So how's that workin' for you?

My tea experiment is over. Done. Finished. OVER!

Yesterday was the third day, and I grazed all.day.long. I don't think I ever wasn't eating something. Some of those foods were on-plan, but most of it was completely ridiculous.

Here's the thing: I like coffee. And I was feeling left-out and deprived by limiting myself to one mug a day, and then switching to herb tea. I wasn't enjoying making it, and I wasn't enjoying drinking it.

If you're not enjoying what you're doing and you're eating all day to make up for it – well, it's just not working. I don't feel a bit bad about myself for throwing in the tea towel after just three days.

My first-thing-this-morning decision to drink as much coffee as I want comes on the heels of reading a magazine article before I went to sleep last night. I don't subscribe to Paleo magazine, but I was given an issue last year and keep going back to one piece, by Adam Farrah, in which he writes:

It's the same with training and moving. If you learned to love the drive to the gym, the warm up, the workout, and the drive home, you'd find the future you want naturally comes into being - or at least a reasonable approximation of it. 

Doing something we don't love and value in the present so we can have what we want in an imaginary future - the imaginary future being "the fruits" - is how we trick ourselves and make things harder than we need them to be.

Now for someone who's been sober as long as I have, you'd think I'd have figured this out by now. Living in the moment, being present, is a key component of my recovery. But I guess it's more key for my recovery from alcoholism. I haven't applied that principle to food or fitness.

Toward the end of my day of destruction – I didn't even enjoy all the snacking, I just did it – I decided, since it had rained most of the day and I hadn't walked, to hop on the rowing machine for a bit. I took the iPod with me and listened to part of a podcast. I stopped after 20 minutes and gave myself an E for effort.

I read the article later, after I'd done that short workout, but I was able to see that I'd enjoyed doing something good for myself. I didn't think of that rowing session as punishment, but as nurturing. I wasn't trying to make up for doing something "bad," I was simply yearning to work FOR myself, and not against.

And I woke up this morning feeling back on track. Good, if you will, although not in a "good-girl" judgmental way, but in a feel-good-ready-to-keep-on-keepin'-on way.

I'm so grateful I have this blog for dumping my brain like this. I don't know if it made any impact on you, but it did for me. Thanks for reading.