Discipline
It’s all about discipline. Every last thing we all do to improve our bodies and increase our overall health is based upon the fundamental cornerstone of discipline. It’s easy to sit on the couch and quaff a cold beer while munching on salty chips slathered in fiery salsa. It’s great to sip fine red wine while eating 12 ounces of red meat, half a pound of potatoes, and then topping that off with a carmelized creme brulee for dessert. It’s easy, and it’s tempting. Temptation is all around. It’s a part of the constant barrage of advertising we face each and every day. It’s part and parcel of nearly every product sold on the shelves of American supermarkets. It’s on the plates of our friends and family. It would be so easy to give in.
But we can’t. We can’t because to do so would be to invalidate all our hard work. It would endanger our health, and it would make us feel like crap. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but every now and again, I have to remind myself why I got into this thing in the first place. Living in a fit, healthy body is better than any alternative I can think of. People complain about being overweight; about their clothes not fitting; about the scale constantly going up. They complain all the while they’re shoving a hot dog covered with cheese chili down their throats. Their feet, knees and backs hurt because they’re carting around thirty or forty or fifty pounds more than their bodies were meant to handle. They wheeze going up a flight of stairs because the last time they walked anywhere was during the Nixon administration. They complain, spend a fortune on fast weight loss cures (SNAKE OIL; SNAKE OIL), and never correlate their diet and lack of exercise to the condition of their bodies and the state of their psyches.
I’m feeling particularly self-righteous today because faced with more calorie-deficient food than you could shake a stick out, I turned my back on it all, went back to my desk and had a small baked potato and three ounces of broiled chicken breast for lunch. Then, after three hours of overtime, I went to the gym instead of going home. It was a small victory, but damned satisfying.
