What Doesn't Kill Me

This is me out running this morning. The weather here has been the exact opposite of what's going on in the east coast, so it's not even cold at 6:30 in the morning, but it's still hard to get up at dawn and go running several miles.

I'm hoping that it's all worth it.

Cheater

I've been doing this...for lack of a better word...diet for the last few weeks. Starting on Oct 10, It's been no sugar, no carbs. I've been very faithful to it, and I lost nine pounds.

But this past weekend, I decided would be my cheat day for October (in November it's going to be Thanksgiving Day, and in December it's going to be Christmas Day). Not sure why, maybe my body was already getting ready for the upcoming cheat, but just before the cheat day, I gained back about four pounds.

Then came my cheat day, which evolved into a cheat weekend, and I gained three more pounds. Now, after a month of no sugar, no carbs, and one weekend of lots-o-sugar, lots-o-carbs, I am basically at square one.

So, I'm here to say folks, don't cheat. It's just not worth it. Cheaters never prosper.

I Got A New Belt

It's been a really long time since I got a new belt. I've just been making do with the one that I had from way back when...you know, a year ago. This is my old belt.

You can see that it's been stretched and misused a lot.

And here you can see the extra holes I had to poke into it to make it fit me recently.

With this new belt, it's the first time in a while that my belt hasn't been cinched up to the last hole...or a new last hole that I had to create myself in the leather.

I'm pretty excited to finally start building up enough clothes that fit me that I can consider them a wardrobe. The best part about it is that, even though I haven't lost any weight recently, everyone keeps complimenting me on the fact that I look skinnier than the last time they saw me. That's a funny thing that happens when you start wearing clothes that fit, instead of the baggy old ones you had before.

Habit Forming

So, I was browsing through the Kindle store the other day, when I saw the book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg I read the description, and was sold.

I've never bought a Kindle book before, mostly because I don't get a lot of time to do eyeball reading. Instead I do all my reading via audiobooks, but the impulse buy got me. That one-click purchase thing is a smart move by Amazon.

Anyway, I started reading the book right away, and it's really fascinating. I'm learning a lot of stuff about habits, how to create good ones and replace bad ones. Apparently, with habits you have a cue, which is the thing that causes you to perform the routine of the habit. Then there's the reward, which is the thing you get for performing the routine of the habit.

What I most want to do by way of this book is establish a writing habit in my life. I was thinking that I could set an alarm on my phone to ring at a certain time each day, and when that alarm rings, that is my cue. Then I could perhaps have a chocolate or something once I manage to write for a half hour or 500 words or whatever. That would be my reward, and I could have it despite my no-sugar-for-the-rest-of-the-year vow. I was also thinking of allowing myself even greater rewards if I manage to write for a week straight, and greater yet at two weeks and so on.

I went out and bought myself a bag of chocolate this morning, and I was thinking of getting that song called "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield for the ringtone of the alarm. It's the only song I know that's got lines in it about writing.

"Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find"

Here's to hoping that a song like that can cue me into a habit of writing. After all, there's chocolate involved right?

Vow Of Celibacy

Okay, not really. It's a vow to deprive myself of something wonderful, but not a vow of celibacy. Instead, I've decided to take a vow to abstain from sugar and carbs for the entire rest of the year.

That's right, through the Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas seasons.

You see, that's the worst time of the year for me as far as weight gain goes. It's also one of the happiest times of the year for me as well...hmmm...I wonder if that means something. Anyway, I'm going to try to nip it in the bud this year.

I will give myself one day of for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas, though. But that's it.

Last year, I weighed 250 at the beginning of September, and by the time we started that weight loss contest in March I was 283. In six months, I gained 33 lbs. Most of it came on in the holiday months.

We'll see how it goes. I started on October the 10th, and I'm doing fine so far. It's hard, but I'm committed. It'll only get harder as Christmas approaches though. I gotta have nerves of steel if I ever want to have buns of steel, right?

Hoarder

Maybe this makes me weird, or maybe it's just the natural thing for a film school graduate to do, but I save all my movie ticket stubs. In fact, I save all my ticket stubs, from concerts, to the circus, to soccer and football games. I guess I think it's neat to be able to show that I was there or something. It's kind of cool to be able to look back and say at this exact moment in past, I was doing this. I can pinpoint my whereabouts twenty years ago.

I wish I'd started saving movie tickets before I ever went to film school though. I wish I could pull out my stub from some of the great films I saw as a child like Back to the Future or Ghostbusters or Brewster's Millions. Sadly, I didn't start saving them till the mid-nineties.

This weekend, I went and saw the 3D re-release of Finding Nemo. I got free tickets people, don't start accusing me of being a hypocrite. Yes, I would have preferred it if the film had been in its natural 2D state, but what are you gonna do? Anyway, in honor of that re-release, and my ticket hoarding habit, I thought I would present my ticket stub from May 31, 2003 when the movie first came out:

And this second time around:

I told my daughter that if she cried and made me have to take her out of the theater this time around like she did the last time I saw Finding Nemo, I wasn't going to be happy. She didn't think it was funny. She's ten years old now.