weigh-2-go.org

Be alerted, gentle readers. This post contains an inconvenient and painful truth.  (It’s painful to me too.)

As my posts under the category of “philosophy of weight loss” will attest, I am interested in the personal philosophies and psychological aspects of weight loss. But I have been dancing around a fundamental point. I found a blog post from a motivational speaker in Australia, Craig Harper, who put it right out there.

One of Craig’s readers, Mandi, writes [condensed here]:

Please, please, please, please help me….I currently weigh 104 kilos and often cry when I look in the mirror. As you always say “I know what to do but I don’t do what I know.” I am so sick of myself and the way I constantly shoot myself in the foot that I don’t know what to do any more….Why do I continue to self-sabotage when I hate the way I look and feel?…

Mandi’s lament sounds familiar to me–painfully familiar. She describes a vulnerable, stuck place that makes me ache.

Craig gives a long and thoughtful response. The full post is here. But this excerpt cuts to the painful truth:

…you need to want it enough. You might think you want it enough now but I can tell you, you don’t. When you associate more pain with staying in your current condition than you do with throwing that chocolate in the bin (or feeding it to the dog), then you’ll get the job done and find your way to your best body. As with any change process, you will always be the problem and the solution. [emphasis mine]

Wow. Craig’s reply sums up the answer to my question, “Why?” It’s about priorities: wanting it enough.

Perhaps you have read The Secret. The “energy frequency” premise is, for me, too far-fetched to be useful (for the short version, skip to 5:50 in this video), but an inversion of The Secret makes sense to me:

When I want to reach a goal, and I make it a priority over other goals, then my real-life actions and decisions automatically take me there.

The angst, like Mandi’s, simply vanishes. My behavior leads me in the right direction. Things fall into place.

This truth applies to all my goals. As an unmarried middle-aged suburb dweller* who is 15 pounds above goal weight, I wrestle with painful truths. But if I want to make progress on all my goals, I am only dancing around until I ask myself honestly, “Do I want it enough?”

When the answer is “no,” I always have strong arguments to defend the reasons–sometimes outdated and laced with shame, but strong nonetheless. So then, the real work of weight loss, or achieving any goal, is not to collect healthy recipes, join a gym, or join Weight Watchers. All that will come in its time and place. We know that stuff already. As Craig says, we are the problem and the solution.

Instead, the real work is breaking down the arguments that defend that vulnerable, stuck place.

Ouch.

*David Byrne sings, “How did I get here?” The whole song is so awesome.

I don’t make very good decisions in the moment.

It’s 5:30 am and I am faced with this decision: “Get up now and have oatmeal, fruit, and yogurt for breakfast, and have some extra prep time for my morning meeting?  Or sleep another 15 minutes, wing it at the meeting, and enjoy a muffin and coffee with cream while I’m there?”  Guess which one I will pick.

It’s 1:30 pm on a busy working day. My decision: “Stop, take a break, go to Whole Foods Salad Bar? Or order Chinese with everybody else in the office and get a few more things done?”  One choice is good for my job–and other people in my office–and one is good for my body. I tend to “sacrifice” the personal benefit for the common good.

5:00 pm, and time to leave work. “Hmmm, I need to de-stress. Should I rush to make Betty’s 6:30 yoga class? Or sit on the sofa and watch ‘House’?” The latter sounds less stressful–but the yoga class would be better at helping me manage stress. But I’m more likely to pick “House.”

I tend to pride myself on my ability to improvise. However, I don’t make the best choices unless I plan ahead.

So, my new challenges:

• Plan meals in advance
• Schedule exercise in advance, with a buddy who expects me to be there
  (E.g., I always get the Y on Tuesdays, when Jill meets me there. I have missed Monday yoga for weeks, though, because nobody is expecting me. Time to make a yoga pal.)
• Nail down a morning routine and “just do it” before I have the time or the mental capacity to talk myself out of it on any given morning.

So here is the progress I have made in the past few weeks:

• Attended 2 Weight Watchers meetings
• Started writing down everything I eat
• Got through Memorial Day weekend, in a cabin with 10 people, without completely pigging out
• Very limited servings of wheat for the past week

On Sunday I will fix my broken Weight Watchers membership so that I have eTools. Then I will begin counting points in earnest.

This progress is slow in coming. Blogging about it severely difficult because the resistance is not entirely conscious, and is hard to articulate.

The other day I was talking to someone about her choice for a weight-loss/nutrition advisor, and these words came out of my mouth: “Weight loss isn’t just a health issue, it’s a mental health issue.” That helps articulate it.