How {NOT} to stay on track with your fit and healthy lifestyle

Most bloggers in the fitlife, fitspiration, and weight loss communities have posts telling you how to stay on track with your fit and healthy lifestyle. I probably do, too. Several in fact. These posts are written in the thick of it, when reading others' advice has turned you into a matra-spewing weight loss and fitspiration guru in your own mind. But how many have a how {NOT} to stay on track with your fit and healthy lifestyle post?

Here's mine.

How {NOT} to stay on track with your fit and healthy lifestyle

1. Do not control your portions sizes. Eyeball that shit and eat whatever the fuck you want.

2. Do not pack a lunch to go to work. Starve yourself all day, while you're at your highest level of activity and stress, and then make up for those calories when you get off work, driving from drive-thru to drive-thru until you've stuffed your bad thoughts deeply enough under the surface to survive walking through your own front door and engaging with friends or family.

3. Do not engage in elevated or intensified movement or activity, a.k.a. "exercise", for 20 minutes per day. This may cause you to lose weight, maintain a healthy weight, and inadvertently reduce your risk of heart attack, type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases, thus extending your life*.

4. Do not reduce or stop consumption of heavy, yeasty, and malty craft beers as a pastime, as this will also reduce your intake of added sugars. Also, you may want to start smoking pot, as this will help you increase your desire for highly sweetened, salty and fatty foods, which as a trifecta are your best friends in {NOT} staying on track with your fit and healthy lifestyle.

5. Most importantly, commit yourself to eating the cheapest food possible, so you can eat a lot more of it. Eat alone at a buffet restaurant at least a few times a week**. In most moderate-sized towns, you can find a steakhouse buffet, a Chinese buffet and at least one other ethnic buffet (ie. Indian, Italian, etc.). Make use of these resources to ensure your fit lifestyle will cease.

Thanks for reading this bullshit. Now go do some squats, get to bed early and wake up in time to get some physical activity in before work! (Don't forget to hydrate...and food is fuel, not your friend!)

*Be advised that extending one's lifespan is often a direct result of staying on track with a fit and healthy lifestyle.

**Eating alone all but ensures you will be able to eat much more than you would with others watching and judging you.

Grief may not be a choice, but bouncing back from it is!

Last year, I posted something about wanting to lose weight so I could "be healthy and capable for my parents as they grow older". The week after I wrote those words, my mother's four-year-long battle with cancer would take its terminal turn; She was diagnosed with a brain lesion, and a single radiation treatment would speed up her demise to take her from us much too suddenly; in less than two months she was gone.

Rock-hopping Strickler Knob (Even at 350 pounds, I'm still hiking!)

Her sickness led to a deep sadness I was unable to shake. In my grief, I stopped doing anything that gave me pleasure. I stopped hiking altogether, and hiking at that point was the only remaining vestige of my fitlife days, the days of clean eating, medball workouts and 6-day-a-week gym visits that led to my 165-pound weight loss only a few years prior.

My mother's death did threw me for a loop. My mantra of decisions controlling my destiny, not my conditions, went out the window. My choices were once again not only influenced but dictated by my emotions. I had completely reverted to the hopelessness I'd lived in for nearly a decade in the wake of my experience during 9/11.

I'm back to hiking - having gone on my first hike a few days after my mother passed away. It's been seven months and I've done more than 30 hikes, averaging around three per month. This summer I plan to up the days hiking, and I also plan on bringing back my medball and planking routine. The gym is not a priority now, although it's only because I haven't found a gym that suits me in the small town to which I've recently relocated.

For those of you who still subscribe to my blog even though I'm not the living inspiration I may have been to you when you first found me, during my "amazing transformation", I thank you. This is, after all, a journey. I've said that from the beginning, and so I'll say it again. Every day I wake up the decisions I make point me toward my future. And I continue to hold myself accountable.

My weight gain, which had been out of control throughout this winter, has been stabilized. Now is the time to begin to move in more intentional ways that will once again excite my metabolism and fuel my body in ways that promote that movement. I know muscle memory will kick in once I get started, but that's where I am now - setting a goal, making a decision, and acting on it.

I'll keep you posted...more to come.