I'd Like to Give Up 10 Pounds for Lent

We aren't Catholic, but Kurt attends a Catholic school and he has to give up something for Lent. When he first mentioned it to me, he told me that he didn't want to do it this year but his teacher insisted that he must. A day later, he told me that he had decided that he was going to give up spending money for Lent. I thought that was a good sacrifice to make.

Since I don't know the Catholic religion (other than what comes home from school), I am usually reminded about Lent after the fact. I have often thought that I should give up something for those 40 days. But somehow, by missing the start-date I absolved myself from the tradition.

This year, Kurt got me thinking about it a few days early. My first instinct was that I didn't want to give up any of the new facets of my 'new life'. What I have brought in to my life over the course of the past few years has been positive and motivating. Realizing that, I was reminded of all that I do have to be grateful for.

I wondered aloud, what I should give up. Kurt's unedited response was to ''give up being mean". Ouch. Once again - that isn't really giving up something. It is the realization that I must bring patience and tolerance in to my life. A few more ingredients to add to the recipe of the new me.

What I realized after last week, was that this impatience comes from an over-stressed, over-taxed and over-tired me. I have had an aura of calmness within me since unwinding this past weekend. I'm on the road to enhancing the nicer person that Kurt wants me to be. I want that goal to go beyond the 40 days. That is a life time achievement. I must keep working on that one. Every day. All day.

Kurt's words resonated within me and I wondered what I had to remove from my life to add patience in to it. The outside stresses are definitely a factor. None of which I really want to take out of my life. I just want to keep them all in balance. Once again - I'm not giving up anything. I'm adding that equilibrium that keeps me feeling at peace in my world.

It isn't like I don't have any bad habits that I could give up! It is a matter of choosing something that I can strive to achieve and keep up after the 40 days of Lent is over.

My experiment with replacing bad habits with good ones kind of went awry after my chocolate overload. I think the chocolate was just an excuse. My stomach had been feeling very out of sorts during the last few weeks of my experiment and I wasn't sure what was causing it. Something I added or deleted or a combination of the two was playing havoc on my digestive system. So I turned to the chocolate as an excuse to bale out on healthy choices.

Since my little binge, I've gotten myself back on track. I have retained the exercise habit. I am eating smaller quantities. I have eaten only a few bowls of ice cream in the past month. I am simply moderating my intake of food and trying to stop the emotional eating cycle. In fact, I sat down and ate a bowl of ice cream after lunch yesterday and I didn't savor the ice cream experience and I felt rather crappy after I ate it.

I seem to have a problem with extra pounds finding their way onto my body lately. It could be the horrible eating habits that I have gradually added to my life. Over eating, emotional eating, the junk food habit ... added to the fact that I spend more time in front of the computer than I ever have in my life and less physical activity ... it equals the larger numbers on my scale.

So I thought of one food habit that I would truly like to break - the evening snacking. I thought to "give up snacking after 7:00" would be my goal for Lent. Sacrificing something that will be hard to do and beneficial to me sounds like a good goal. Achieving this and adding that exercise into my morning routine should help with the weight that I seem to be accumulating.

So the short of it is: I would like to give up 10 pounds for Lent.