April 24th, 2012: I feel static as hell, but I did lose a pound, and that seems to be fuckin miracle this week. 278. Between Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I jogged 12 miles, biked another 4 miles, and did a yoga session. It’s like I’ve been told about a career (if I could ever decide upon one): If you enjoy what you do, the money will take care of itself. Like this program, if you are enjoying how you feel, then those pounds will take care of themselves. Honestly, I probably would quit if I had poor numbers and felt like crap, but it’s just not working that way. I feel awesome.
It’s just that looking good is important for me, or you know, at least not standing out. I just wanna fuckin look normal. I want to stand out for accomplishments, not what I look like anymore. It’s been so long since I’ve entered a restaurant or any other place where people watching occurs, and felt good about myself.
So I feel great inside – physiologically, compared to 114 days ago. My exterior self still just sucks, i.e. I feel aesthetically inferior to just about everyone except maybe the fattest man whoever lived.
So for a flashback to lighten my mood – help me remember from where I’ve traveled. I remember at about this time last year I decided to go for a 3 mile jog. I wasn’t weighing myself regularly, but I’m sure I was in excess of 300 lbs. I should apologize to the concrete. But anyway, I remember starting that jog that day and feeling every single ounce in my knees and feet. When you’re that big your posture is all jacked up and your stride is screwy as you try to compensate for too much weight in all the wrong places. I did finish that run, probably could’ve timed it with a calendar, and then I’m sure I rewarded myself with a box of donuts. Even now that thinking seems crazy to me.
April 24th, 2020: Imagination is HUGE for the program, especially when first starting the fight. I just had to envision this 189 lb. guy who’d been swallowed by this 350 lb. white bear. Mirrors were very difficult for me because they represented reality.
Even in math, the most concrete, yet intangible entity on the fuckin planet, you’re still required to use imaginary numbers sometimes to solve a problem. If it works for math, it works for the program. At times I just had to pretend I wasn’t me. That big white t-shirted thing with the extra chin looking back at me in the mirror was just a coat of one single color that I was set to remove one cotton fiber at a time, and it generally felt like that might take until the end of the world.
It’s not that I was entirely unhappy with who I was as a human. I still valued myself as an intellectual individual and a caring person. I just couldn’t picture myself this heavy from minute to minute because it usually seemed like nothing was happening at all. At times when this was really an issue, I very much appreciated a bathroom scale because to look at myself in a mirror was to look at someone who was sacrificing for nothing. At least the bathroom scale usually indicated some kind of change.
I would pick out my favorite athletes, or movie stars in athlete roles (Sly Stallone in Rocky IV), and that’s who I would pretend I looked like all the time. I pretended that I was awesome, and only getting awesome-er. I couldn’t face the reality that all the huffing and puffing, and sweating, and aches and pains from the exercise; and the hunger pangs and boo-hoo’s of diet self-deprivation were only bringing me back from the shithole of poor choices to the surface of normalcy.
