Not I, Not Me, It’s Us and We – The Process
Has anyone ever told you to enjoy the process? It usually entails an effort happening on your part and that effort is something that is going to take a while, or something that is going to be hard. For example, losing weight. We’ve all been there, or at least most of us have been there. We decide it’s time. Many reasons or some reasons or A reason brings us to that point. Not I, not me. It’s us and we.
We do all the things to get ready. You know, binge all weekend because we start Monday. I know that’s what people do. It shouldn’t be that, but because we are starting a new diet on Monday, we naturally think we are going to be deprived of everything we love and we think the only thing we will be eating is chicken and broccoli. We really need to stop this behavior and change this mindset. But, I get it.
Anyway, we are ready to go. Monday rolls up and we are off. We feel great, we are doing well. The week is good. Then here comes Friday and the weekend. Things don’t go so great on Friday and Saturday. We tell ourselves how bad we suck. We get mad and we then usually just say screw it and we are done. We think we messed up so bad that it’s not worth it to get back to it. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
When we are making changes, it’s okay to mess up. We are all human. We are going to have some bad days. The thing that makes or breaks the change is to keep going. Who cares if you messed up. Get right back at it. The thing that makes or breaks the change is to be honest with yourself. Completely honest. No half truths. Full truth all the way.
The thing is, when we slow down and pay attention to things going on in our lives, we are better able to figure out why those behaviors are happening. We need to own up. We do so many things to try and remove our personal responsibility from them. We want quick. We want easy. Well, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. We need to buck up and take responsibility. Fixing these things takes awareness.
Because until you find out why you are lying to yourself when you add extra food and don’t record it…or put some peanut butter on your sandwich and then dig into the jar with your butter knife again and put that in your mouth…or when you bring in a package of donuts and eat one donut and a bite off of every other donut in the pack because that means you aren’t really going overboard and then you throw them away, but half an hour later you dig them out of the garbage…or you eat the gummy vitamins because they taste like candy and you aren’t going to record them, because duh, they’re vitamins…or we tell ourselves we are just going to have two Oreos and pretty soon we ate a whole sleeve…or how many times have you sat down in front of the TV with a bag of chips or a bowl of popcorn and pretty soon you realize it’s all gone. Yes, you ate the whole thing…or you ate a whole bowl of guac, because it’s “clean.” These are the things we need to work on during the process. The behaviors. The habits. The —why am I this fucked up— things. (We tell ourselves we are fucked up. We really aren’t. We are human). These things are the things. Work on these. All of these.
If you don’t do the work to change, you will never change, If you don’t “enjoy” the process, you will never change. You will just go through the motions of change. And those motions aren’t going to get you much. The time passes no matter what. It may take 6 months. It may take a year. It will probably take longer than that, but while you are changing get in this process. Live the process. Enjoy it. Treat it like an experiment. You have the problems. Let’s solve them. Piece by piece, bit by bit, let’s put the puzzle of ourselves back together. Track things and look for trends. It really works to lay it all out. We always want to over-complicate this thing. It’s not complicated at all. It takes patience.
And most important of all, it is okay to love yourself where you are and while you are changing. That is not a conflict. It’s all about self-awareness. It’s all about you. So, the sooner you realize nobody is coming to save you, and that you are responsible for your actions and your progress, the sooner you are going to start enjoying this process and digging into this process and making those changes you are so looking forward to. Accept it, stop denying and do the work. Watch the changes come. I believe in you.
Not I, not me. It’s us and we.