January 12th, 2012: No treadmill last night. No weight loss today. Still at 340. Now, ok, this is a journey and all, but to say it’s not a battle is to ignore the elephant sitting in my brain. I’ve decided that until I reach the “journey” stage of this journey, I’m going to consider every pound a challenge. That means I have about 151 more challenges, that’s all. 151 more miles, and each one’ll be a challenge. Waiting all week to weigh myself is going to be too hard – maybe when I reach a maintenance stage or something, but not now. I need to see if there’s a reward every day because this is an every day challenge. The food I eat tastes really good, but it just looks like, well, it just looks so small. I like to eat as if I’m competing for a spot on an NFL team as an offensive lineman. I guess if I’m going to undertake something like this, I’m going to have to figure out some way to have fun with it. It’s hard for me to think about anything else right now, and that feels a bit narcissistic, but it’s just got to be that way for a while. I’ll come out on the other side a better person, and that other side just isn’t that far away in the great scheme of things. Thanks to my family for their patience.
January 12th, 2020 (retrospective): To say this is a “journey” is not always the proper euphemism for this process. On some days it would be better described as a personal war, with a battle for every goddamn pound. The war is getting to 189 lbs. from 350 lbs., and that war will never end even after it ends. I can’t pretend to think it’s all over when I get to 189 because all it will take is a short string of slip-ups, the slope will get slippery, and before I know it I’ll be past 350 and into the 400’s! Shit, slow down Ben, you are thinking big now when you should be thinking small. Every pound is a battle and all my thoughts have to focus on the day ahead and nothing more. Will there never be any crime again, or terrorism, or floods or fires? No! And that means you have to fight. Every. Single. Day. You either fight or you die. Start enjoying the fight Ben. I have to turn my liabilities into assets!
The process of weight loss and getting physically fit, when you come from dangerous levels of obesity, is by nature a self-centered process, but that does not equal narcissism. I realized early in the fight that I mostly had to think about me for what might turn into a long time – like maybe a year. It wasn’t that I had forgotten about my family – they were in the top 10 of my reasons for picking the fight. Mechanically, I remained available as a husband and father, emotionally I believe that for the first 6 months I was almost completely unattached. This is the oxygen-mask analogy. On the airplane at a high enough altitude, if the cabin loses pressure the oxygen masks drop, right? As instructed by flight attendants, and common sense, you’ve got to put that oxygen mask on yourself first, before you help your loved ones! You will not be any help to anyone if you’re passed out. It’s also analogous to one of the first things I learned while training to be an emergency medical technician many years ago: don’t make the problem worse by running out into traffic to help someone only to get hit by a car yourself.
