April 22nd, 2012: Well I’m just slogging along, just grinding away, and that means a gain every now and then, I suppose. One pound back north to 279, but I’ll blame it on not getting my boxing workout in last night. At least I didn’t fall back into the 280’s. As soon as I finish this, though, we’re headed out for a 6.5 mile run – that’ll teach this damn pound! The 270’s are starting to be another albatross. You’d think I’d have learned that each of these decades is going to test my patience, but no, still – still sometimes wondering why it doesn’t happen overnight. You silly goddamn diet-rabbit, it don’t happen that way!
I’ll tell you what though, as far as energy, hell, I feel like I could jog from New York to LA today. There are many non-scale victories adding up for me in Idaho these days.
I only have 28 more days at my current job, which I hate, and then I’ll officially become an online math and science instructor. Although it promises to be a challenging job, it’s only part-time, and that means I get to use the rest of my time raising my kids and training to become some sort of early middle-aged athlete again. I’m pretty darn stoked about it.
April 22nd, 2020: I was pretty lucky in 2012, in that I was able to move from my full-time job at the nuclear-research facility in the middle of the desert into a part-time job out of my home. I’m curious about lots of things in life, but my curiosity is a mile-wide and an inch-deep. As part of that curiosity, I’ve spent much money and time on a wide array of college and training. One of the things I know how to do is teach math and science to kids from 6th to 12th grade. I’m not great at it, but not bad either, so I left my work on the nuclear-fuel fabrication team and transitioned into an online math teaching career.
Mostly though, I wanted to raise my younger son, who has special needs. An added bonus: all the time I needed to exercise. A new challenge: being in my house all day with all the food there, ready to be eaten. Bored moments can be deadly to the program, especially when you’re home most of the day and food is easily accessible. A bad diet cannot, repeat, cannot be defeated by exercise – at least as a mortal human.
This is where I may have discovered the omnipotence of habit. They say habit is power – and good habit is great power (or they say something to that effect). If I ain’t a creature of habit, nobody is, and by Wednesday of that first week home, shit started to go downhill because I was forced to establish new habits, and developing good habits does come easy for me. I can develop a bad habit in a matter of minutes; a good habit, at least a month. I’ll have to see here soon, but I know it required some major soul-searching, consistent and conscious positive and motivational self-talk, and probably a buttload of luck.
