Greetings, Steemians and Steemettes!

Hey, it's me again. Hope you are all doing fine and still got lot's of energy left in you. Weekend ain't too far away and I bet some of you looking forward to it just as much as I do!

Tell me how you like these new designs. I really wanted to try something new for a change.

Bad habits, we all got some of those.

One I am known for is that I love to express myself using a lot of words. And how could I not? Words are beautiful and come in many different shapes and forms! Be it spoken or written, I do love to express myself. Which in itself is okay. But there is a point to everything where too much of something good can turn sour. But I don't want to talk about my writing habits aside from saying that I will make an honest effort out of keeping this one short and coherent.

I have plenty of bad habits that are in need of being rooted out. There is one habit in particular that I heavily dislike because it ends up sabotaging a lot of good I am accomplishing. Most of you would probably guess that I am talking aboiut one of the more common vices like drinking or smoking and most of you would be wrong.

I actually despise alkohol and nikotin. Smelly, unhealthy, expensive, why would I bother with those?

No, the one vice that has been a thorn in my side, aside from the place where the butcher did wish-it-was-a-thorn-but-it-was-actually-a-knive into me is actually much more particular.

Going to the grocery store

At some point a couple years ago, I used to get out at night with a friend of mine to go to the grocery store regularly. We used the opportunity to talk. And when I say that we talked, I mean that he was talking about his problems, mostly women related and I gave him good pieces of advice that he was free to ignore. In his defense, he was earnest enough to say that I was right in hindsight and that he would have been better off if he would have listened to me.

___Which of course does not make him start to listen to me for future cases, still, but let us put this can of worm to the side.____

After he finally found himself a girl, he chose to rather hang out with her, which is understandable because she is much more pleasant to look at than me. But the habit of going for a late walk to a grocery store to buy something to eat, be it something big or small, remained.

This habit actually became such a big part of my day to day life that I have a very hard time breaking with it. And to make things worse, there is a new grocery store even closer by that always lures me in.

What is so terrible about a grocery store?

Well, if you have the intention of living healthy in any kind, one of the things one has to take care off very soon is to minimize outside influence. And grocery stores are full of tempting offers that one can buy in order to undermine good health related operations.

___Say you are living on a ketogenic diet like me, but because you are me and have this terrible habit, you decide to go to the grocery store at around 20:00 and find that a lot of fruit is on a special offer. Or chocolate. Or any kind of sweets. Or, or, or.____

Scientists have proven that there are limits to our willpower and our current world is full of factors that put our willpower to the test, with grocery stores being one of the hardest. Especially if going to them has become such an integral part of your day to day life.

It's not all that bad

Because I am quite social, I do tend to start random conversations with the staff at pretty much any kind of store that I visit which leads to the point where I am pretty much on common terms with everyone working at the stores close by, so I can always enjoy some short but pleasant chatter going to these places. Because I am going so late usually, they are always especially delighted because I can be considered to be the envoy of the end of their working shift.

"Envoy of the end of a working shift". I have heard worse titles than that!

Still, I have to find ways to get rid of this habit, even if these people will miss me.

How to get rid of this habit?

I have a couple ideas on how to accomplish this. A couple of them I tried out on their own, with mixed success.

1. Do a big tour of grocery shopping once a week.

I do not own a car, so this one is usually not all that encouraged because shopping food for a week ain't too hot most of the time, even though I fast on a day to day basis. Still, having the core ingredients stocked up here at home would make wanting to go to a grocery store a much less attractive option.

2. Doing something during critical times.

I actually made an effort of writing at around the time where I would otherwise get up and start a trip to the grocery store. In most cases, it did not work because I would still go and just leave the writing be for a while or make an effort out of getting finished right before it would be too late to still get going. Combining this with other factors may end up being a lifesavor, still.

3. Actually starting to do sports again.

As soon as I feel comfortable enough to do so, I will start to do sports again. Aside from sports being a healthy habit meant to replace a couple bad ones, I hope that being beaten and exhausted after doing some sports in the evening will leave me too demotivated to leave the house again in order to buy snacks that would just ruin my effort.

4. Proper meal planning and prepping.

Failing to plan is a plan for failure. Properly scheduling food intake helps in focusing away from the tempting offers and focus on what is good and helpful. Failing to plan is a plan for failure after all.

5. Being in good company.

If I manage to find myself being in good company, i.e. someone who also lives healthy or can be trusted with having an eye on me, that will help me keep myself in check, of course, this can backfire quite easily too.

That's quite a lot of ideas!

And I am sure that if I apply some of them in tandem with one another, I may be able to get that sickly habit out of my system and replace it with something useful and healthy instead. Leaving health and dieting aside, it should also help me improve my performance on pretty much everything else because my power levels would not be diminished by grocery stores shoving their tempting offers and advertisements in my face every night.

Do you have any awkward habits that seem to cause your problems? What solutions did you come up with?

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