I lost much of my confidence awhile back. I think it went out the door when I started wearing size 40 pants. Since then, it's moved further away on the horizon. I don't think of myself as a fat guy. In the story of my life, I'm the attractive protagonist. But mirrors, scales and shopping for clothes has a slightly different message.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have miserable self esteem. In the right clothing, lighting and angle, I still think I'm a pretty decent looking guy and I'd like to think my personality is a strong counter to some extra weight. Unfortunately, it's hard to photograph personality, and I find myself hiding from cameras, mirrors and scales. Ego is a fragile thing, and there's nothing worse than seeing a picture of a happy time on a happy day, and your only response is "Oh my god, am I really that fat?" or "Note to self, never look down in pictures" or "No more pictures sitting down when I can't suck it in."
Which brings me to Day One. The Truth. How much do I weigh? What am I trying to accomplish? What am I really willing to do here? I know I'm not suddenly going to go run 5 miles a day. This isn't about drastically changing my life, it's about making some changes, following a goal and being honest with myself.
I haven't lost a single pound yet, but I'm guessing that honesty is the hardest part of dieting. I lie to myself all the time.
Lie #1: I'll eat healthy and exercise for a few days before I see what the scale tells me.
What is the purpose of that?? Why not take credit if I can lose a couple pounds that first week? Am I so scared of what my current weight is that I'm hoping to lose weight before I start losing weight?
Lie #2: From now on, I'm going to work out for 60 minutes every day, and limit myself to 2000 calories. No pain, no gain, let's do this!!
Nope. No matter how much I pump myself up, I can't suddenly change my life from 0 to 60 in one day. Maybe some people can, but I can't. Too much inertia there unfortunately.
Lie #3: This will be my last burger & fries / candy bar / bag of chips.
Nope. There will be another burger, more chips, more candy.
So by lying to myself, I'm just invoking Catholic guilt, which doesn't help.
Who am I? I'm a professional in my early thirties with a wife and 3 young children. I'm busy with baths and playtime, I travel quite a bit, and now that I have Tivo, there's a lot more TV I could be watching. I sit more than I walk. In my free time I consume more than I produce. I'm soft and tired and out of breath and my pants are 10 sizes bigger than they were when I was in high school. But I'm not ready to just accept that I'm overweight and out of shape. There's a healthier me in some parallel universe, and I'm going to find him.
So what happened to me? I used to be fit, exercised a fair amount, and was pretty happy with my situation. Since high school I've steadily gained weight, which happens to a lot of people. But that doesn't matter, I didn't want it to happen to me. I've thought a lot about this, and I think it's a chain of events.
1) I was happy, but concerned about social status so I worked out regularly.
2) Got a steady girlfriend... stopped working out quite so much.
3) Started going out to eat more often, since that's what you often do in relationships. In retrospect, why didn't we go hiking?
4) Got a job at a fast food place. This was the beginning of the end.
5) Rebounded enough to get a new girlfriend, who married me.
6) Compounded bad habits and laziness with work stress, financial stress, and for one gut busting summer -homebuying stress.
7) Added kids.
Now I wear size 42 -44 pants. Because I constantly think I'm on the verge of massive weight loss, I hate to buy clothes. Well, that and the fact I hate buying clothes because it forces me into a reality check. Chain reaction here means that many of the clothes that I own are worn and rumpled from use. I latch on to a favorite pair of pants and wear them until they're dull and faded. So now I'm a big guy who doesn't dress sharp and is even more shy about his appearance. Self confidence takes another couple steps away.
Enough preamble, what's the plan? I'm certainly not planning to lose weight by typing 5,000 word essays every day, although that would be nice. The plan is for me to make some subtle changes towards losing weight. Let's call them baby steps. Step one is to start being honest, stop lying to myself. That's partially what this blog is for. Throw some truth out into the anonymous void. I honestly want to lose weight. I'm honestly tired of being tired. I honestly want to do something about it, and I'm finally going to do something about it. Honest means going to my scale and weighing myself. I still haven't done that yet... I'll be right back.
...267. Ouch. But it had to be done, and if I have my way, it's only going to go in one direction.
Also in Step One is writing down what I'm eating. Honesty is pretty rough here. If I lose my discipline, which is small and easily lost, I'll have to write down that I ate a Big Mac with fries and a milk shake. Accepting that I threw any kind of diet out the window while in the midst of a diet is tough. It's like lying to your mom about something dumb, even though you're an adult. You don't want to disapoint her. Instead, it's easier to decide I'm not on a diet right this second and I'll start again tomorrow. (Lie #3).
To promise myself I'll admit to what I actually eat requires prodding, poking, pinching, and even praying. Please note, I didn't intend for all those verbs to start with "P", it just sort of happened. Actually, are those verbs, or gerunds where verby type words are turned into nouns? I forget how that works... But "P"s, verbs or gerunds not withstanding, I can't just trust myself, I need to compel myself. I'm at the point where I'd be willing to hook myself up to an electric shock that would go off whenever I tell myself a lie. Sort of like Pinochio's nose, if Pinochio's nose also whacked him in the shins.
The last of my baby steps involves exercise. No pretending to run a marathon in 6 weeks. No shiny gym membership to make me feel guilty when I miss my first day. No fancy equipment that I'm going to run out and buy in preparation for a future garage sale. Whether it's 2 minutes or 30 minutes, I'm going to try and get myself in the habit of doing a little exercise each day. The discipline of doing something everyday is important to me right now. Not the quantity or quality, just the consistency.
I own an old, dilapidated exercise bike, so I'm going to start there, and maybe do some situps. Like I said, 2 minutes or 30 minutes, there's no wrong answer, so no excuse to fail. I could exercise in the morning, before bed, or more than likely I'll exercise right after the kids go to sleep, and just before I watch any tv or surf the internet.
Some additional background - I'm not a therapist, fitness trainer, nutritionist or anything helpful to my endeavor. If anyone in those categories ever reads this, they'll probably scream at me for committing cardinal sins of some sort with respect to change, growth or in this case shrinking. (I can't write shrinkage there since it just makes me think of Seinfeld. Certain phrases in this country are doomed to pop culture, such as "Who are you gonna call?" or "Can you hear me now?") But I believe that every person is different, and what works for some, probably won't work for most. Personally, I've tried a lot of drastic ideas in the past that didn't work out. Some worked for a short while, some didn't work at all. The one common thread was that the failure was embarassing, and somewhere along the way, I gave up.
So this time, I'm going with the baby steps approach. Set easy goals, to make success - um- easier. Expect some failure, and if I fall off the wagon, make it a slow moving wagon, low to the ground, with a ramp I can climb up while the wagon's still in motion -sort of like that big truck in Knight Rider, but at walking speed.
So step one is pretty simple. Hopefully these will be all the rules I ever need, and everything else will simply grow out of my desire to keep improving. But these will continue to be the fundamentals.
1) Be honest with myself and this blog
2) Write down what I eat
3) Exercise every day, whether it's 2 minutes of jumping jacks or 30 minutes of pumping iron.
