Habits- Day 2

I’ve been giving some thought to my habits. I’ve decided to include a list of my daily habits without passing any judgement on whether they are considered good or bad. Tomorrow I’ll address the concept of what is considered a good habit, and what is a bad habit. 

Perhaps you could make a quick list of some of your habits. 

Remember the definition from  from yesterday. A habit is something that is done involuntarily, meaning you do it automatically without giving it much thought. 

List of Habits

Shower in the morning 

Brush my teeth morning and night

Wear my seatbelt in the car

Spend time on my i pad and i phone

Drink primarily water

Snack between meals

Sit more than I walk

I think our lives become a series of habits. Is this good or bad? Tomorrow we’ll dig deeper into that vein of thinking. 

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

Thomas Paine

Habits- Day 1

Habits:

“An acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become involuntary.”

Today begins a thirty-one day series about habits. It has been my custom, dare say I my habit, to participate during the month of October in a 31 Day Writing Challenge. 

If you are interested you might check back in my blog for previous years 31 Day Challenges. I have written about Discovery, Change, Art, Virtues, and Creativity I think you might enjoy reading them. 

Habits have always been a reoccurring interest of mine, and over the years I have read several books and articles about habits. I thought I might share with you some of the information I’ve acquired.

Now, technically, just because you have the information doesn’t guarantee that anything will come from it. I’m notorious for not taking action. I seem to like to accumulate it, and hoard it for some other day, just in case. 

I hope to not just share information or knowledge, but rather to reflect and perhaps take action on how habits play a part in our lives. 

Good, bad or indifferent let’s see where I’m at at the end of October. 

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

Samuel Johnson

Thoughts on a Saturday Morning

 

I’m glad the weather has taken a turn, and the 100 degree days of summer are finally over.

         This will be a summer for the record books, and I’ll be glad to put it past me.    

I’m taking pleasure in seeing green again when I look out over the pasture. It’s amazing what a little rain will do. 

I’m feeling inclined to start writing again, but am lacking any inspiration as to what to write. I’ve missed the discipline of writing daily in my blog. It forced me to be ore observant about life. Today I’m slipping back to auto pilot as I’ve settled into a routine. 

I spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the “truth” about vaccines, elections, and current events. I come away exhausted and downtrodden.

I want to set my sights on something more up lifting. Or at least find a better balance between the two. Over the last seven years of Grace Found Daily  I’ve tried  to share what has been on my heart and mind. 

It has been a struggle not to share what has consumed me since the spring of 2020. My eyes have been opened, but sadly I think my heart has become more closed. I’m not exactly sure what direction I want this blog to take, but I’m not quite ready to give it up. 

(Something I find ironic is that the format I use to compose these postings doesn’t seem to be quite as cooperative, and even the physical act of writing is more of a challenge. I’m pretty sure it’s an attempt to urge you to upgrade to their paid format.)

Ginger and Honey

It’s beginning to look a little like Noah’s Ark around here. 

To quote my four year old grandson, we are collecting animals “two by two.”

In addition to our two kittens about a month ago we acquired to Black Mouth Cur sisters who were abandoned out in the middle of nowhere.

Chuck had been wanting two larger dogs, and the Black Mouth Cur was a favorite of his. 

Our two pups are around eight months old, and are settling into their new home. 

Overall, I’d say they are doing quite well, but being puppies they still are requiring some training. 

To quote my poodle Cooper’s breeder, “Who is training who?” 

Both Chuck and I are in the process of figuring it out. 

Kittens

                            

        Back in July we had a new addition to our family-two actually. 

We knew at some point we wanted to get a cat. Living in the country it doesn’t hurt to have a mouser around to keep the mouse population at bay. 

To be honest, I’ve never act seen a mouse out here, but Chuck had caught some in the barn. 

I kept hoping by some miraculous chance a cat would one day just appear at my door needing a home. 

I would look out each day expecting to see one, but sadly the only cats I did see were my neighbors.

My daughter put the word out to her friends that we were in the market for kittens. 

By this time I thought it might work out better to have two instead of one. My thinking was that they could keep each other company, and maybe help protect each other since they were going to eventually end up bring outdoor cats. 

It wasn’t long that we were given the opportunity to adopt two kittens from a friend of my grandson. 

On the way to deliver them to us I informed my daughter that I had not come up with any names yet. 

Not to worry since she handed the task over to mu 6 year old grandson who seems to have a gift for naming animals. 

Within seconds he rattled off Ranger for the boy, and Bluebonnet for the girl. 

After meeting the kittens for the first time the names couldn’t have been more perfect. 

We are heading into September now and we’ve established a pretty good routine. 

