Hypocrites …

Reading Time: 7mins

Hello Loyal and Take-Me-Or-Leave-Me Readers,

We are on Week 4 of this wee blog and I’m back to getting it out on Mondays (or at least I think I will)! They are taking me somewhere between 2 – 4 hours to write but this one has gotta be much faster as I’m supposed to be an hour into study right now (6pm).

October is supposed to be “revision month” on my course timetable , however I am deliciously behind schedule so it’s more like “squeaky bum month” for this budding Nutritional Therapist.

I have that sense at the moment of being just a little bit shit at everything – so dramatic I know!

But it’s that general feeling of overwhelm where I want to be an ostrich with my head stuck well down into the sand. Overwhelm is something I struggle a lot with because I create it so damn frequently for myself.

Let me give you a for instance:

My big goal at the moment is to start pivoting my life towards starting a family.

SIT BACK DOWN!

IT’S NOT ANY TIME SOON!

… I saw you getting carried away with yourself there and you can simmer right back down!! 😂

Anyway, this is how my brain works:

1. To be ready to have a family, I must be healthy (nutrition, exercise, sleep, thyroid, folate), lessen my stress load and have a decent income.
2. To lessen my stress load AND have a decent income, I’ll need to be able to reduce my gym working hours if pregnant without closing down so I need good staff that my members like.
3. To have good staff in place in the future, I need to get them started now(ish) and trained up.
4. To have good staff AND a good income, I need to have a relatively full gym with happy members which takes excellent service provision as well as some sales, marketing, HR capability, financial know-how and KPI monitoring.
5. Oh yeah and did I mention that I’d ideally like to own a house at some point in there too and because I can’t quite save decent amounts YET, I spend my small amounts on caffeine.
6. So the long and the short of it is, to have a lower-stress future, I must make-do with a high-stress present and not get sick or burnt out or lose sight of the Big Picture and that means eating well, exercising & resting …. but how the hell do you DO All The Things AND RECOVER from them?!!! … especially when the aul biological clock runs on shitty batteries.

You can’t.

Or at least I can’t.

And that means that standards slip in the areas that I either subconsciously or consciously deprioritise.

It’s also really hard to motivate or orientate your actions towards a future goal when it feels so alien to present life. It’s almost like I can’t allow myself to imagine being a mam if I can’t achieve the list of things above first.

Now I can already hear you guys saying “you never feel fully ready” and you can keep those thoughts to yourselves because logically, I’m fully aware of this. But I think you can definitely feel more ready.

It seems quite intense when you write it down like this but just as I said in a previous blog, I’m not unique. This is essentially what modern living is – and it’s why so many of us (including me) end up deprioritising things that should be non-negotiable.

I think last week, I told you that I’m a fecker for missing lunch.

But it’s not as if I’m sitting at the table pushing the plate away. No siree Bob!

I either stay at the laptop for “just another minute” which turns into 45minutes and I’m starving so I need something QUICK or I jam so much into my day that I don’t leave time to make food that I can bring with me. And I guess on some level, I make a decision that what I’m doing is more important than feeding myself.

It takes effort to pull your head back up out of the sand – my ostrich analogy. And I think it takes a bit of humble pie too to acknowledge that the irritability or tiredness or overwhelm I feel is possibly more due to my own decision-making than to himself leaving a dirty dish brush in the sink – again!

Same probably goes for you too if you are blaming your boss for having lunchtime meetings – you know you’re entitled to a lunch break away from your desk but because it’s easier to harbour resentment and throw your eyes up to heaven than to advocate for your own health, you stick to the status quo.

I’m a hypocrite here – I’d kill Amy Lou if she didn’t take a lunch break but I don’t uphold the same standard for myself.

You probably are a hypocrite too cause you’d never expect your kids to work through their lunch break at school but yet on work-from-home days you might sit at the kitchen table all day and think it too much time away from work to make a little omelette with 2 or 3 veggies.

Don’t misunderstand me here ok? There’s no shade or judgement being thrown by me – I’m kind of just making the point that we are all great at putting our current-selves last on the priority list versus our jobs – which we generally sign up to do in exchange for money to provide for our families & future-selves. We just lose sight of this sometimes and it’s totally understandable. Life is overwhelming.

So how do all of us cute little Hypocrites break the cycle?

Well here’s what I’m doing this week:

1. I’m taking a big slug from my self-compassion cup and telling myself this is not as bad as it seems and it all doesn’t need to be fixed in a week.
2. I’m drawing out my week in a notebook on Sundays – everything goes in: coaching, laptop work, food, exercise, calling my dad, napping – everything!
3. I’m getting Pettitt’s to deliver to me!! It’s a game changer!!! Even the Pettitt’s delivery guy gets his own groceries delivered. He told me so today and that’s solidified my decision.
4. I’m highlighting all the stuff I need to do for Current-Ellen in yellow cause that’s my favourite colour and I’m trying not to let other things bleed into my yellow-time.
5. I started this last week and I kept to 50% of the yellow-time so this week I’m learning and tweaking.
   • Example: Last Friday I didn’t have food in the house for a portable lunch so I got some delicious sausages in the deli in Piercestown which gave me heartburn during my spin class. But this week I’ve made a note to bring a portable lunch AND I have food in the house to make this happen.
6. Oddly, calling myself a hypocrite for not taking self-care more seriously serves as a positive motivator for me so I’m keeping the phrase from Blog 3 in my mind:  “while the desire for fat loss did not make me a hypocrite, neglecting my own self care did“
7. Lastly, I’m singing this silly song to myself and jumping up and down in the kitchen whenever I boil the kettle. When I was little, my Dad used to do this when he’d come in from the farm for his breakfast. I used to just think it was a funny habit but now I reckon he was self-caring before it was even a thing.

So what do you make of me calling us all out as Hypocrites? I think 4 weeks in, I’m able for a bit of backlash this week so keep it light but Bring It On!

FYI – this took me 1hr 58mins to write and I really have to go now cause it’s my night to make dinner and himself has most of it done and I feel guilty. He’s honestly great. If that was the other way around, I’d be shouting up at him.

Lots of love,

Your Chief Hypocrite

Bye, bye-bye, bye, bye …. bye!