Tuesday, January 10th, 2012. Milestones. I checked my scale today, and I am down a total of 10 lbs. I feel as though I’m ready to set up some milestones. People who feel overweight in the 200’s always talk about being in one-derland, which is weighing less than 200 lbs. I will feel my first chunk of hmmm-success when I’m in two-terland, so there’s where the milestones will start: 299 lbs. Then from there I want 275, 260, 243, 225, 215, 205, 199, 195, and the finish line 190 (189, actually – I need a one pound insurance).
Friday, January 10, 2020 (the retrospective): I set up the milestones, and then thought how I would celebrate when I hit each one. This is when I had a brief nut-kick of sadness. Food is what I’d always used as my currency of celebration, with everything, and everyone around me always celebrates every accomplishment, every holiday, every everything – with fuckin food! Does it have to be that way? Is that in the “manual” for how to live a proper life? Does an alcoholic celebrate 100 days sober by getting shitfaced? Maybe a fat ass celebrates by eating a salad with a tiny bit of fat free dressing, only for this party you get to use two bags of salad? Does the alcoholic celebrate by cracking a frosty O’Douls non-alcoholic beer? This was new to me. I had read about treating yourself to some kind of material thing that you don’t put in your mouth when you reach weight goals. The only material things I like, that aren’t food, are guns, trucks, and guitars. Maybe I need to broaden my horizons.
Anyway, this was my first epiphany, or “a-ha” moment in the process. All of a sudden I went all spartan and realized that maybe there didn’t need to be an extrinsic reward. As an educator, I am always trying to push this idea of intrinsic motivation. My belief is that intrinsic motivation to do or succeed at something is kind of the cruising altitude, or true beginning of understanding and joy of whatever it is that you’re practicing. Maybe not every damn thing has to have a trophy or prize or cash reward or toy or a sauce. Maybe you can enjoy the journey, and the process, and the blood, sweat, and tears just for the sake of them. But is that possible with weight loss? I think I have no other choice. I certainly didn’t have a choice in 2012. I didn’t have a discretionary cent, which is to say I still had one foot on bankruptcy, and the other on a banana peel. I wouldn’t have been able to go around buying guns and trucks and guitars.
And as a side-note: I realized that the smell of a pizza, with my name on it, hot out of the oven, would now need to be as foreign to me as the streets of Beijing fuckin China. This is no joke, this is serious shit, and it’s a long long road. I came to the conclusion that if I had any chance of sticking to this, I would not only have to embrace the process and embrace the suck, I would have to slip it the tongue.
