I hated vegetables when I was a kid.
Growing up my options for veggies were either 1) bland boiled mush from a can or 2) covered in bacon fat, gravy, and somehow there’s sugar in there, too.
Option 1 turns veggies into a chore to be avoided.
Option 2 tasted mighty fine, but good Lord the diabeetus.
That left me avoiding veggies whenever possible well into adulthood. I didn’t get around to eating plants on the regular until my creative wife introduced me to vegetables that didn’t taste awful.
Now here I am with two kids who ask for broccoli as a snack.
Still, old habits die hard, especially the habits made in our formative years. My natural instinct is to recoil from veggies and head for the meats and cheeses.
Natural instinct? Not quite. It’s a learned instinct. There are alternate Matts in parallel worlds who never developed that behavior pattern but are otherwise identical to “me”.
The line between what nature gives you and what you pick up from your surroundings gets hazy.
When you push to change a habit, you’re working against your nurture, not just your nature.
An instinct burned into our core being may as well be our nature.
Changing a habit isn’t about leaving behind the old pattern and replacing it with a new pattern.
New habits never replace the old habits.
It’s more like erasing the pencil off of a used sheet of paper and writing over it. The original writing is gone, but the grooves set down by the pencil are still there in the paper.
Veggie-eating Matt isn’t a new person who completely abandoned the old identity. He’s junk-eating Matt with a new set of behaviors layered over the top.
I think a lot of people misunderstand this.
They try to set a new behavior pattern.
But, inevitably, they run into one of the old grooves in the page.
The “bump” knocks them out of the new rhythm and they fall back to the old script.
Is this failure? So to speak.
The trick here begins with realizing that you’re always tugging between the old script and the new script.
The new habit isn’t over with just because the vinyl skipped to the old track.
Everybody’s got a history and none of us can fully escape our pasts.
What you can do is change what it means to you. The old habit can be cause for moping and sulking. It can also be an opportunity to realize you’re doing new things, and that you aren’t a prisoner to who you were.
You can suck lemons or make lemonade.
The older you get, the harder this becomes, you understand. By mid-life most human beings are set in their grooves and actively resist any disturbance to the routine.
The possibility is always there, even if the imagination isn’t.
There’s a reason I’m trucking along looking and feeling gooder than I have in years even on the wrong side of 45.
I’m here to help people from 40 and up use exercise and nutrition and recovery methods to get that kind of deal for themselves…
…even if you are stuck in ruts you don’t believe you can escape.
More energy, less achy joints, less fat, more muscle… and the improved health markers that they bring… and you get to look pretty, too.
I offer a regular cohort where we work on this. Spots open up once a month or so. But you’ll need to be on my waitlist for the option to join.
If you’re interested in taking that step, use this link:
Matt Perryman