Let Go of Eating for the Permanent Record. It’s All About the Math.
Let go of the emotional attachments with food. If you want to lose weight, just do the math.
Look, they lied to us in school about the whole “Permanent Record” thing.
Remember that?
We were all told in school that we couldn’t skip or get detention or whatever because it would go on our permanent record, and that permanent record would follow us our WHOLE life.
We all graduated high school and got on with life only to realize that THERE WAS NO PERMANENT RECORD!
What???
That’s right!
No one in your adult world cares if you skipped school to hang out at the lake that one Thursday in May. (Ha, ha, just joking Mom and Dad…) Or, if you failed that history test sophomore year. No one.
We all believed in the permanent record, and sadly it was a fabrication.
They also told us that we needed to learn math, really learn math, because math would follow us our whole life.
Guess what?
When they told us that one, we didn’t believe them!
Pshaw! We don’t need to know this [insert favorite high school expletive here] math.
The years went by, and we learned that, dang, we need to know math to figure out our finances. Dang, we need math to figure out the best way to hang pictures (and then later paintings) on our wall.
Math creeps into every aspect of life.
If you love math, have a Pi t-shirt in your closet, and you still consider the Pythagorean Theorem your BFF, then you have a teacher or two to thank!
My math teachers and I didn’t hit it off too well, and I think it may have been because I was sitting in class worrying about my permanent record too much to pay attention to what was being said.
Now, here I am in my 50s only to find that I need math YET AGAIN, and this time it’s to figure out the whole weight gain/weight loss thing.
My husband and I have been doing interval training at Orangetheory Fitness for over a year now, and we love it.
It’s a great hour-long workout that focuses on our heart rate and keeping that rate in a specific zone during the class.
We’ve both been amazed at the muscle tone we are developing, but we both want to be rid of our middle-aged belly fat.
One day one of the trainers, Tommy (We love Tommy. He’s always so dang happy!), tells everyone that weight loss is 20% exercise and 80% diet.
What???
Nooooooooooo!
Why can’t it be the other way around?
WHY?!
When I stopped to think about it, it made sense, though.
What we eat plays more of a factor in losing weight than the actual exercise.
What good does it do to burn 500 calories in an hour, which is possible at Orangetheory Fitness (just saying), and then spend the next 14 hours of our day consuming 3,000 calories?
Now, if we continue burning calories during the day, that would be OK. But, let’s be real here. Most of us do our workout, and then we sit in a chair in front of a computer for the rest of the day.
While that 500 calorie workout is fantastic for our heart, our emotional well-being, and our mental focus, for our weight loss goal it’s a 500 calorie workout.
This brings math back into our world from the fluorescent bulbed musty smelling classroom of our youth.
So many of us fail at weight loss or weight gain because we view it emotionally, like an English class essay on how Shakespeare’s Macbeth made us feel.
Controlling weight is not about emotions. It’s about the math.
We put a number of calories in our body, we have to increase our calorie burn.
If our metabolism is low, we have to raise it to lose weight.
We have to let go of the attachment to the “Permanent Record” of life.
It doesn’t exist.
If you increase your caloric intake because you failed your sophomore history test, or your boyfriend broke up with you to date a waitress at Piggy Park BBQ, then just stop.
That donut that you just ate because your sister yelled at you on the phone is not justifiable diet homicide.
We hang on to what life and people do to us because we think it’s all part of the “Permanent Record” system, and it cripples our ability to make rational food choices.
Let go of the past, people, because there is no permanent record!
If you want to lose or gain weight, just do the math.
To see how many calories you need daily, you can use a calorie calculator, but please combine it with common sense.
If you are starving, eat something healthy even if it takes you beyond the daily recommended caloric intake.
Balance and moderation in life will get your farther than complete and utter compliance with a calorie counter.
Take a deep breathe and remember with diet and exercise, it’s ok to falter.
There is no permanent record!
For calorie counters, check out these websites: Free Dieting, Precision Nutrition, Bodybuilding.
- To follow my blog, please click the subscribe button on this page. We’ll be working together on ways to journey towards the positive.
- Click the Yoga tab to find simple yoga poses that we can all do together to help move in the direction to calm down and let go.
- Next week, we’ll talk about salty baths! I hope you will find your way back to The Happy Bishop to read the post.
Now available, How to Survive the ICU Experience, an eBook to help you as you sit by the bedside of a loved one. Buy your copy here!
