The forming of new habits has been the bane of my existence.
My favorite habits (the unhealthy ones) form without me even noticing.
Grabbing a beer every single night when I get home from work seems to creep up during the summer out of nowhere.
Skipping a coffee date with a good friend turns into skipping the next and the next, until suddenly we just don't talk anymore.
Putting on my pjs and hopping into bed at a reasonable hour only to bugger about with my phone until one in the morning becomes a ritual before I can even blink.
It's the habits I WANT to pick up that are so tricky.
One habit I am trying to make stick is drinking a full 16oz glass of water first thing when I get up every morning.
You should probably know: I hate water.
It's genetic!
I swear it's not my fault!
My parents haven't had a glass of water between them since the late 80's.
One english and one Canadian, both baby boomers, they grew up during the coffee and tea revolution.
In my house growing up there was a pot of coffee on before my mother even knew she was out of bed and in the kitchen. Back when we were broke it was Chockful o' Nuts, which to this day still smells like stomach acid to me.
As soon as the second pot of coffee was gone, they switched to tea, and tea was drunk intermittently throughout the afternoon.
If you go into my parents house at this very moment, there is a pot of tea either boiling hot at my Dad's elbow, going tepid on a coaster as my mother turns the pages of a book, or stone cold and forgotten during its ninth reheating in the microwave.
At dinner, my mother drinks tea, and my father will spoil himself with a glass of lemonade, and then switch back to tea directly after the meal.
Their last physicals both put them at excellent health (ages 60 and 67) so perhaps they're onto something.
I never grew up drinking water.
I wanted to be a grown up so badly I begged to drink tea from the time I was six years old.
They refused and instead served me nursery tea, which was a cup of hot water from the third or fourth steeping of a tea bag, flooded with milk and honey. I treasured these white hot little drinks as my gateway into the adult world, so naturally, as soon as my parents deemed I had finished my growth spurts, I began trying to drink coffee.
I was sailing along merrily, drinking all the drinks except water until around college, when I first experimented with restricting and realized how many extra calories were in those drinks, so I cut them out, and began chugging the vile, flavorless beverage I had avoided my whole life.
After my recovery swung in the other direction, I all but abandoned it, and associated it (sadly like I do a number of things) with that time period.
Until I started working at the bakery about six years ago.
In the back of house, especially in the summer, the bakery would easily rest between eighty and a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I was lifting hundreds of pounds of flour, hustling in front of a four hundred and fifty degree oven, and shaping countless loaves of bread for eight hours.
My coworker, the second night I was working, hurled a bottle of water at me and said, get this in your face, and nothing had ever tasted better. I became a devoted water drinker, beasting two or three bottles in a shift.
After I stopped working in the back of house and moved to the (while certainly not sedentary) less heated position of manager, I took up running, and for my seasons, I would reach for water as readily and handily as any athlete, something I marveled at: my renewed thirst!
This year I have had to end my season early thanks to my ankle injury, and I can feel bad habits gnawing at the borders of my brain. I want to sleep more, eat more, hide more, due both to the change in seasons and the slowing of my metabolism now that I'm not distance training.
My water intake plummeted.
About a month ago I went out for breakfast with my parents and jokingly asked them about their hereditary hydrophobia.
They laughed and dismissed it of any importance chatting happily away about how they revile the stuff and can't recall the last time they drank any.
My Dad leaned across the table very seriously and remarked, "but I have taken to having a large glass of cranberry juice in the mornings, darling," as if to set my mind at ease.
But JESS, WE'VE BEEN TOLD OUR WHOLE LIVES TO DRINK 8 GLASSES OF WATER A DAY OR WE'LL SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST!!
That RDA about eight glasses is actually hogwash, you can read about it scientifically here:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256
and
You can read about it in a much more fun and down to earth way here:
http://butterbeliever.com/8-reasons-not-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day/
As part of my getting back to listening to my body thingy, I realized that nine nights out of ten, I don't drink anything after six in the evening. Weird right?
I just forget...usually because I'm in the midst of some food drama related brain melt, but sometimes because I do get locked into the bad habit of a glass of wine after work is very very nice, and then I get sleepy, and well...you know the rest.
So I have been successfully getting my ass out of bed every morning, and while I walk the dog, I drink a 16oz bottle of water.
At some point in the afternoon I usually reach for another, and then, if I am thirsty later I base my agua needs on how I feel in the moment.
Do I want a water?
Or do I want that giant lemonade?
Or am I just going to give in and make a pot of tea?
You can guess which one wins more often than not, and in the mean time, I'm still getting up in the mornings and feeling good about the first thing I do, so that's something.
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