A “Fresh Start”
Perhaps the best day to start a new behavior (dietary strategy, exercise regimen, etc.) is when there is an unexpected wake-up call – something that basically scares you into making an immediate change. For many people, that ends up being a heart attack, a stroke, or a diagnosis of a chronic disease.
Among those who don’t wait for a wake-up call, it is quite common to rely on time-based landmarks, such as the New Year, a birthday, a semester, or the first of a month. This “Fresh Start Effect” serves a motivational role for individuals to create “new mental accounting periods each year, which relegate past imperfections to a previous period.”
People tend to compare their current selves with previous versions of themselves, wishing to leave behind past failures. They We develop a disparaging view of our past selves and aim to distance our current selves with superior behaviors. Using a landmark date to disconnect from our inferior selves appears to serve as motivation for new behavior.
Time-based landmarks also lead us to thinking about the “bigger picture”, particularly with landmark ages like 40, 65, etc., which motivates us to make goals directed at particular goals.
My Ideal Landmark
While I have relied on landmark dates many times before, I recently re-committed to a strict lifestyle change based on an entirely different landmark . . . a dental cleaning.
The way I see it, after my hygienist dedicates nearly an hour of continuous effort to painstakingly clean each surface of my 32 teeth (yep, still have my wisdom teeth), I should not be eating (or drinking) anything that could contribute to plaque formation. From the moment I walked out of that dental office, I was committed. No sugar, no alcohol, no fermentable carbohydrates, no carbohydrates at all, in fact.
I even strategically scheduled this dental cleaning to be right after the 4th of July weekend, which I knew would be an indulgent weekend for me in terms of food and drink. Having a thorough cleaning of my teeth thereby serves as a “reset” for me that allows me to make a fresh start.
Why do I Need a “Fresh Start”?
The rationale behind cleaning up my diet right now is based on my upcoming backpacking trip in 2 weeks. I want to be in the best shape possible for the demanding itinerary, and I want to be firmly in ketosis as I was last year (Backpacking part 1 and part 2).
Being in ketosis on the trail is ideal, as my desire for food will likely be next to nothing. Granted, even if I’m not in ketosis beforehand, the physically demanding hiking will put me there quickly. Better yet if I start in fat-burning mode, though, and I’m happy to shed the unnecessary weight.
