February 15th, 2012: Caught in a holding pattern at 313. I’ve been whitewater rafting a couple of times in my life, and sometimes you get caught in these eddy currents behind boulders and downed trees and stuff, and these eddies tend to suck you up against the boulder or whatever. It’s a potentially dangerous situation and sometimes hard as hell to remove yourself from them. So here is a new term for the weight holding pattern – the “weight eddy”! Remember, I take on every single pound to lose as a personal challenge, and these holding patterns are particularly aggravating. And dangerous.
It’s early morning, and I’m not feeling it today. I’m gonna have to work really hard to get back in the New York Groove. I’ll give myself two reminders of why it sucks to be fat. These oughta jump-start me.
1) I’ll never get respected if I remain obese – respected by others or maybe even myself. If I look at a pickup truck that is quite obviously fire-engine fucking red, and say “look at that red pickup truck” and someone else standing next to me, who isn’t fat, says, “look at that green jeep”, then popular vote says that it’s a green jeep. And now I second-guess my own vision if I’m not careful.
2) If you’re fat, people think you are lazy. So fucking false, but still, it really hurts. I am not lazy. First of all, it took a lot of damn work to get this way . . .
. . . and even more work to not be this way someday. Far far from lazy.
Anyway, what’ll I do about it? Well hell, I’ll keep fighting, of course, and I will lose the weight. There are many more important reasons than 1 and 2 to lose the weight. These ones are just aggravating, like a paper cut – not serious but they do sting. I hope that by being downstream from the respect factors and the lazy assumptions make it so I am never like that to anybody.
February 15th, 2020 (retrospective): When I’m at home, I keep a little sandwich bag near me with a single dried marshmallow in it. There’s also a blue sticky note in the bag with a message written in green sharpie on it. The message says, “Don’t eat the marshmallow”. You can read up on why I would do such a thing if you look up the Stanford marshmallow experiment, but I’ll summarize: It was a study originally/ostensibly designed to research how the ability to force yourself to delay gratification predicted better life outcomes. It involved marshmallows or pretzels. Basically, you could choose to eat one marshmallow right now, or you could choose to wait until later to eat the marshmallow. If you waited, you were given two marshmallows instead of just one. There were many iterations of it, and it really ended up revealing something entirely different than intended. I don’t care about the details, I just use the marshmallow in the bag to help remind me that if I can hang in there one more day, or one more hour, or even one more minute, then my discipline will surely result in the winning of all the metaphorical marshmallows. I have never heard of a situation where discipline and crazy belief didn’t pay off somehow. You stick to your guns and believe in something long enough, that shit will happen.
