No GAINZZZ Is Good GAINZZZ

That's false, of course.

I had an injury two months ago and took a week off to let it heal. Then I had a complicating factor called "lazyitus," and I took a couple of more weeks off. Then I was just out of the habit of working out so I just sort of did nothing.

Results: gained eleven pounds, but that's only half of it. I reverted to a lot of bad habits, like staying up late, getting hit with frequent insomnia, being Low Energy Jeb!, etc.

All the good I accomplished over a year or more was kind of wiped out in two months.

I used to have acid in my stomach at night. That went away when I got healthy.

But after two months of not being particularly active or healthy-- it came back. Because of course it did; why wouldn't it? When you revert to your old habits you're going to get your old ailments back.

I restarted my regime a week ago but I'm still not feeling great.

I guess the lesson is: Don't go off your routine. It's hard to establish a habit of being healthy and once you've established it, that's really helpful for continuing it.*

But once you start doing nothing, it's easy to continue doing nothing and it's hard to start doing something again. If you start being a slug again, then that is now your habit. And it'll take work to break that habit and start the new (good) habit again.

But that's my problem. How are your GAINZZZ? Please tell me about your GAINZZZ, because a bit of inspiration (and shaming) would be helpful.

* The way I put it is this way: The big Failure Point of any workout routine is, of course, simply deciding if you're going to work out or not. If you're making that decision each time you might or might not work out, you're going to fail, you're going to choose "nah," 50% of the time or more.

But once you have the habit of just doing it M-W-F or whatever, that decision point is largely gone. You're not deciding whether or not to do it; you just do it, because that's what the schedule says.

So eliminating that Failure Point by just getting into a schedule and treating the schedule as more-or-less inviolable removes all those many, many chances of failure.

Once you're not making the decision if you'll work out or do IF today, you just do it. The decision gets taken out of the decision loop.

Mostly. Obviously you're gonna have some really bad days where you just say "Eff it."

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:24 PM

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