“Courage is being scared to death—but saddling up anyway”
-John Wayne
Of all the things that lulled me into videogames while growing up, nothing was more effective than a phenomenal story. Give me a dynamite tale about a born-from-nothing hero going on an adventure, meeting companions along the way, setting on a mission to save the girl of his dreams from the clutches of some evil dude, and I was captivated. I would put up with annoying random battles, mind-numbing fetch quests, or monotonously stale battle mechanics if it meant finishing the quest I had become emotionally invested in alongside the main characters. I would grind past the most tedious of procedures in order to get to that culminating moment, where the hero would conquer his demons and save the world. Whether it was Alex battling the Magic Emperor in the Goddess Tower, Cloud dueling Sephiroth in the Lifestream, or Crono traveling to the End of Time to confront Lavos, I was going to persist until the villain had been vanquished, and the story was complete. Through seeing these types of hero’s journeys lead to incredible moments of triumph, I longed to experience a similar type of adventure and victory in my own life’s trials.
Around two decades ago, I was an overweight, undisciplined-diet kid with little awareness of maintaining physical health. The rest of my life was honestly pretty squared away, as I was diligent about being responsible for finishing schoolwork or chores before getting wrapped up into whatever game I was currently obsessed with, I had no issues making friends, and I was surrounded by a very supportive family. But, not to sugar-coat it, I had zero self-control when it came to eating correct proportions or healthily, and it showed. Fortunately for me, and although it took me years to recognize is, this weakness meant that I had stumbled across the journey that I had sought for so long. I wouldn’t be saving a princess or defeating some bad guy in an epic sword battle; rather, I’d be saving my own life, and defeating the bad habits of overconsumption in an epic willpower struggle.
The duel would last years— early victories by me, losing a bunch of baby-weight, but resulting in little muscle and a ‘skinny-fat’ high school build. Fast forward to regaining some fat due to lack of macronutrient understanding, then a severe drop to “Skeletor status” via underconsumption and overexertion (in efforts to get a 6-pack, which I discovered requires some “basic strength”– you won’t have abs if you can hardly squat your own body weight…). Finally, nearly 10 years after it began, I believed I had finally ‘conquered’ my demons, as I found myself lean with definition for the first time ever, after finally incorporating weightlifting into the mix and ditching running. The days of binging on bad foods were behind me, thanks to my newfound discipline, and I had defeated my outrageous sweet tooth habits once and for all…right?
The next nine years should’ve been the healthiest of my life. And to be fair, they have been—but not anything like what I would’ve expected. In those nine years since that summer of 2011, I had expected myself to have the willpower of a superhuman, resisting anything that didn’t fit my diet plan to a tee. And in the process of those expectations, I sort of lost myself a bit. I didn’t let my workout and diet regimen became an amplifier to my life; rather, my life became a slave to my routine. I no longer saw the journey as a quest of opportunity; one where I could learn lessons through victories and failures along the way. I started to view the journey as a mathematical equation, where there was a formulaic way to go about business, and anything else would not suffice. I purchased and became handcuffed to a food scale, became obsessed with perfect macros and dietary deficits, and insisted on doing workouts a certain, specific way—with no compromise to use any alternatives. If I couldn’t start my workouts on Mondays with 2 sets of deadlifts and 3 warm-up sets prior, then I would do nothing else—there was no point. I refused to run with friends—an activity that, while perhaps not optimal for muscle retention, was something I had come to enjoy socially—in fear that it would mess up my recovery window for the following week’s workouts. And above all, I made my house a junk-free zone— you wouldn’t have been able to find a trace of something unhealthy in my house. In my head, I was so disciplined to my routine. But in reality? That battle I talked about, awhile back? The victory I had scored over my undisciplined eating of the past? I hadn’t defeated the villain, not even close—if this were Voldemort, he had simply been banished from my world and concealed from existence in a different form— but traces of him remained on the planet, and he was far from dead…
