2018 was as interesting year. I focused on my physical and mental health. This year I will start sharing what I learnt by sharing what I call my 'quitting list'.
This story starts in 2017. I had no idea what being healthy meant but I finally had a bit more time to try and figure it out. It turns out that being healthy is complicated, and I still do not know much about it, but I like to think that I have started moving in the right direction.
There are many things that one could do to start living a more healthy life. I chose to focus on quitting unhealthy habits first.
I noticed that I would eat chocolate in very large amounts. I could never eat just a little bit of chocolate. It was either none at all, or a lot, and I could not trust myself with sweets in the house either. I knew that I did not want to want to eat so much chocolate, but I did want to. That is where I started. Not knowing what healthy means, I started by quitting the things that I did not want to want.
Over time I figured out that there were many such things. I started writing down the day after the last time I had any chocolate. The first day I was clean, if you will. I did this for everything I was quitting, and I would refresh the date if I relapsed. This list grew slowly but surely. As the date on the list would seem longer ago, I would be less likely to relapse. Having been chocolate-free for longer only ever made me want to relapse even less.
After chocolate, I added many more bad habits to the list, starting with alcohol. I call this list my quitting list. I also added some items that I would never want to want to use, just to be sure that I would never start either.
In 2019, I plan to write about my quitting list and the specific items on it. As a short overview, here is the current (summarised) list:
Tabacco
Weed
Alcohol
Sweets, Chocolate
Facebook, Instagram, twitter, social media in general
Coffee
Meat
Porn
Sugar in processed foods, including soda.
TV shows
Animal products
Gaming alone, including mobile gaming
Movies alone
Youtube alone
All processed foods, including fruit juices
Masturbation
I will probably not write about things I never quit because I never started, like tabacco and Weed, because all I can really say about them is "They seem like a bad idea".
The next post in this series will be about moderation, and why it does not work for me.