Giving up, but gaining more

What a drag it is to get old - so said Mick Jagger long ago. Then as he got much older, he started shedding his old ways, picking up some new healthy habits, and rocked on! I'm taking a page from his book, reluctantly, but then when results appear, warmly.

I read More magazine which tells me how to be 40+ and fabulous! Hmm. I read lots of health items that tell me to eat better, exercise more, and look for anti-oxidants and to fear or find free radicals. I can't keep up with all the advise. Then I was waiting for a friend in a bookstore and saw a book with a title that caught my eye - Skinny Bitch. With a title like that, I had to look. I started to read it, bought it, and have been devoted ever since. I instantly became a vegetarian on the 29th of February, 2008. So it has been a year. Yay! I have not gotten thin being a veggie. But it has greatly eased my mind. I turned my eating habbits when I read about factory farming and production of food. It made sense to me that the fear, shock, and anxiety that animals feel as they are cruelly slaughtered is then embedded in their flesh and consumed by me. You are what you eat.

Recently, I read a post by a friend on facebook about the evils of diet and regular soda. I have been a lifelong devotee of diet soda. But when I read this stuff, I stopped on a dime. Havn't touched the stuff since. Besides the risks of the sweetener, soda will hurt your liver, screws up your metabolism (and you get and stay fat), leads to osteoperosis, and so forth. It just hit me hard that this stuff was killing me! It was easier to give up meat than Diet Coke, but I'm doing it :)

I've had a long run with and love of alcohol. Beer, wine, Jack Daniels, Kettle One martinis. All yummy. I just kept having more and more difficulty keeping it in check. I finally realized that alcohol was not the escape I thought it was - because I was escaping to a dead end. I finally accepted that I have worked hard to love my life and I do! So, what do I have to escape? Nothing. End of abuse of that vice.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that you CAN change habbits that you don't like. But you never will do it until you decide that it is worth it to YOU, not because you think you should because someone has told you to. Something has to click. And it won't click until you are happy with the core of your life. When you have that going for you, you want to make it as good as you can and the bad habbits start to drop away. It has taken me a very long time to get to this spot, but it is worth the journey and the work!