“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
~George Santayana
It's summer time again and the diets are in full bloom. Every channel, every book, and every client is talking about it…
The stress, anxiety, and desperation that come from a winter of nutritional transgression are coming to fruition.
It’s the perfect storm of emotional turmoil and bad decisions. Here we go again.
What will you do?
Will you do the same as you have always done?
Or…will things be different?
Let’s face it…We’ve made sincere, passionate vows to do better with our nutrition in the past, but keep doing the opposite. Even when the voice of reason says no more…we continue to contradict ourselves by indulging in compulsive behaviors.
There are many definitions of this destructive loop that seem to dominate and derail all of our efforts…
~ Vicious cycle…A complex series of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop… one trouble leads to another that aggravates the first.
A vicious circle has detrimental results when negative feedbacks (weight loss/weight gain) are ignored.
~ In Tibetan,
the word ‘khor ba’, means circling. This circling refers to an endless cycle of
compulsive flight and fixation.
And my favorite… The Devil’s Circle by Stephen Batchelor
A man lost in a desert can trudge for hours through the sands until he sees ahead of him an unmistakable line of foot prints leading to the horizon. But his joy on finding a trail turns to despair when he realizes the tracks are his own. Since one limb was a few millimeters longer than the other or habit or injury inclined him to step fractionally further with one leg, he consistently veered to the right or left. Without a path or landmark to guide him, he traced a vast circle while convinced he was walking in a straight line.
This describes life’s tendency to repeat itself… “Like someone lost in a desert, I feel compelled to struggle ahead, unaware that a devil’s circle will only bring me back to where I began. Through the years, I return again and again to the same stock obsessions. I flick through the tomb of my achievements in the blink of an eye only to feel that nothing has really happened. I am still the anxious and puzzled child who set out on the journey.”
There was another story of a young man sitting eating a pile of chili peppers. He was sweating profusely; his face was flush with pain. When asked what he was doing… he replied… “If only I continue a little longer… I am sure I’ll find a sweet one.”
How many times have we done this when it comes to our diets?
“No matter what experience has taught us in the past, we insist on making the same mistakes again and again. A devil's circle is addictive. It raises you to dizzy heights of rapture only to bring you crashing down into thoughts of despair. Yet I do not hesitate to start the diabolic cycle again. I find it hard to resist the urge to go through the familiar and comforting motions of habit, even when I know that the end result will be the anxious craving to repeat the experience again.”
A path leads into unknown territory, whereas a circle goes over the same ground again and again. The enticing avenues that a devil’s circle offers are not paths at all.
“New paths are not familiar and secure. The new patterns we will create are not as stable or predictable as they once appeared. In the devil's circle, not only does the devil block the way to freedom, he tricks one into following paths that appear promising, but lead only to frustration and disillusion.”
C.S.
Lewis
