February 7th, 2012: On track today. 1 lb. down to 318. 37 days, 32 lbs. I’ll take it.
I have to weigh everyday, and I will if I can, for a full year or until I reach my goal, and then I’ll start weighing once a week. It has to be that way for me because otherwise I’m ignoring that elephant (me) in the living room. I wish I could wait a week, but then I would just obsess about it all week and start wishing my life away. It was kinda like that when I was drinking only on weekends. When I took a job I hated, all I would do was wait all week until Friday so I could get bombed. I got to where I thought it was wrong to basically be in a trance the rest of the week, so I thought, “either I’ve got to drink every day, or drink never”. Anyway, without trying to be too dramatic about it, it’s like that with weighing. I can’t deny the fact that I’m obsessed with trying to reach goal. I’m hoping I can settle down after I reach goal, but right now, gotta weigh every day, good news or bad news.
Yesterday was a hard day. Too lazy to follow my new weekend routine, I instead found myself sitting around too much and thinking bad-food thoughts. I pushed myself to exercise once in the morning and once in the afternoon, which gets those endorphins flowing and that helps, but man, it was a long one. I do know not all days will be like that, and the sacrifices I make now will make those days where I choose to eat whatever I want all the sweeter (if you will).
February 7th, 2020 (retrospective): It’s been 12 years since her initial diagnosis and my Mom is still hanging tough in her battle with ovarian cancer. She still seems to be able to do everything she could in 2001, 2005, 2008, etc. She has been an irritation at close range sometimes, but an inspiration at a distance. You pick a fight with cancer, you are in it for life. You pick a fight with obesity – same thing. As sure as she gets her CA 125 markers checked, so do I continue to monitor my numbers through my weight on the scale and my energy balance sheet (calories in minus calories out). In either situation, drifting outside of your navigational barriers is cause for concern and must be addressed.
Comparisons of the two diseases, and how they’ve manifested in my mom and I, relatively, are worthwhile. For starters, I seem to see a similar poker-hand in a lot of families – one person gets dealt one kind of disease they don’t have much control over, the other gets dealt the fat-card, which is something that can be controlled by the poker player/patient. And truthfully there is no fat-card anyway, this person gets dealt a wild-card, that can then be played as an addiction card or something (as of this writing, I don’t think they have a medical definition for that card). Who has it worse? I know, the short answer is the one with cancer – so far this disease has defied the wonders of modern medicine. But wait, obesity seems to still have defied the wonders of modern medicine as well. But the cure is so damn simple: eat less, exercise more. But wait, is it really that simple?
The person with cancer need not walk around feeling guilty about anything he did that may have dealt him this card; that is, unless he smoked a pack of cigarettes every day his whole life, or ate a bowl of radioactive Cobalt-60 every morning through his adult years. Cancer isn’t his fault. But the fat person, every time he opens his mouth and puts a piece of food in it, he’s supposed to feel guilty about it. Guilty about doing something that’s as natural as breathing. Guilt is a sonofabitch. The Guilt Monkey on your back will drive you insane. Guilt causes stress, and stress will eventually cause some other kind of disease, or exacerbate some malady you may already have. Guilt is the fat person’s tumor, and if you don’t address it with the same warrior mentality as you would any other disease, it’ll put you in the ground just as quick.
Well there’s some Friday food for thought. Eat it up and stay strong.
