My failure is two-fold. First it has been several weeks since the last time I got a really good workout. Then, embarrassed by my failure to workout, I have not kept you in the loop. I said I'd be honest, good or bad, and from now on I will be.
If there is one thing I've learned since beginning this journey, it's that there is always a reason to not workout. How often do you feel 100% healthy? How about at 5 AM? How often do you feel like you have gotten enough sleep? At 5 AM? My point is that it is very easy to make that first excuse, to skip that first workout, and once you start...excuses become easier and easier. "I don't even feel as good today as I did yesterday, and I didn't wake up early and workout then..."
Like a thousand little dominoes that you've worked so hard to line up, all the new aspects of your healthy lifestyle start to collapse, taking more and more with them. Suddenly, not only are sleeping in and not working out, you're ordering the value meal. Instead of counting every calorie, you're giving a cursory glance at the nutritional stats and chowing down.
The worst part of all of this is that even as you make these bad choices, you are constantly aware of what the right choices would be. The overwhelming emotion attached to these mistakes is shame, and yet you feel somehow stuck, trapped, and powerless to change.
Well, I'm done being stuck. I'm sick with guilt over my recent behavior, doubly so because I had experienced so much success. No sooner had I reached my goal of completing the Lake Travis Relay than I was skipping out on the fitness regimen that got me there. At the time, I had lost more than 20 pounds.
The tragic thing is that my success probably contributed to my failure. You keep losing weight over enough time, and it becomes easy to forget that weight doesn't come off without help. It takes work, and discomfort, and inconvenience. When you stop putting those things in, the weight stops coming off...or start to come back.
All this leads to the unavoidable (and believe me I've tried to avoid it) of where am I now. How much of my progress have I undone? Monday evening I stopped by the Summit on my way home from work and stepped on the scale for the first time in more than a month. I knew I wasn't going to like the result. I didn't know how much I would hate it.
Keep in mind; I wasn't wearing my usual workout gear and sneakers. I was wearing work clothes and work shoes. Did I mention that my job is that of a deep-sea diver from the 50's? No? Well I am. Someone's got to do it, and that someone is me. The outfit you see here weighs about 100 pounds, so when I tell you that I weighed 215, you'll understand that this means I'm actually much skinnier than Keira Knightley...All this to say that after nearly seven months, I'm probably less than 10 pounds lighter than when I started.
That's pretty demoralizing, but I'm not going to let my frustration keep me from getting back on track. I'm starting the same way I did last time, by setting goals. This year, I will be participating in the Jingle Bun Fun Run 5K. My dog Sulley and I will be training for that over the next few weeks. I started this morning by going on a 1.8 (a little more than half a 5K) jog with my sister Sarah, who is also training for the 5K.We brought along an 8 pound medicine ball and threw it back and forth to one another as we jogged. By the end we were pretty exhausted, but we never let ourselves take a break or slow to a walk.
My larger goal is to get back below 200 pounds by January 6. As part of that process, I promise to get back on track keeping you in the loop.
No comments:
Post a Comment