Tag: routine

Daily Life, Health

Things Will Calm Down

Every once in a while, you stumble across something that just makes you feel seen. As in, oh crap that’s me. This morning it was this:

“Adult life is saying to yourself ‘after this week, things will calm down a little’ over and over again until you die.”

This completely sums up my diet and fitness journey.

There are contractors coming to the house this morning. I have a long drive tomorrow. We still need to find a gift for that birthday party. It’s going to rain hard on Thursday. We have that dinner thing on Friday. I need to get the yard done. I can’t put off the oil change any longer. We leave on Monday for two days.

Once I get back, things will calm down and I’ll dive back into the diet and workout.

This is me most weeks. I’ll go two-three days of being consistent, and then something always seems to come up that throws things off.

Unless you live on a deserted island, completely unplugged… life will never “calm down”. I need to stop feeding myself that lie. The problem is that diet and fitness was never a routine in my life. It’s never been a priority.

It needs to be a rule that doesn’t get broken. It needs to be just part of who you are. I wake up, have coffee, and go for a run. Period. I go to the gym on my lunch break. No matter what. It’s just what I do. I play at some sort of sport every weekend. It’s the rule.

Paying attention to what I eat doesn’t feel natural. It’s always something that’s a change. “Starting Monday, I’m eating clean”. It feels forced because it’s not part of what I normally do. Same thing with exercise. Since it’s not part of my normal routine, it’s easy to abandon it when life gets busy.

Like brushing your teeth, it just needs to be a normal part of your daily routine. I wish this had been drilled into me as a kid. Changing your daily routine after twenty years is not easy. It’s no different than if you suddenly had to switch to working the night shift. Nothing about that change would feel normal. But eventually, it would.

The interesting thing about that analogy is that you’d find a way to do it because it was your job. You’d have to. The secret sauce to diet and exercise success is finding a way to tell yourself that this is your new job. Because without it, your long-term prognosis is poor.

It’s part of my new rules. I brush my teeth. I don’t leave dishes in the sink. The dog gets a run. I pay attention to what I eat. I get eight hours of sleep. I exercise. Life will just have to work around that.

Daily Life

Do You Have Rhythm?

Rhythm noun
a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound
a regularly recurring sequence of events, actions, or processes

I’ve lost my rhythm. And no, I don’t mean the shake your booty and get funky on the dance floor kind of rhythm. Although to Mrs. Troutdog’s great disappointment, I’ve never had that kind of rhythm. What I’m talking about is a flow, a sense of order, a comfortable pattern to your days. Rhythm is different than a routine. A routine is simply repeated behavior. Waking up at the same time every day, eating oatmeal, and drinking exactly one cup of coffee is a routine. That’s a micro-view of your day. Rhythm is a macro-view of your time.

Rhythm is planning out workouts for the week. Rhythm is looking forward to and participating in an activity you enjoy on weekends. It’s a sense of order to your time. It doesn’t have to mean you eat pasta every Tuesday and meatloaf on Thursday. Instead, it’s a feeling of being intentional about your meal planning. It’s sense of enjoyment from exploring a new restaurant every Friday night. Rhythm is the collective whole of your day-to-day time. It’s having a sense of purpose to your weeks and months.

Up until this last year I feel like I had a comfortable rhythm. Work was a known entity. I made a point to get a run or a bike ride in most days. Mrs Troutdog and I had our individual activities, and we were good about making time for shared activities. Winter was a busy time full of skiing, wood chopping, and evenings by the fire. It was a good rhythm.

And then some pretty big disruptions happened. Nothing horrible, just life throwing a few curveballs. The end result was that we’ve been in random mode for quite some time. We went months without a kitchen, eating pizza and burger patties off paper plates in our laps while sitting in the backyard. Constantly changing plans to wait for contractors that never show up. Strange weather that went from rain and mud to 100 degrees seemingly overnight, straining my motivation to do outside activities. I missed much of the ski season due to construction woes. I had an odd back injury that slowed me down for a while.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s all first world problems so I can’t really complain. We’ve just about sorted through most of the things going on and life is slowly getting back to something more normal. But as we were going through this, I found myself more and more out of sorts. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why my mood was so off, so often. I finally realized it was that loss of rhythm. I’d lost that comfortable pattern to my days.

Everyone experiences randomness from time to time. Random can be exciting. Vacations and travel are random, that’s part of the fun. But it’s also exhausting after a while. Thats why you have that deep sigh of contentment when you get home. It’s that comfortable sliding back into your rhythm.

I now find myself in an interesting position. I get to create a brand-new rhythm. Sure, some of the old familiar patterns will return. But it’s time to move on to a new flow, a different set of patterns. All of us do it from time to time. Moving to a different city. Kids going off to college. Retiring. It’s part of life.

I need my rhythm back. But it doesn’t need to be the old rhythm. Finding a new rhythm is a good thing. It’s growth. It’s preventing stagnation. I’m not sure what it’s going to look like yet. There will be more exercise. More cooking. More music. More reading. More creativity. And nachos. Definitely more nachos.

Are you happy with your rhythm? Maybe it’s time for a change?