Starting Over Yet Again (And Thank You, Instructor Steve)

My motivation to walk and eat right seems to have gone haywire lately: I'll walk six miles one day and nap instead of exercising the next three days, eat really well for a week then not bother to stock up on healthy groceries for the next week, fill out almost all my daily food diary during the day and not complete it at night, and so on. One of my math instructors in college once reprimanded me while looking over my self-made study materials for his class by kind of snidely opining that I should do more work and less preparation for work. And although I argued that I did both--I really worked quite hard even to pass that class--I understood what he meant: I'd put together a number of sample tests to take, I'd rewritten some of the textbook thinking it would help me memorize the step-by-step how-to of the problems, I'd copied and organized into one folder all the formulas and other tools from the text and from books and resources I'd borrowed from him, I'd done so many little things that fell under the category of "This Math Class and Things I Know About It and Things That Might Help Me Do Well in It," but I was really doing very few actual math problems. I was working around the subject instead of working on the subject. And I can see now, these past few weeks, that I've been handling this weight loss/better health challenge of mine in much the same way: I've signed up to have various diet and health-related newsletters emailed to myself, I've taken a couple "before and after" pictures, and I've bookmarked a bunch of articles online that contain good tips and information on weight loss, but I've been skipping my walks, not eating well, and slacking off with my food diary too. So as Instructor Steve would say, it's time to do more work and less preparation for work.