The Change

Here is where I’m supposed to enter a story about some radical thing that happened to make me suddenly wake up and begin transforming myself from a very overweight, mostly sedentary 30 something year old with horrible eating habits into a still somewhat overweight, much less sedentary 40 something year old with pretty good eating habits.

I would love to do that.  For the sake of being less boring, I’d love to be able to write about some dramatic epiphany I had that changed my life.  There was no major health scare.  I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes.  I didn’t get dumped by the man of my dreams because I was fat.  I didn’t cause a cruise ship to sink.  In all honesty, there have been events all throughout my life that could have and should have served as wake up calls.

I’ve had friends drop dead of heart attacks, knew a woman who lost both legs due to complications with diabetes, had my boss (a pathologist) show me livers with fatty liver syndrome and hearts with atherosclerosis and I’ve watched other people I know with obesity related illnesses struggle.  If humiliation was going to work, junior high would have been the end of my weight problems.  Flying and all of the associated anxiety should have done the trick (more on that in a future post).    Going to restaurants where I barely could squeeze into the booth didn’t work. Collapsing a lawn chair at an outdoor concert in front of a lot of people wasn’t sufficient.  On one occasion when I actually had a brief moment of fear that I might die (for reasons unrelated to fatness) one of what could have been my last thoughts was literally,  “Crap, if I die, I hope my family knows to cremate me because having to have a jumbo sized coffin would be permanent humiliation.”

NONE of those things made me change my life.  Oh, I’d take little stabs at it… always hoping to hurry and lose weight and looking forward to being able to “eat normally” again and never really having any hope that I’d succeed because my life was littered with so many failed diet attempts that it would take an entire book just to list them all.

So what was it this time?  What was the big catalyst that finally made me “change my life”?  What finally woke me up and made me stop seeking the quick fix, the temporary fix, the fix where someone else fixed it?   Maybe everything.  Or maybe nothing.  I just decided to.  I’ve got thousands of good reasons and examples.  But I’ve always had those.

There was nothing super dramatic here – just a decision.

“Trying” and “hoping” don’t work.  I either do it or I don’t.  But feeling hopeless doesn’t work either.  I am responsible for the fuel I put in my body.  I am responsible for my activity level.    There are a lot of things in my life I can’t control.   2012 was full of all kinds of examples of that for me.  But this is something I can control.

My choices, my consequences, my responsibility, my ongoing journey.