Self Monitoring

I guess to some extent it is inevitable; if I'm going to try to change my behavior, I have to become more conscious of how I'm behaving. By now, a lot of my unhealthy eating patters are essentially automatic. If I don't make the effort to bring my food choices out into the conscious part of my brain, where I can evaluate them and make intentional decisions, then next thing I know some subconscious part of my brainstem will have made a tray of brownies and eaten half of them.

To some extent, this is the purpose of an eating plan: to bring my eating behavior out of the dark crawlspaces of my brain and up into the living room where I can keep an eye on it. Sometimes, though, this self-monitoring process can run amok. The line between conscious awareness of behaviors, and self-conscious hypervigilant over-scrutiny isn't always entirely clear.

For one example, I recently heard someone talking about "exercise bulimia." Now, I certainly have been exercising more lately. Instead of 3 or 4 times a week, I'm exercising more like 5 or 6. I wanted to get more weight lifting into my patterns, and I've managed to do that. Inspired by the triathlon coach who runs our spinning class, my wife and I are planning to start swimming lessons and get ready for a triathlon this Spring. So the question is, is this a healthy exercise pattern, or a newly emerging manifestation of my compulsivity around food, activity, and body weight?

It's not an easy question to answer. What are the criteria? I know what the end outcomes are: if this is a compulsive behavior, it will eventually wind up making me and the people around me miserable. But how do I know if I'm on that path, or on a path that leads to balance, health, relationship, and accomplishment?

The Wikipedia article on exercise bulimia has a list of warning signs. Exercising while injured or sick? Check. I've got a mild head cold, and I'm about to head off to the gym as soon as I'm done typing this. Defining self-worth in terms of performance? I don't know. I certainly do get a sense of accomplishment when I'm stacking more weights on the machine than I used to, or when I have to up the pace on the treadmill to maintain the same level of exertion. Is that really pathological? It makes me feel good, but surely it's an exaggeration to say that I'm defining my self-worth in terms of my treadmill setting.

For the record, I haven't been calling in sick to work so I can exercise, or defining myself as a special "elite" athlete. But what about "scheduling life around exercise?" Well, certainly I have made adjustments to my daily and weekly schedules to accommodate exercising.

I think this is why 12 step programs have sponsors. Sometimes when you're the one doing the behaviors, it is nearly impossible to draw the line and distinguish between healthy behavior and not. If I wasn't an expert at self-deception, I wouldn't be a compulsive eater in the first place. A sponsor, by virtue of being someone else who doesn't live in my head, can recognize when my behavior is going haywire and when it isn't; when I'm fooling myself and when I'm not.

Whether it's a sponsor, an accountability group, or a professional counselor, I think it's essential to put the monitoring function - or, perhaps, the function of monitoring the monitoring - on the outside perspective of a supportive Someone Else.