An Unhealthy Addiction to Energy Drinks and Soda
April has not been a good month for me personally on many fronts. At the beginning of the month, I had the motivation and desire to hit the ground running on my physical health, and I had set myself up to not be reliant on anything involving caffeine, but flash forward to now and I have developed a pretty unhealthy habit. I am addicted to energy drinks and soda for my caffeine fix. Even as I type this now at 8:20 in the morning, I am drinking a monster energy drink that I bought the night before. While giving up coffee has been a positive, I would argue that my consumption of energy drinks and sodas as the replacement has been a step in the wrong direction and even worse than drinking my 6 cups of coffee a day that I used to.
At the beginning of the month, I was planning on hitting my physical fitness goals with a passion. I had started going to the park and shooting hoops at the basketball courts and was planning on going to the gym as well. For whatever reason however, I have not been to the park or the gym for the whole month. It is like my motivation stopped dead in its tracks for very little reason. To be fair, the reason is I started streaming more again. When I stream more, I end up going out less, and this is the primary reason for not going to the gym. I am incapable of doing both it seems. Today I will be going to my regularly scheduled DRs appointment and I am almost positive I would have gained substantial weight for the 3rd visit in a row.
Why can I not just go to the gym and game at the same time? What is it that makes me not want to get healthier physically when I know it is the right thing to do? I am aware of my desire to go to the gym and do more, yet I always find a reason or an excuse to not get up off of the computer chair. Perhaps the twitter doom scrolling is also getting to me. I have found myself spending hours and hours just reading twitter posts, getting upset, writing aggressive responses, and ultimately being worse for it.
Let's get back to the subject of this post, however. Because I have been streaming more because the job market has not been good (although admittedly, I stopped looking for a job because I started streaming more), I needed to find a way to have the energy to stream for longer hours. Without coffee, I found I was getting tired and only capable of streaming for 2-hour segments, and that just isn't enough if you want to grow a larger community on twitch. So, my solution was not to go back to coffee, but instead, seek energy drinks that could have a similar impact. It is unfortunate, but they absolutely do the trick to keep me streaming longer. It will only be a matter of time though until they stop working and require me to drink more and more of them in order to get the energy fix, I desire.
I have always been sad that the worse things in life for you in terms of health are always the things that seem to be helping you short term, which makes them convenient and delicious. I enjoy the taste of the energy drinks and soda, and of course, life makes it so that they are terrible for my body overall. Same with candy and sweets. I have the biggest, sweet tooth and love eating ice cream, but once again, it is the worst possible thing for you if you want to be healthy and lose weight. If you never had the healthy habits taught to you as a child, it is so incredibly hard to make the decision to live a healthier lifestyle. I cannot see myself changing, so if that is the case, then what do I do? Do I turn to weight loss pills and other artificial means to lose weight?
Maybe I am just being dramatic, and things will change and I will get back on the right track, but sometimes it feels like it is a losing battle that I will never win. Without the motivation to go out and be healthier, I just don't know how I will break this vicious cycle of eating more, moving less, and relying on energy drinks to do the bare minimum in my streaming career. In any event, I need to find a way to press forward because this lifestyle is not sustainable at the rate it is going.
Until next time,
Blackboa