Typical of kittens they are too wild to let roam freely in the house. My upholstered dining room chairs were showing signs of not surviving, so they spend their days playing outside, and come in to spend the night in our laundry room. 

I had missed having cats in my life, and these two have already brought so much joy to our lives.

Yes and No

 

               It’s been a long couple of years as I’ve struggled to maintain my weight loss. 

This leg of my journey began in the spring of 2017 when we had just moved into our apartment in Las Colinas. I had spent a good eight months getting ready for the big move. Between culling through eighteen years of accumulations, getting a house ready to sell( not an easy task after eighteen years), and making arrangements for a new living space, healthy eating was the last thing on my mind. 

After settling in the reality was that I had gained back about twenty pounds of weight that I had previously lost. Now the good thing, though was generally my weight gain was usually closer to thirty pounds, so I was already ahead of the game by ten pounds.

I located the nearest Weight Watcher studio and began the arduous task of losing those twenty pounds. At a half a pound a week as an average loss, it took about seven months to reach my goal. 

Along the way, though, I began to make acquaintances with my fellow WW members. Along with losing weight I was making friends in my new community. I looked forward to my meeting each week. Add to that a pretty dynamic coach, and I was on my “weigh!”

For the next several months my weight loss slowed down, and it wasn’t until the next summer when I embraced a plant-based diet that I began to lose weight again. In total I lost about another ten pounds. 

Now to be honest I felt like I was a little too thin, and although I enjoyed plant-based eating I felt like I was not getting all the nutrition my body needed by eliminating meat and dairy. I went back to about an 80/20 diet with plants playing a more prominent role. 

As time went by, though, I found myself slipping back into my old habits. As much as I wish I could say that losing the initial weight is the hard part, for me it’s always the maintaining part that is the challenge. Forever is a long time. 

As much as I tried I was struggling to be motivated to continue down the path of healthy eating. The one bright spot was that I had reconnected with a High School friend at one of my WW meetings. We began meeting for a healthy lunch, and proceeded to catch up and support each other in our weight loss journey. So along with a healthy weight I had a new friend as well. 

Interestingly, it was the beginning of the pandemic that kicked me into gear, and motivated me to embrace my healthy lifestyle whole heartedly. Although, we really knew little about the infamous Corona Virus at the time, I knew instinctively that if I were to get the virus, it could only help to be healthy. 

I began learning more about my own natural immunity system, and worked hard to boost it. This strategy worked fine during 2020, but as time went by, and we began to make plans for another move (technically we had already moved from the apartment after a year to a home in Euless) I found my resolve waning. 

Once again the stress of the move began to interfere with my healthy lifestyle. Add to that a year of Chuck and I living separately during the week as he continued to work in Irving, and I two hours away, I was now completely off the rails. 

He was no longer home, and my cooking consisted of unhealthy casseroles that I could send with him back to the apartment. Meanwhile, I was basically eating nonstop, and nothing actually healthy. 

As my weight began to creep up I began each day thinking things would be different. They never would be, and I would retire each night feeling quite discouraged and disappointed in my lack of resolve.

One good thing, though, that I continued to do was to attend at least one WW meeting a month to do my monthly weigh in. By doing this I could keep my lifetime status current, and receive my online tools for free( although, technically I wasn’t using them.)

Predictably the WW eating plan had changed (which it does regularly) right about the time I moved, and I never could quite adjust myself to the lack of points I was given daily. Although, I could earn points through healthy choices, I just couldn’t find the motivation to do so. 

Last week I stepped on the scale, and as it hovered close to the next decade I knew I had to do something. As I looked through my WW app for motivation, I came across something that really resonated with me. 

“Saying no to things that don’t align with your goals allows you to shift your focus to what you are actually saying yes to.”

In other words, by saying no to that handful of potato chips or that nightly dessert I was actually saying yes to a healthier body, and a weight I felt more comfortable at.

I was able to make it though one day ( no easy feat when babysitting my grandsons at their home). I’ve found that if I can make it through one day then I can usually make it through two days. Sure enough I did, and now I’m at a week and a half. 

My weight is down about three pounds, and I’m encouraged to keep going. I only want to lose a few more pounds, and those may take a little longer, but that’s okay. 

What I’m finding is that food is beginning to taste better again. When I’m filling upon junk rather than on whole real foods, my pallet seems to take a nose dive, and nothing really ever satisfies my taste. 

Today when I’m tempted to eat something I know is not on my plan I say yes to what I really want, and that seems to be guiding my success. 

It’s kind of crazy how I got to yes, by saying no first. 

Library List

I’m keeping track of books I’ve read, but I’m not going to do a book review for each, though.  Although, I do enjoy reading I’m not all that crazy about being a book reviewer.