Starting Out

Ok, it is time.

I want to tell you about a time when I really got serious about nutrition and successfully maintained a healthy and well-founded nutritional plan for a month—it was difficult and incredibly strict, with little room for error. Determination, positive outlook, and support were on my side, and after a month I actually lost weight.

Three pounds. I lost three pounds.

Many times in my life, I have worked on weight-loss in theory, but not so much in practice. Somewhere between huge plans, nutritional theories, endless discussions about those theories, and Netflix documentaries that rallied the troops of health and wellness, my weight has been on a steady and constant incline. Some even know me as a fairly vocal proponent of nutrition, frequently reading books, writing facebook comments, and signing up for any number of blogs and newsletters on the topic. I’ve psychoanalyzed, journaled, and discussed my issues, and had many emotional breakthroughs over the years, but actual change has never come to me. Untold hours have been spent staring into the fridge/menu/vending machine having silent arguments about my choices, and I’ve have cried a million tears and sweat buckets trying to conquer the monster. But I’ve never made real headway or successfully undone any of the consequences that I carry around with me all day every day.

And then one day, this river of nonsense and failure and disappointment swelled, and the dam I had so carefully constructed out of false confidence and denial broke, and that fragile equilibrium which had come to nearly define my personality was lost. It was subtle, in a way. There weren’t tears, and it didn’t happen on the floor of a fitting room, and I wasn’t reacting based on food guilt or anger. I just felt like the bucket of my thoughts and feelings on being the way I am was brimming and spilling over, and the words had to come out. I had to put words to why being fat made me miserable. As Flannery O’Connor once said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” For me, my thoughts are senseless and unformed until I force them down onto paper. So that is what I did—I sat down and for an hour or two I put words to nearly 2 decades of emotions. At the end I felt as if I had just thrown up, and the poison had left me. It was the weird and mournful euphoria one gets when they decide to quit their job, or to move out of their house. Suddenly you look around the office or the house and feel like you don’t belong there anymore… it was the beginning of a separation between me and the body I’ve lived inside of for quite some time.

That night I had a ridiculous and typical dream that made little sense, and probably involved characters from the TV show I’d watched right before bed, but in that dream I was skinny. It was the first time in my life I’ve ever had a dream like that. I’ve had dreams where it would have been nice to be skinny—once I dreamt that I won a shopping spree, but nothing in the store fit—but I have never been anything but what I am when I dream. This may seem unremarkable, but what I realized it meant is that I had never previously accepted the idea that I could be anything other than that which I was. And that had fundamentally changed.

I decided to give it one last try, and to truly bet on myself and my success and my future. I began, as always, in earnest with a clear plan set in stone. In a month of a nutritionally sound diet plan and little or no failure, I lost 3 lbs.

Three. Pounds.

In a month.

The proof was in the numbers—there was no way I could be that determined long enough to lose all I needed to at such a slow rate of loss. And through a series of trials, successes, and epic divine appointments which I’ll go into on a later post (because it is good stuff), I decided I needed help. I then began Medifast through a Take Shape for Life coach. It is not cheap, and it is not easy, and it isn’t the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my life, but it has led me to this blog.

Like I said at the beginning, I’ve done a lot of theoretical weight-loss in my days, with little actual weight-loss. This time, I decided that I’d do the weight-loss in practice first, and then dive into sharing my progress publically. I set a bench mark to hit before I involved you all in it, and I’ve hit that bench mark. I feel I now have the appropriate credibility to speak with some measure of reliability because while I have a lot to say about dieting, until now I’ve had nothing to say of weight-loss.

To date, I’m down 33 lbs and still pushing.

More to come later :)