Most weeks, we'll go as a family to the pub quiz on a Wednesday night.
It's intoxicating.
You can eat pub food and drink beer and do the pub quiz (and almost always lose). You can go there and choose carefully from the menu and not eat too much rubbish and have water to drink or a cup of tea, or you can go and have a burger and chips and 3 pints, and you can do that every week.
You can if you're me, and I'm very lucky that I'm able to do that, but the problem with that over time is that it leads to a decrease in your fitness and your general health and an increase in my weight.
It's ok that, though, because you can do that all winter and then when it gets to spring, you can cut it out and start to get fit again, but the price it takes to get fitter and thinner and healthier is huge compared to not getting to that position in the first place.
As always in these pages, what is fact is also metaphor, but in truth, that is the sequence of my life.
Boom, followed by a bust, and then boom again.
As I get older (and a little bit wiser), I find that trying to maintain is a whole lot better than trying to regain.
I ride with a group of guys on Sundays, something I have done for ages. It's a bit intermittent and on and off, but several of those guys have the ‘maintain’ thing down to a T.
The thing about that, though, the routine, the boringness, the monotony of the ‘maintain’ is that it's hard for some character types (like mine) and easier for others (like those guys on the Sunday). I'm much more the wanderlust guy; I'm much more the guy who wants to be here, but then when he's here, he wants to be there and vice versa.
Learning, though, that to maintain over a period of time (that is to be boring and repetitive in some people's eyes) is by far the best way to live a healthy life, a wealthy life, a happy life, a stable life.
It applies to what you eat, what you drink, your relationship with money, and, in fact, your relationship with everything and everybody.
Worth thinking about.
I suppose it was listed well in Atomic Habits, but it is a principle to follow.
Keep what you have instead of striving for something else or trying to get it back once you've lost it through bad behaviour.
Blog Post Number - 4246
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