One Month at a Time: Sometimes, giving in is the healthiest option

Among some of us at West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Chuck Anziulewicz’s cheesecake is the stuff of legend.

Chuck is an announcer at the radio station. For years, his regular shift has been Saturday mornings, a job nobody else much wants.

Few people like the idea of getting up early to read the weather and the news on the radio, but Chuck loves the shift, and he is as reliable as the sun. I don’t remember the last time he called in sick.

It’s been a while since I had a regular shift on the station, but I remember that every now and again, Chuck would need a Saturday off to go visit family in the southern part of the state. Then, he’d have the unenviable task of trying to get one of the other radio hosts to crawl out of their comfortable, daytime or evening Monday through Friday and get up before the sun -- on a weekend.

It was a tough ask. To sweeten the pot, Chuck would sometimes offer up a homemade cheesecake.

That usually had the lot of us fighting over who could fill in for him.

And I was always too slow.

So, the cherry cheesecake was just something I knew about, something I imagined, but had never actually seen -- and then there it was, looking like something out of a cooking magazine.

This was not my cheesecake, of course. Chuck brought the dessert as his contribution to our coworker Marilyn’s retirement luncheon.

For reference, I bought two pies at Kroger, on sale for three bucks each.

Effort and heart went into that cheesecake. I used a digital coupon and got some fuel points.

Marilyn should have had the first slice, but when I looked over, I could see her plate was only half touched. Everyone wished her well. She was busy chatting with her table.

I shrugged, picked up the knife and cut myself a reasonable slice. I didn’t know when I’d have another chance at this, and I didn’t want to risk waiting.

And that’s how my 75-Hard challenge officially ended; though, really, the plan had fallen apart that morning. Earlier in the week, my son started a new job. After a couple of days, they’d abruptly changed what time his shift began.

This affected me because, at least for now, I was his ride to work. That had thrown off my regular schedule and I couldn’t adapt to the change quickly enough. I couldn’t fit in the morning workout and couldn’t make it up without canceling my evening plans or ditch work.

I couldn’t or wouldn’t do either.

So, there could only be one workout, which meant that I would not complete all of the required tasks for the day.

Blowing my diet was redundant ... but very satisfying.

Chuck’s cheesecake lived up to the hype -- and 15 years was too long to get a chance to try it -- but the moral to this story is that I shouldn’t brag.

The day before, as I was finishing up last week’s column, I felt very smug. Following the 75-Hard program, I’d stuck to a diet for nearly 30 days and maintained the grueling schedule of two workouts per day. I drank a gallon of water every day and abstained from alcohol for all that time.

I felt great, proud even, and I’d shed a few pounds.

But then it was over. If I wanted to continue, I needed to restart the program at day one, which sounded exhausting.

Failing after a month stung a little, but I’d still accomplished what I set out to do in June. I’d wanted to reset my year, and it felt like I’d done that. This breakdown hadn’t come because I’d been unwilling to continue, but because continuing meant sacrificing things that should not be sacrificed for the sake of an online challenge, even if it meant well.

Besides, this was supposed to be hard. The program was rigid and unforgiving by design. This wasn’t just a diet-and-exercise plan. It was an exercise to build mental resiliency, but it was only a tool.

And tools can also be turned into implements of torture, if you take them too far.

It felt like progress that, for once, I deliberately chose to halt.

And this maybe had something to do with the journaling exercises I’d taken up as part of June’s mid-year reset.

I’d been using a series of writing prompts meant to help me reflect on who I was, where I’d been and where I wanted to go. It was a self-help exercise I got from artificial intelligence.

I figured those computer algorithms should do something besides try to sell me something for a change.

I’ve actually been journaling most mornings since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been a good practice, though the journals are nothing anybody should ever read, including me.

These are “burn books� filled with all of my anxieties, insecurities and frustrations. They are the archives of my every disappointment, my every grudge and anything that’s gotten under my skin for longer than 10 minutes. This is where I come to wring out the poisons of my mundane life.

Whenever I fill up a book or can no longer stand to look at the thing, I tuck it away and buy a new one.

There are strict instructions among family and friends not to read any of these.

The writing prompts were different and took me away from the griping and whining, though some of the questions were nonsense, like “What limiting beliefs are you holding onto?�

How was I supposed to know? How do you know when something is a limiting belief?

Was believing in gravity a limiting belief?

But other prompts encouraged me to look at how the past informed the way I made decisions, how I planned my future and what I really wanted out of life.

I hadn’t given all of those questions a lot of thought, which seemed funny given the birthdate on my driver’s license. It also seemed sad, like I’d missed something that could’ve saved me a lot of trouble.

So, I didn’t feel all that bad about breaking 75-Hard and I absolutely didn’t regret the cheesecake. I had more clarity than I’d had in a while, which was what I wanted in the first place.

Sure, I expected I’d try again, try to do the full 75-day challenge, but not right away, not for a few weeks, at least.

In the meantime, I tossed out my old journals -- all the bad ones -- and bought a new notebook.

Where did I want to be in a year?

Now seemed like a good time to figure that out.