Sunday, May 6, 2012

Integrity

The following are direct quotes from the book.

Krista Vernoff; Az Ferguson. The Game On! Diet: Kick Your Friend's Butt While Shrinking Your Own. HarperCollins.
The Rule: Keep your own score and do it with absolute integrity. Judge yourself at least as harshly as you would judge your opponent.
Here’s another, far more painful, example. In my one-on-one game with Az, we were neck-and-neck for three weeks—both pulling down perfect scores. And then in week four, I was super tired one day and I was trying not to drink coffee ’cause I was fighting off a cold and coffee tends to make me lose the fight and so I walked over to the commissary and I bought an iced tea/lemonade, and I drank the whole thing before I realized there was sugar and high-fructose corn sweetener in the lemonade. It was basically soda. Which is not a game-sanctioned food. I didn’t even have half lemonade, half iced tea. I had mostly iced tea and probably 40 calories of lemonade. EVERYTHING IN ME wanted to ignore it, or justify it somehow.
“Because the game is designed to make us think BEFORE we toss calories into our mouths.” Unconscious eating is a serious culprit in a lot of people’s weight gain. And if you have to take a penalty for “not thinking” enough times, eventually, you will start to think before you eat.
This entire game is about integrity. It’s the one key ingredient you cannot play without. A word from Heide Banks on Integrity Most people don’t understand what integrity really means. It is not about doing things that are right/wrong or good/bad but rather keeping your word with yourself, 100 percent. You decide to do something, agree to do it 100 percent and you stop weighing options from that moment forward. To paraphrase John-Roger, doing anything at the 99-percent level is a bitch; move to 100 percent and everything becomes a breeze. Living outside of personal integrity has some very real consequences. Even the smallest of lies takes energy—both mental and physical—to maintain. This is also why when you keep your agreements, especially to yourself, you will often feel a surge of energy.
There is another benefit, perhaps even more important than weight loss, that we encounter when we stop lying ourselves and demand 100 percent self-integrity. We finally come in touch with the emotional pain we have been pushing down with food and other distractions, and now have the ability to heal and transform that pain into joy and fulfillment. —Heide Banks, coach, psychotherapist, and author www.heidebanks.com
There is no benefit for you in cheating at this game. No benefit for you and no benefit for your waistline. One of the main objects of the game is to take weight off. Guilt is a mental and emotional weight, so lying entirely defeats the purpose. (And may lead to sleeplessness, which will lose you sleep points, and may find you raiding the fridge at 3 a.m., which will lose you snacking points. See? Vicious cycle.)

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