest.  And what happened, then?  I started testing the waters a little more & a little more until I was a punk little girl with a mouth that would have made George Carlin uncomfortable.

Lest I start sliding down another slippery slope besmirched with four-letter words, let me publicly state that I am going to track my food again.  I am not going to wait until the beginning of my week (tomorrow), rather I am going to start with the next bite that goes in my mouth.  Tracking is one of the pillars of the success that I've had & I'm not going to let it go out of laziness.  I have previously said that I will track my food until the day I die...since I didn't die 5 weeks ago it's probably time for me to regroup & starting tracking.