February 21st, 2012: Two pounds south! 309 baby! I was the bug most of last week, but this week I’ve been the windshield.
Now I have an even 120 more lbs. to lose. It’s not an epic journey to the whole world, but it is to me. This, I think, is the hardest personal challenge I’ve ever undertaken. It’s not really an acute, one time, get-it-done-get-it-over with pain, but more of a chronic, always on the mind thing. I haven’t done many of those things before. In my mind I have marked it off as the most epic journey in history, but I need to make it small again, so it seems manageable. In order to do this, I’ll compare it to some real historical accomplishments and journeys. Certainly nowhere near exhaustive – it’s just what I came up with off the top of my head. Feel free to drum up some more for yourself.
1) If Lewis and Clark can take canoes and horses and stuff from the Missouri to the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, I can lose 120 more lbs.
2) If the United States can send people to the moon 250,000 miles through outer space, I can lose 120 more lbs.
3) If Magellan can sail around the Earth with the equipment they had then, I can lose 120 more lbs.
4) If Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay can climb Mount Everest, I can lose 120 more lbs.
5) If Alexander Graham Bell can invent a frickin’ telephone, I can find a way to find the guts to lose 120 more lbs.
6) If Union Pacific and Central Pacific can build a railroad across the country, I can lose 120 more lbs.
7) The Hoover Dam. Yeah, I can lose 120 more lbs.
8) If the tortoise can beat the hare, I can lose 120 more lbs.
9) If Buster Douglas can beat Mike Tyson, I can lose 120 more lbs.
10) Insert here…there’s gotta be more examples that trivialize my weight-war.
I could go on and on and on – flight, politics, sports, society, etc. You get the picture. It is doable. You can never underestimate the power of the human spirit – especially when it appears you have no other choice.
February 21st, 2020: It’s the American way, and indeed, the way I’ve always had pushed into me, to seek results in your endeavors. It started that way with the weight loss war; and is still always in the shadows of my mind. However, I learned that here is one long-term venture where being driven entirely by results can drive you mad before you reach your goal. I learned that it’s better to let the program worry about the results, while I spend my time worrying about the process. The time factor was just too much for me to wrap my mind around.
I made my detailed plans in the beginning, and they were based on my research and my own experiences with different programs. It would have to work – after all, as I’ve said before, you can reduce any real diet plan down to just eating less and moving more. Any other weight-loss program that doesn’t revolve around this simple (general) idea of diet and exercise should be regarded with suspicion. Of course, there are tons of variations of how you eat less and move more, but the premise is the same. It just has to work; you don’t gain weight from photosynthesis.
You gotta believe in your program. I believe in mine. So much so that I let it have access to the entire network system of my brain – and all that implies. I planned for his arrival, he is the vampire of my creation, and I let him come into my home and my life and take over carte-blanche. He has never let me down. I have let myself down by not listening to him, and by struggling to believe at times, but for the most part, I have let him plan, while I worked hard to stay on the rails of his instructions. Anytime I haven’t seen results it’s because I wasn’t patient enough. Have. to. Have. PATIENCE.
Patience is especially hard to maintain when you lose a bunch of weight right at first, but then it slows to the pace of molasses flowing uphill in February in Idaho. That scale won’t budge, so it must be the program’s fault, right? Shut the fuck up and just believe. You signed that statement with a lucid mind in the beginning, and I promise you it’ll work. Nobody, and I mean nobody, consistently gains weight when he maintains a daily caloric deficit through the combination of diet and exercise. I learned that my job was to worry not about results, but instead worry about maintaining fidelity to the program and leave the worry about results to the boss. The boss is the program. You make him look good, he’ll make you look good – metaphorically and literally – you take care of him, he’ll take care of you. Moving away from daily “results-driven” thoughts is difficult for me, but in order for this to continue to work, I have to do just that when it comes to the program. I have to remember to just keep my head down and work. The program is like life, we all know where it ends, but if we dwell on that shit we’ll all lose our minds – it’s the journey that matters. You’ll lose the weight, just do what the program tells you.
