January 26th, 2012: Dammit I am caught in this holding pattern at 329. Seems like this has happened every week so far.
PATIENCE
Sometimes I like to think of myself as the character Andy Dufresne in the Shawshank Redemption. Chipping away at the walls of the prison that is my fat body. I would like to take dynamite and blow my way out, but that’s not an option. I cannot and will not give in. I will break out of this fuckin prison no matter what. NO MATTER WHAT.
Well there I injected some drama into my day already.
Watch Manny Pacquiao fight. He’s in the ring punching and getting punched and the guy is still in there smiling right through the blood. I’m learning that to smile while you’re fighting drives your opponent nuts. Since my opponent is essentially myself, I’ll have to smile and drive myself nuts I suppose. This process is weird.
January 26th, 2020 (retrospective): I used to be a wildland firefighter, and on fires we carried around this thing called a fire-shelter, which was made of aluminum foil and a silica weave. You wore it on your web-gear (backpack) and would only deploy if you had completely run out of options, i.e. plans A-Z had failed. The fire-shelter was the last resort and you’re trained to rely on it with about the same confidence as you would the safety on a gun. In other words, make sure you have solid A-Z plans.
Fortunately, I was never in a situation where I had to deploy my fire-shelter in all my years in that occupation. As a personal trainer, I suggest to clients this is how one should consider willpower. Willpower is awesome – and examples of the things it has done over the course of human history vividly illustrate the power of the human spirit. It’s always within you, and it’s carefully engineered to do its job when all else fails, but if I were you, I wouldn’t rely on it because sometimes it’s just not there when you need it most.
Another analogy might be the seat-belt in my truck. Just because I’m wearing it does not mean I try to ram into things on purpose. Swerving and avoiding danger is generally better than ramming into it – that is, unless you’re crazy and/or you simply want to test your willpower. I learned, and have to frequently re-teach myself, that if I there’s something I shouldn’t eat, I probably shouldn’t have it in the house. This is swerving to avoid it rather than ramming into it and hoping my willpower alone can save me. And I’ll tell you one thing, if it comes down to a battle of wills, my will will win every time – yet I still ain’t gonna test it if there are other options.
