After taking you along on my journey to get fit by losing over 100 pounds in under a year, now I am sharing my quest to crushing goals while I live my life of fitness in a post weight loss world. My hope is that something I share resonates with you and helps you live your fittest, most productive and happiest life.
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing.”
Theodore Roosevelt
My new M&M habit…
On my kitchen counter I have a number of jars of snack items stored for easy access. These items include tea bags, almonds, fried chickpeas, trail mix and M&Ms.
Lately, as I walk by, I have found myself mindlessly grabbing handfuls of M&Ms or trail mix. I know that mindless snacking is not the right choice for my fitness but I haven’t been too concerned about this. I tend not to even log the calories from this snacking because each M&M is just 4 calories so a handful it’s just a nominal addition to my day.
I didn’t realize just how much of a habit this has become until I was buying my third big bag of M&Ms in two months. Then I did the math that each bag is a total of about 1400 calories. That’s a lot of extra calories that I am mindlessly consuming. And I am justifying to myself through a phrase that I have learned to consider a big red flag: it’s just.
Always easy to do the wrong thing…
I have concluded that the real reason I am mindlessly snacking, no matter whether I am hungry or not, is because it is easy. Always having the M&Ms on hand and readily available in the jars on my counter make them very easy to grab as I walk by. They are setup perfectly for stress eating, bored eating and many other poor choices. Plus, not logging the calories in my food tracking app makes it easy to ignore the dietary impact.
There is a big lesson here: in many areas of our lives it is easiest to do the wrong thing and the right thing is usually much harder. But the easy path often leads us to failure.
The easiest foods to eat are usually the ones that are most detrimental to our nutrition. Packaged, processed foods are often packed with calories, fat and sodium. Some of them are even engineered to be addictive so we keep coming back and even eat them when we aren’t hungry. Fresh, clean foods usually require a bit more planning and effort to prepare. It is harder to mindlessly snack on healtier foods on complete autopilot. Similarly exercise is a harder choice than not exercising which is why so many people live a sedentary life.
Choosing the easy path over the right path is one of the leading causes of poor fitness, but it doesn’t end with fitness. There are countless other ways that taking the easy path is not the right choice. Just a few examples include:
- Poor leadership is often driven by the ease of avoiding conflict and hard conversations.
- The same ease of avoiding conflict leads to many of the unresolved issues that cause strained relationships.
- The endless wall / feed on social media helps drive addiction to screen time and disengagement with real life. The same effect also comes from endless video streaming and 24-hour news.
One of the most impactful and dangerous ways that people choose the easy path over the right path is choosing digital over human contact. Hiding behind digital contact only because human contact is too hard enables many of our worst behaviors including the negativity I talked about in my previous post.
Our path and success in life is based on our choices and sometimes those choices require us to take the hard road not the easy road. If we always take the easy road our goals will certainly die of loneliness. If we take the harder path and take the risk of trying we can crush our goals.
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