A reminder of my ‘what ifs’.
For context please ensure you have read ‘swimology‘ and ‘the what if project‘.
- No alcohol
- Body ecology diet. I have decided to start my diet in the second week when I am home and have had time to get organised and focused.
- Yoga
Monday, January 1st
Get up, do yoga. No alcohol, even though I am down south with mates. Yay to me! Oh yeah, I’m going to rock this year.
Week one:
I manage to make it to Saturday alcohol free. I don’t practice yoga again this week. My diet…
Week two:
I’m in the black hole of Calcutta – I drink all the drinks, I eats ALL the foods. Now I look like a barrel (as opposed to a plum pudding). What happened to my waist?
Please note: I am not generally an unhealthy person or a big drinker. My brain (like most people’s) seems to have short-circuited – set a challenge – get excited by the idea – not in love with the reality.
Why Marnie, Why?
Life gets in the way. Actually, excuses get in the way and they have been there now for two weeks.
How I envisaged this year.
My reality
Time for an attitude adjustment
Yoga
As my wise friend Veronica says “First we do the yoga, then we do the things.” How smart is she?
Week two of the year, I made it twice to yoga. Now it’s week three and I will go three times if the last two weeks are any indication.
When I go to yoga, everything else flows. It was during yoga practice that the idea for the ‘What If Project’ started, so for me, this is the biggest non-negotiable.
Alcohol
I still plan to be alcohol free.
Caveats…
- If you are a good friend and you have a birthday with a nought on the end in 2018.
- Funerals and wakes (this is what undid me in the first place – the death of a close friend’s father)
Body ecology diet
I’m just not there on this one. I have decided to do a general ‘reset’ for this month. This means:
- No gluten
- No dairy
- No processed sugar
- No alcohol
At the end of February, I will review and adjust. Keep tuned on this one as I will be sharing my recipes and yumminess as I go.
If there is a diet you would like me to try, drop me a line (it must be healthy – I won’t commit to drinking a coke every day).
Now you might be thinking at this moment, ‘what’s this Marnie chick like???’ I can tell you this for sure – I am not beating myself up at all. What’s the point? If I give myself a hard time about not achieving what I set out to do at the beginning, I just end up sabotaging any future goodness. As Don Miguel Ruiz says, in The Four Agreements – ‘always do your best’ (knowing that your best is different from day to day).
Here is what I do know. Change is hard. We are hard wired into behaving in certain ways. Stimulus = response. Even though I may have been delusional in thinking that I would wake up News Year Day 2018 and just do everything I set out to do, I am going to keep trying. As the Japanese proverb says, “Fall down seven times, get up eight!”
Back to ‘What if I…stop negotiating with myself’? ‘What if I…get out of the way of myself?’
I hope this gives you, dear reader, a little hope. None of us sits on a pedestal of perfection (even if we’d like to believe so).
Fasten your seat-belts folks – it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
Yours humbly,
Marnie