Doug Losing Weight

I have to admit, I’ve judged my fellow human beings harshly.

I’ve seen many people have their inner plumbing altered in one way or another in order to lose weight.  My thoughts have been harsh – “just man up and get some self-control and stop putting stuff in your mouth” I think.  The weight comes off, everyone tells them how great they look.  But in my mind they’ve cheated.  Taken the easy way out.

Now I think I might understand.

Now I really really want to lose this.  I’m so tired of feeling crappy.

I had a business trip to San Francisco last week.  My time there, at this conference my company sponsors, is pretty intense.  I have to stay in these expensive hotels where food is expensive, and it’s questionable whether my company will reimburse me.  The conference provides food as part of the deal, but often it’s hard for me to get over to the convention center at the right times to get the food.

This all ends in me not eating very much.  I’m on my feet constantly, hauling stuff around, interviewing people and recording people and the event with still images, and I’m focused.  For about 4 days straight I am completely creatively focused on what I am doing.

The week before the conference I was very good at sticking to my two shake, one meal, one healthy snack regimen.

So when I came home and saw the scale was fixed at the gym, I was looking forward to a lower number, to seeing how much weight working out, sticking to my regimen, and spending a week on my feet with very little food (comparatively) would translate to weight loss.

My weight was the same.  I hadn’t even lost one pound.  Man that’s depressing to type, to admit to the world (or all three of you who read this).

So now we’re in April, three and a half months into the year where I’m going to lose 140 pounds.  I’ve lost 8.  At that rate it will take me 4.4 years to lose the weight.

But it’s not even that.  I lost 8 pounds in one week – then life happened I guess.  It hasn’t been a slow and steady progression, it’s been one stellar week and then nothing.

And I suppose that’s what the real challenge is here.  If I could go to a ranch somewhere and just focus on getting my habits fixed, fixing my relationship with food, I think I could lose the weight.  I have no faith that I would be able to keep it off once life started back up for reals again.

I have people in my life tell me that I should feel good, that 8 pounds is great.  I have a hard time seeing it that way.

So now I start to understand the mentality of those that go in for surgery, who go in to have parts of them removed, or their plumbing re-plumbed so they can keep eating whatever they want and the body just doesn’t absorb it.  I can see how after years of “trying” I could come to the conclusion that surgery is the only way out.

As I sit here now, I don’t really know what to do next.  There’s canisters of shake mix in my pantry, but I have no motivation to replace meals with them.  All those shakes I’ve gagged down (there are recipes that make it less nasty, but they rarely tasted good to me) and I haven’t lost much.  My body just doesn’t seem to buy the fact that a drink is a meal – I still want to chew something.  So I do.

Back to those habits.

So I have a hard time thinking that this approach is going to work for me.

I know I could sit down and devise a plan of what to eat in the whole food realm, working out every day, eating lots of raw and whole foods – I know what to do…

But then life will happen.  I’ll get busy, I’ll try to squeeze in some interviews for my People Story Network after work, I’ll take a freelance gig to help someone out, I’ll get motivated by some creative vision at work and work late for a couple of nights – and there I’ll be out in the world with my body completely out of food, nothing around me but highly processed, highly sugared food…

And I’ll stay up so late working that getting up at 6:00 am to workout won’t happen…

And the wheels come off the track and there I’ll be…  in front of my computer blogging about how hard it is.

So how do I do this?