Overcoming and Succumbing to Excuses

Nap in Hammock after trail work

Last night and this morning I had several occasions related to both diet and fitness to exercise restraint or overcome excuses. Today's blog entry covers the reasoning that led to both success and failures in the art of overcoming or succumbing to excuses.

Inge cooked one of my personal favorites last night, Schnitzel, Rotkraut, und Kartoffelbrie - Chicken schnitzel, red cabbage, and mashed potatoes. I must be a simple guy because I love simple food! (My three favorite vegetables, in order, are spinach, cabbage, and asparagus.) For the last few weeks, I have been watching my portions and for this meal, I try to limit myself to one schinitzeled chicken breast half. However, Inge, in her ever generous way, put one and a half schnitzels on my plate.

I immediately entered a mental quandary with thoughts and excuses ping-ponging through my brain:

"It's only half a schnitzel extra," I pontificated to self.

"But I have been loosing weight so well. I can't eat the extra because it'll spoil my diet!" replied the other side.

The trident bearing half responded, "since you HAVE been doing so well, half a schnitzel won't hurt!"

And in this case I succumbed to the temptation and ate the whole thing along with extra portions of Rotkraut and the first beer in two weeks. For the first time since the New Year, I was stuffed to the point of discomfort and just a bit peeved at myself.

The annoying thing about this is the half-vs-whole thing. If she had placed a second whole schnitzel on my plate I would have immediately put it aside to eat as leftover because schnitzel on a slice of German rye bread makes an excellent leftover. But half a schnitzel borders on insufficient for leftovers and to discard it would have wasted food - something I discussed last week. So I ate it to my chagrin.

Today is the beginning of another travel day and I also had an early morning international conference call scheduled. So I rushed through my morning routine, the morning walk with Penny, and my Kettlebell swing session. Tuesday I had executed 15x15 swings but this morning I was sorely tempted to do fewer using the time crunch as an excuse. During the second session, I was mindlessly swinging and realized I went past the 15 count so continued to 30 for a double session. Still thinking about stopping early I decided on the 9th session to double up to 30 again, and thus zoomed past the tempting 10th session stop. From then on, it was just a matter of doubling my sessions the next two times to skip past even stopping points and repeat Tuesday's 225 swing session. By doubling up on the last three sessions I overcame excuses and temptation to slack off.

However, I know how long it takes to shower, shave, and dress so I knew I didn't have enough time after the swing session to perform my Turkish Get Ups this morning. So I skipped TGUs, rushed to get ready, fired up the work computer just in time for the 7:30 meeting, only to find that the meeting was canceled. Go figure! The lesson here is to adjust my morning to fit my exercise into the schedule even for an early morning work meeting.

Anyway, I always live knowing that life throws curves and even when I give in to temptation or find an excuse not to perform as I should, I don't beat myself up too much. It's easy enough to get back on track as long as I don't fall into the trap of letting excuses take over every day.