Crutches and Weaknesses

After posting my "CNTL-ALT-DEL" blog the other night, I received several comments from people who didn't agree with my musings regarding "crutches", "weakness", "failures", and not needing "all of this".  Those folks were upset with me for implying that using myfitnesspal.com, this blog, my exercise streak, etc. were bad things that I could do without.

Sometimes in these posts, I am not always very clear.  Sometimes I don't always convey what I am thinking in my head.  So, let me clarify...

I wasn't trying to say that writing in this blog is a sign of weakness.  I have always enjoyed blogging... though I have enjoyed it more when things were going well for me.  If I knew that I would need to keep blogging for me to maintain my health, I would attempt to blog until the day I died.  I am perfectly fine with that.  But, I would prefer it if the blog was a byproduct of my journey and not such a key component of it's success. My fear is that if, for whatever reason, I can no longer blog, then all of a sudden I will start gaining weight.  What if I can't think of anything else to write?  What if I just get bored with it?  Will I do exactly what I did over the last two years?  I just want to find something that works so that when I lose this weight, I can maintain it for the rest of my days.

I wasn't trying to say that my exercise streak was a sign of weakness.  But, again, I want to know that I can make it my plan to exercise daily with an expectation of never exercising less than five days in a week.  But, what I don't want is to start a streak and find that the streak is what motivates me and not how I feel.  After my streak ended last time, I didn't immediately stop working out.  But, I did find that I was more willing to skip workouts afterwards.  I want to be able to continue to exercise regularly without having that streak be the sole motivator. 

I love myfitnesspal.com.  And, I truly believe logging everything I ate was a huge driver of my previous success.  But, I want to be able to still think about what I am eating even if there comes a moment where I get out of the habit of using MFP.

Maybe it will take some sort of compromise that works for me.  Maybe I will simply log my weight every day, which in the end is the biggest accountability moment when posting to this blog.  Maybe I will post lengthier blogs weekly instead of daily.  Maybe my streak will be the number of weeks working out at least five days rather than trying to beat my previous streak of 549 straight days without a miss.  I can still use MFP regularly... the commitment is not overwhelming.  I can continue to fill my cabinets with healthy foods.  I can continue to use all of these tools at my disposal and, hopefully, find a compromise of all of these things that works for me over many years.

Here's to finding the correct mix of all of these "aids", as one friend insisted to me, that works and not thinking of them as crutches or weaknesses...