If I had truly conquered my undisciplined ways of yore, then why did I far too regularly end up making a post-sunset store run on weekends to buy boxes of cereal, dozens of fresh-baked cookies/donuts, and pints of cake batter ice cream— all to be eaten in one sitting? Why did my appetite become a bottomless garbage disposal the minute I visited a relative’s house that wasn’t ‘junk-free’ like my overly protective house? If I had gotten past my unhealthy roots, then why were these ridiculous cheat days rooting themselves back into my life, and in more extravagant fashion than they had been in my youth? I attempted to find the source of these relapses into sugar comas— one by one, I “discovered” ‘Oh, this must be my trigger food!’ and eliminated different products from my household. At first it was peanut butter—can’t have it in the fridge! Then it became diet soda— whatever sweeteners are in it, they’re causing cravings! At one point, I even became convinced that consumption of caffeine— a known appetite suppressant— was resulting in these epically bloat-y cheat nights. Obviously, there is nothing inherently ‘magically triggering’ from peanut butter, diet soda, or for the love of god, caffeine— but whether it was true or not, I saw them as gateways to resurrecting the old demons of my past. I feared that by having access to them, I would inevitably lose the victory I’d proclaimed over unhealthy habits. So, I figured I’d just swear them—and many other foods—off completely, for life. What a joke. It became a vicious cycle of the same pattern: Rid my house of the new enemy, go strong for a few days/weeks thinking I’d finally figured it out, and then race to the store one night of lusting for treats to buy all the ‘banned items’ and eat them all at once— so that none remained to tempt me later. It’s so silly, right? But in my head, I knew it would have been even worse if I had had them in my cabinets already….right?
It wasn’t just foods, either— with my specific programming for workouts, and my new best friend—my food scale— my life became even more of a math equation. I had a set plan to eat a specific amount of calories each day, burn a specific amount of calories, leading to a specific deficit each week, to lose a specific amount of weight each month. My workouts would have no wiggle room, and that was fine by me. I needed a certain ratio of protein to fats to carbs, and I would work like a mad scientist on my phone calculator in order to craft the perfect dietary plan to meet those wickets. And of course, every calorie consumed would be tracked diligently. Did it work? Of course! It was mathematically designed to work, and efficiently so—there were no surprises, no extra or less weight lost, and it seemed that I had entered the next echelon in my fitness journey. When I was in control, making all my own food, eating with a “home field advantage”, it worked perfectly—-when everything went according to the perfect plan…
And that’s the catch about math equations: If just one, simple variable is off? The entire solution is wrong. And that’s exactly how I started to see my day-to-day life. If I ate something at a friends’ party that was not part of my perfect macro intake plan? I would get anxiety over how many calories I had consumed, and then, undoubtedly deviating from my carefully-crafted total for that evening, I’d just say “f*** it!”, call it a blown day, and fill up on Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Reeses Puffs, etc. If I decided to finally “cave in” and eat a ‘road game’ meal at a restaurant with friends, there was no chance I’d find a clear exact alternative for the macros I ‘needed,’ so I’d say “f*** it!” and order the biggest, most unhealthy meal they offered—and grab a Sonic Master Blast on the way home. If I had no access to work out with the equipment I needed for that day’s routine, I’d completely skip it (nothing else was worth doing, in my mind!)—which theoretically would mean I would need less intake without muscle breakdown. But would I end up cutting back on some extra carbs? Not a chance; You know the drill—“f*** it, let’s get some peanut butter cookies and Funfetti cookie dough!” As good as I had become at following a strict plan, I had become equally as vulnerable to blow the whole plan up the second the tiniest thing was off. If the final result of the day wasn’t going to be exactly what I had planned, then I would consider it a failure— and I’d ensure it was an epic failure! To put my struggles in short: I became more unhealthily obsessed with a perfect execution and not screwing up than I was focused on building healthy, sustainable, realistic habits.
Eventually, after far too many years battling the same demons, I finally realized: Willpower? Discipline? Victory? To keep the analogy going, Voldemort was alive and well. Hidden, sure. Concealed, yeah. But eating via mathematical equations? Peanut butter banning? An inflexible regimen for everything? These were essentially little horcruxes, keeping alive the sobering truth: I hadn’t conquered my demons; I’d just been hiding from them, hoping time and time again that they’d never return.
