A Victory For Health

It has become more and more important to me that I eat healthily, but I have not managed all the time to walk the walk. I am perhaps doing better than I was, but it remains very easy for me to fall on bad habits out of some sense of ease or out of excessive frugality. I used to eat a lot of hot dogs, which I know is bad. I don't eat so many now, but I still eat perhaps a few too many. I like getting a hot dog or two once a week before my improv class.

I was going to do that again the other day, but something was working on my mind. Early in the day, a friend sent me a link saying something or another about processed meats being bad. Now, this is nothing new to me. I know the hot dogs are bad the same way I know that binge drinking is bad, but you do bad sometimes because it's no fun to do good or it's too hard. No, the facts from this article really didn't sway me.

If I had come upon the article myself, I could have disregarded it and got my hot dogs like usual, but as I said it was sent to me by a friend. I thought about my friend's motives for doing this. I know he cares about me, and that other people do as well. It's easy to respond defensively or dismissively, but knowing that someone is right, knowing of their good intentions, and knowing that they made a deliberate effort all have a cumulative impact on me.

I knew that on this particular evening, I couldn't resist all that. I abandoned my plan of hot dogs, knowing the shame I'd feel by eating them. I went to two different grocery stores nearby in hopes of finding something more respectable. I eventually settled on some fresh bread, which is maybe not that good, but which must be better than a hot dog. At the very least, here was a display of my capacity to impose discipline on myself, which is encouraging.