Belay that

tweet tweet. “Now, Ensign Weller, report to the bridge on the double.”

The delanceyplace.com selection this morning is about how long it takes to form a new habit, timely because our New Years Resolutions are often forgiven and forgotten by noon on January 1. The psychologist who authored the selection says the wisdom that it takes 21 days is baseless nonsense, that the time depends on both the habit to be formed and the individual. In an 84 day research project with 96 participants it took an average of 66 days depending on habit and person, including 20 days for drinking a glass of water after breakfast, 50 days for walking 10 minutes after breakfast, and so on. Stastically, some habits could have taken 254 days to form. This was apropos for me with diet and exercise for weight control and health, because I just don’t get it. I love tasty things and I hate the damn treadmill. 

Some time ago I started to change the lifelong habit of putting socks and shoes on left-foot-first into the Jewish way of right foot first and making it a praise devotional. Recently I realized that the habit had formed without the prayer, so had to start reclaiming the consciousness of it.

It’s New Years Day and Happy New Year! Three years ago this moment, January 2011, it took three nitroglycerin tablets to get me down to My Laughing Place and back to the house, three and rising, eventually two pills down and two pills back, and I clutched my bottle of pills as they wheeled me into surgery at Cleveland Clinic too many weeks later. But woke up with the bottle gone and have not needed one nitro since. Weight is a dire threat to my heart (and to yours), as is lack of exercise, so in faithfulness to God who answers prayer as well as to friends and loved ones who suffered through those precipice months with me, I’m back at it: ten minute walk before each meal, twenty minutes on the treadmill midmorning, light eating. I’m no CrossFit candidate, but this I can resume without dread. Or at least I did it Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday, January 1, 2014 is the Third Day, which may be scriptural, but sure as hell is no habit yet. 

This then is my New Years Resolution, which I have sacramentalized by invoking St. Paul from 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (CEV), “We also gave you the rule that if you don’t work, you don’t eat” and editing scripture slightly to “if you don’t walk, you don’t eat.”

For me, this will never become habit, I’ll just have to keep at it. My goal is to reclaim my health on 1 February 1978, the day I retired from the Navy.

Tweet tweet, “Now belay that last word.” 

TW+