It’s a classic, cliched trope to see this in many of those videogame stories I played— especially when they needed a sequel. ‘As it turns out, the villain wasn’t truly killed, but instead just locked behind a magic seal/banished to another timewarp/we had just killed a clone.’ (Seen Star Wars Episode IX? You know what I’m talking about). And get this— chances are, we’ve all created this same story arc in our own lives. Ever had a bad breakup with an ex, leading you to delete all traces of him/her from your daily life? You can’t stop thinking about them, so in efforts to speed/ease up the process, you remove them on all social media, block their number, and quit talking to any mutual friends you two may have had. I’ve been there, on some degree or another, and in my experience, it just doesn’t work. You think you’re doing yourself the best service, eliminating every possible way of interacting with the ex—but you’re not truly conquering those demons. You think you’re blocking them out, banishing them to a place you’ll never see— but in reality, you’re locking yourself in a cell, preventing your eyes from being exposed to anything that might hurt you, or tempt you to internet stalk. Rather than face your fears, accepting the discomfort and choosing to overcome them, you’re instead hiding from your insecurities, numbing yourself to the discomfort and hoping to overcome them— and in the end, like Voldemort, their soul remains scattered amongst your life in various forms, no matter how much you try to avoid them. And like me with binge nights, if and when you do ‘break out’ of your self-contained cell (maybe it’s unintentionally stumbling across a post they are in with their new BF/GF, or doing some intentional curiosity IG stalking), it’s a brutal scene, an emotional relapse, and re-opens the wound, eliminating all of the “progress” you had made up to that point.
So how do we do it? How do we kill Voldemort once and for all, instead of just leaving him banished to some otherworld, as he continues to haunt us and manipulate our emotions? Courage. Conjure up your John Wayne patronus, and act like Harry Potter. Like the brave Gryffindor Harry was, we need to look our ‘Voldemort’ straight in the eye, accept that we may lose the fight, but show up to battle regardless. My problem with my diet discipline demons was never that I hadn’t cracked the code on what my ‘trigger’ foods were— my problem was that I had declared an early victory by removing the ability to fail from my life— which ironically brought about more detrimental failure than I could have ever fathomed. I had been seeking the perfect way to achieve my adherence goals, when I was instead just making everything immensely more fallible in my routine. I had sought myself to be a robust, brave hero, able to fight off anything in my path toward improvement and victory; Instead, I had become a fragile, metaphorically fearful person, capable of achieving great things when everything was laid out perfectly, yet crumbling at the first sign of adversity. I had to make changes, I had to conquer my demons instead of hide from them. No more meticulously tracking of every single calorie. No more ‘banned foods’ from my house. And no more acting as a slave to one workout routine with zero wiggle room! No longer would I live a life that was prepared to shelter me from the ‘scary’ realities of the real world. Discipline—or whatever life factor you’re struggling with— is a muscle, and if you don’t train it, it will atrophy into nothingness. Facing your demons is training that oft-neglected muscle, proving to yourself that you are in control of your life, and that you don’t need to hide from your greatest failures. It is willingly accepting yourself to be tested, despite a chance of failure, and building confidence by overcoming the challenges presented.
When you can be around a plate of cookies or candy at work, or come across some chips and guac or queso at party, and make the conscious decision to say “I know they’re there, and I very easily could eat way too many of them and binge afterward, but I choose not to,” you are making progress. When you see your ex post a new picture or story on Instagram, and consciously choose to scroll past without analyzing every bit of it, you are conquering your demons. When your one-and-only workout routine is brought into chaos as nearly every gym closes down worldwide because of a global pandemic, and instead of saying “f*** it!”/doing nothing but eat yourself into oblivion, you instead adapt to a new routine, and admit “I know this is different than what I’ve been doing, and while my old way was a great method, it may not be the ONLY method,” you are growing as a person, forcing yourself to evolve and think critically, and are showing resilience where many others show resignation. When you realize that the easiest, safest way may not be the best way, you are Chasing Better. Enough hiding from demons— call Wormtail, get them resurrected, invite them into your life, and face them the way Potter, and all those videogame heroes of yore did— with a stomach full of fear, a spirit full of determination, and a heart full of courage.
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