Accountability Wednesdays: Week 17

A few things before I move on to the accountability portion of this post:

A big congratulations to all of my fellow “A to Z Challenge” participants who managed to make it through the entire month! Some of those letters were damn difficult, but we made it! I had a blast with this challenge, met a ton of new blogging friends, and gained a respectable number of new followers, so I guess it served it’s purpose. 🙂 Since I did a theme, and a lot of people enjoyed it, I’m going to post a link list of all my challenge posts tomorrow, as well as a couple of links to some of my favorite new bloggers. Don’t forget to check it out!

The other thing I want to mention is that by the time you are all reading this, I will be just finishing up my first (and last, hopefully) CT scan. The previous procedure that I had last month evidently didn’t show anything outstanding, so I’ve been scheduled to have my innards x-rayed. A new experience, and hopefully a helpful one. Wish me luck, everyone!

Now, on to the main event…

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

I won’t say it was an overwhelmingly good week, by any standards. As previously mentioned I put my exercise plan on hold in favor of getting through some other stuff first (see: aforementioned CT scan, amongst other things). So no, I didn’t exactly overwhelm myself with physical activity this week. I have been doing a bit better when it comes to things like portion size, but that’s mostly because I’ve been strangely lacking in appetite this week. On three separate days this week the only meal I ate was supper, plus a snack at nighttime. It was odd. Maybe my mind is too busy to bother with hunger signals.

Anyway, all in all it was neither a good week nor a bad one, and we’ll worry about this particular goal more next week, okay?

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

If I’m going to be perfectly honest, I slowed down a lot this week, but it was still a pretty good one. Coming on the end of the A to Z Challenge got me a little worn out, but I still managed to keep up a presence most days. What amused me the most this week is that I found myself being mentioned in several tweets linking to “daily report”-type websites who mentioned me. The sites don’t seem to be the type that are going to send me waves of new followers or anything, but it’s still pretty damn cool to be mentioned. 🙂

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

I promised that I was going to do something toward this goal this week, and I kept that promise, dammit! 🙂 It wasn’t an enormous amount of work, but I took some important steps by crossing off every item in the “invisible typos” list from my beta-reader, and skimming through for “weakening” words, which I have a very bad tendency of using on a regular basis. On top of that, I took the time to transfer my manuscript to a separate “final draft” Scrivener file to make for easier editing and the ability to look back at previous drafts. It sounds like I just copied and pasted, but trust me when I say that it was somewhat more complicated than that. Point being, everything is all neat and organized now, so I really have no excuse not to go through and start making my final changes.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

The other promise that I made last week was to write something every single day. I did not keep that promise. Boo. I almost did though! I don’t even know what happened, honestly, but somehow I just completely forgot to write anything yesterday. But that was my only screw-up, I swear! I didn’t write too much useful, to be honest, but with a couple of blog posts and a few pages of notebook nonsense, I managed to come up with 4769 words this week, which is significantly more than the last two weeks combined. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to keep it up this coming week.

Actually, this explains a LOT…

As you know, last week it was my birthday. I got a couple of nice presents, but one of them isn’t in my possession yet because it has not yet been purchased. You see, my husband suggested that he would buy me a new bathing suit for the (hopefully) coming summer. I’m not usually the kind to spend much money on such a thing, so he thought I could pick out a really nice one for a change. I loved the idea, but here’s the thing…if I’m going to get a really nice bathing suit, I want to look good in it. So on Saturday night I gritted my teeth and decided that this is it: I’m restarting Jillian Michaels’ Body Revolution and this time I’m sticking to it.

Sunday morning started a bit askew, since little missy was up in the middle of the night, which resulted in all of us sleeping in until almost 10 am. But I gritted my teeth, and after a healthy breakfast of whole wheat toast and boiled egg whites, I headed downstairs and did workout number 1. I then attempted to go about my day without resorting to any of the mindless snacking I’m famous for, while waiting for my meatloaf to finish cooking and anticipating the fact that I was going to have to measure my portions to keep from eating twice as much of it as is smart.

So you see, my day was full of willpower. Painful, frustrating willpower. And that got me thinking about something I once read in a Cracked.com article. At the time of reading the article I raised my eyebrows a bit and doubted the reality of the claim, but on Sunday I did a bit of Google research and lo and behold, it looks like it’s true.

Willpower is a finite resource.

I know, I know, it sounds like an excuse, right? But apparently there have been a lot of studies done on this idea, and so far it’s holding water. It looks like the more willpower you use in one area of your life, the less you have left for other areas. In other words, you might struggle all day to keep yourself from snacking, and actually manage it, but then when it comes time to do your exercises you just can’t seem to work up the willpower. It’s not entirely your fault…you haven’t got any left. This explains why you can feel so good about yourself early in the day and happily resist temptations, but later in the day you crash and start (for example) devouring everything in sight.

So does this mean we’re all doomed to failure because we can’t keep up the willpower thing forever? Of course not, although it’s definitely going to make things more difficult. Willpower (apparently) is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised. So the more willpower you are able to exert today, the easier it will be tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. It’s likely to be a slow process, but in the meantime you have to figure out how to dole out your willpower as necessary. If resisting snacks and treats all day depletes your stores so that you can’t bring yourself to exercise later, figure out how to let yourself have a little something, thereby saving that bit of willpower for when you need it. It’s a delicate balance, which in itself probably uses up willpower.

In fact, you know what? It’s not a delicate balance; it’s a vicious, circular cycle that makes me want to punch walls.

*cough cough*

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is that I need to work on my willpower muscle. I’ve worked up great levels of determination before and used up all my willpower after a week or so, and I don’t want that to happen this time. I want to succeed this time because dammit, I want to look good in a really nice bathing suit! Is that so wrong? 😛