January 30th, 2012: Boom! Got another 2 lb. drop. I did a killer boxing workout in addition to my daily 30 on the treadmill, but I don’t think it’s all about that. Shit it makes me think maybe I can get back in the ring though! I don’t know why you get these good reduction days – it’s got to be something more than just diet and exercise. Science tells me that’s not true, but what if there was something hiding in the interspace? What if there is a dash of magic in there? Anyhow, I’ll take it. I have had two really good days in a row – At 322, I have now lost 28 lbs. in 29 days. This process is like life though: sometimes you’re the bat, sometimes you’re the ball. These last couple of days, I’m the bat.
How many of us are afraid of success? When things start going right, it’s like, um, “I don’t deserve this. This doesn’t feel right.” With so many things, exacerbated by being obese, you don’t expect to be the winner. Maybe outwardly so, but deep down, the success is kind of scary. When things start to go right, you start expecting the carpet to be pulled out from under you. “Just a calm before the storm”, we think to ourselves. I want to start enjoying the taste of success again. I used to regularly sample it, but as the realization of the predicament I have put myself in began to hit, I began to consider failure more due to me than success – in any endeavor. I felt like a fuckin loser, and maybe I look the part too. So I acted like a buffoon, covering up my insecurities with humor like some people cover their insecurities by acting smarter or tougher than they really are. I want it to be the other way around. I want to expect to be successful and deal with the bumps in the road as just “one of those days”.
Well, it’s like this: David Lee Roth sings: “I get up, ain’t nothin’ getting me down . . .” on the song “Jump”. I want to be like that. I will think of myself on a success airplane. When that plane is cruising around 30,000 feet in the air – it can’t just quit flying. It has to keep going until it reaches it’s destination. Quitting in mid-air is not allowed.
I hope we can all re-acquire our taste for success, and even when the going gets tough we’ll simply expect to win when we put in the effort. It would make the whole world a better place.
January 30th, 2020 (retrospective): A post-it note I’m looking at right now has “show up and do the damn thing” written on it with a red sharpie marker. I like that one, so it’ll probably stay out for awhile. It means that I just need to suck it up and get this done or that done. Just stop thinking so hard and get to work. Right now, there are a million other things I’d rather be doing, but if I always just did what I wanted instead of what I was supposed to do, I’d eventually get nowhere. At least this way I’ll get somewhere. Maybe not far, but at least a little ways. A little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.
Diet, for me, has become less about the analytical and more about the habit. I’ve built this into my process on purpose. I’ve found what works for me, and I don’t feel the need to tweak it unnecessarily. In my process, if I start thinking too much, I get easily overwhelmed and risk straying into the rhubarb patch. Sparing you the details, at least for now, I’ll tell you that I pretty much have to eat like a dog – same thing every day. My wife Juliana, who I’ll introduce onto this blog shortly, is a daily diet planner. For her, it’s a hobby. She seems to eat something different every night for dinner, and is always on point with all things fitness. This is not me, if presented with food options during the process, I get confused and nervous, especially when I find something new and delicious and over-doable. Habit. I try to exercise at the same time every day. Habit. I try go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Habit. It’s another layer of defense. Habit, however, just like everything else I do, is a double-edged sword.
Habit is key to the process, I realized, but habit can come in many different colors, and your palette defines you. With regard to diet and exercise, I work best in black and white. Too much color too often for me, and I may soon be searching around to see if I have any clothing left over that has 3 or 4 X’s before the L on the size tag. The flip-side of habit, though, is the angst I create when the routine gets disrupted. Used to be no big deal, now it has the potential to infuriate me. I hang onto “positive” habits just as tightly as bad ones – tooth and fuckin nail. When something gets in the way of these routines created through habit, I sometimes feel frustration to the point of becoming infuriated – even over the smallest detours! And I’ve also learned in 44 years that life sometimes appears to give zero shits about your little routines and wants and wishes.
