May 21st, 2012: Dropped a pound to 267, but I’m still probably sending a food-friend packing. On Saturday and Sunday, I used to allow myself one of those chocolate muffins with chocolate chips in them (yep, overdoing it wherever I can). They may not know it yet, but I’m going to break up with those muffins this weekend. Damn, I don’t wanna, but they don’t have my best interests at heart.
This “back in the day” thing is for the cohort of us who started this journey in January, and it’s also for the newest among you. For us January people it’s meant to remind us of those cold and lonely and dark days that made up the first month on the program. For the newest, it’s to let you know how surprisingly fast this happens.
Now, it’s starts off like this: you are motivated, you are going to rock and roll, you are going to do this. You wake up on day one of the rest of your life. You kick day one’s ass, and day two, well, you win that one too! Then day three, and you might have just had your first-second thought about this. “This might be, um, hard”. But your willpower prevails today – sometimes only by tooth and nail and minute to minute, and the next morning you realize that it feels good to feel good in the morning.
You see your first drop on the scale, and that gets you through day 4 and 5.
Then the weekend. Shit, that first weekend is hard – no two ways about it. All your friends and family are eating this good food and all of it they want. All you can do, and there is no other way around it, is fight. You just have to realize that this is one of about 10 days in these first couple of months that are just wickedly hard. It would almost be easier to walk on broken glass in bare feet. Your mind turns on you, you say, “maybe on weekends I’ll cheat a little here and there.”
Fuck that, don’t listen, don’t change your plans just because of the damn day of the week. You fight, dammit, and you get through that first weekend. Then that second Monday, when, no matter what that scale says, you realize you just fought possibly one of the most important battles of your life, and you won. You did it. You made it through a whole week! Celebrate that for 5 minutes and dream. Then prep yourself for another battle.
Don’t ever quit fighting, but also don’t forget to smile while you fight, because although those broken glass days do happen, they begin to be fewer and further between them. Although the battle continues, the good days start to outnumber the bad days – until I promise you, at least 4/7 days aren’t so bad, 2/7 days are pretty damn good, and only 1/7 requires you to test your will.
May 21st, 2020: Weather is my subject today. You wouldn’t think weather would affect whether I would follow the necessary processes across the time span required for the program. I learned otherwise, and in fact, had to learn to become an all-weather sonofabitch for real.
I used to pretend I could function from below 0° to above 100°, but I learned that this particular realm of my imagination had to become reality, and it had to happen soon. Rain or shine, calm or wind, sweltering heat or crackling freeze, I have to get my ass up and do what the program tells me to do. And I’m not talking about going hunting or skiing or fun stuff, or even getting up out of bed to go to work. I’m talking about what this requires with regard to attitude management about my whole life.
Today, all my grand plans for outside yard work, which is generally what Thursdays are for, from April to October, have to be altered – it’s cloudy and gray and drizzling. The grass is too wet to mow, the garden too muddy to hoe. Big deal right? Not so fast there, Mickey the Mouse. Had I not learned to at least try to adapt, this would piss me off enough, or throw me off enough, that I may just spend the day looking out the window and eating sugar baked into something, or fat fried into it.
But this is Idaho, and this is life, and after over a decade of teetotalling, and nearly that long on the program, I’ve learned that if I can’t handle the pitches the weather throws me, then it’s time to head back to the minor leagues. Being an all-weather sonofabitch means that it’s only as cold outside as what I’ve prepared for, and central air-conditioning in a building or a charged A/C pump in my truck will regulate me when I feel like I’m working in close proximity to the face of the sun. Inside of me, or at least the image I strive for, and always attempt to project, or sometimes fake till it bakes, is that it’s always sunny in Philadelphia.
I will leave it to you to decipher all the metaphors in the last paragraph, and hope that you will attempt to become an all-weather sonofabitch yourself. Otherwise, you may spend the balance of your life looking out your window through the raindrops as your dreams dilute and eventually flow away.
