Lisbeth is faced with decisions

I have a post of Mighty Girl’s in Bloglines that I’ve been saving since January - I don’t want to forget the things it said.  I thought I’d share it today (well, really I’m doing some housecleaning in my Bloglines account, and I’m trying to get rid of saved posts).

• I read somewhere that when you catch yourself in a behavior you’re trying to break, you should ask yourself, "Am I helping myself right now, or hurting myself?"  I’ve found it increasingly easy to change course once I’ve agreed that what I’m doing is destructive.  It makes me feel protective.  Like, How could I do that to me?
• "We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." –Aristotle
  I tend to spend hours watching back-to-back reruns of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Repeatedly.  You?
• "Winners have simply formed the habit of doing things losers don’t like to do." –Albert Gray
  (Things like taking the underwear out of the pants you wore yesterday before you put them on again.)

I really liked the idea inherent in the first point - analyzing the things you do using a simple binary system.  "Am I helping myself or am I hurting myself?"  One or the other is usually true (or at least prevalent).  Like, when I had those two packs of ramen for lunch last week - if I had bothered to analyze, I’d have to have said I was hurting myself.  Duh.

But I’ve decided to help myself lately.  I’ve decided that I’ve indulged in a few too many packs of ramen lately, so I’m working now to counter that.  Really, who doesn’t love a diet?  I’ve got two diet buddies, so that’s good.  One of them is a friend and coworker who wants to lose weight too - she’ll be great.  The other is Seth.  He’s wonderful, and he wants to lose a little too, but I’m not completely sure his desire to lose weight trumps his desire to, well, eat ramen (the ramen has become placeholder for food that isn’t so good for you.  Ya’ll get that, right?  I mean, yes, we do eat ramen, and probably more than we should, but we don’t subsist on it or anything.  He eats pizza rolls, too).  But still, he’s supportive of all this, and that’s what counts.  He probably doesn’t realize just how weird my eating habits get when I diet.  Like, one dinner can include a salad, some noodles and gravy, PB on a Wasa cracker, popcorn, applesauce, and a fudge pop for good measure.  Sort of weird, but it works for me.

Did I mention I found a Splenda-sweetened fudge pop that only has 0.1 points?  Mmm…