Day 90 Record Keeping SRHI = 71
Day 58 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 73
Day 4 Burpee SRHI= 22
Day 104 Eating SRHI = 30 - Failed to do yesterday
Bad night sleep, great wakeup.

Eating Danger Zone

With a three day bad eating streak and an all-time low in my SRHI my eating habit, which was absolutely steady for three months, has faltered badly. Before I had mused why 12 weeks was such a common denominator for 3 month transformations and clean eating regimes. In previous diets I’ve only lasted 3 months - sometimes a few weeks longer, other times a few weeks shorter. In those times I felt that feeling of just being sick of it, which to me is the signal for what I’ll call Endurance Depletion.

My theory is this time coincides with the Danger Zone of my Quarter Mark Theory. As an aside, this would put the entire life cycle for a good eating habit to be almost an entire year at 360 days (if we calculate from 90 days as the quarter mark). This, to me, makes sense. from Phillippa Lally’s graph, she extrapolated 250 or so days for the completion of an exercise habit. And I think of eating habits as being more involved - the eating habit is continual, performed several times in a day under different circumstances while an exercise habit is usually made once.

So, what can I do? Well for one, it’s good that I’m not recording it. Record keeping is my first line of defense for making it through because it gives you a bit of distance, and shows you just how bad  your doing in your habit. Without recording, the tendency for me is just to absently forget. It doesn’t explode, it just quietly fizzles out, almost before you realize it. When attempting habit formation as a kid (I used to have charts, just not as detailed as this) I’d remember weeks later.

I’m trying to decide if this is enough, or if I need other tools. Perhaps more cheats? Perhaps telling myself I need to eat clean once a day, then I can cheat the rest? 

The main point isn’t to perform the task perfectly - and this is a point I continually lose track of. It’s to survive this period (another 3 months - ugh!) in any way possible. Even if I come out limping and ragged on the other end, my prediction is that afterwards it gets easier.

This phase has also come with an emotional toll. I’m noticing a moodiness with a chance of depression. Things frustrate me easier, and I get down in life in general. This is, in my mind, the hallmark of Endurance Depletion - a general malaise.