Getting Back on the Wagon

As I've written many times, a couple years ago I started on a journey to lose weight, for many reasons.  Some health reasons started to pop up...nothing serious, but it didn't take any imagination to realize that without corrective action, the health concerns could quickly become serious.  You just can't continue to live in an obese body without repercussions.  Generally, I just wanted to be more active, to not feel so wiped out by doing yard work or when going for a long walk with the dog.  I wanted to have better joint health, particularly knee health, so I could get up and down off the floor easily whenever we had kids.  I wanted to like what I saw when I looked in the mirror in the morning before leaving for work.

These reasons motivated me for close to two years, pushing me to count calories, take walks in the evenings during the spring, summer, and fall whenever the opportunity presented itself, and to push myself on the treadmill in the morning.  And it worked.  I lost a little over 50 pounds that first year (2010), and close to 50 pounds through the first nine months or so of 2011.  And then, for reasons I have yet to be able to explain, the reasons stopped motivating me.  Maybe I became complacent, maybe I became satisfied with the nice round number I hit (100 pounds of weight loss) and figured that was good enough.  But for whatever reason, I struggled to get myself to the treadmill in the morning.

In the short term, this was not crushing.  I was still in the habit of eating right and watching calories, and I had and continue to have my breakfast and lunch so regimented that I still maintained an appropriate caloric intake.  But slowly, over the past few months, that complacency has crept and crept and taken up a more permanent residence.  It hasn't been a disaster, but I've probably gained somewhere between 5-10 pounds back.  And after almost two years of really hard work, it is frustrating to stare that reality in the face, and see failure.

I used to write here weekly about my treadmill progress, and did so because I felt like it held me accountable, for whatever reason.  I may now be back at that point.  When I started this journey, I convinced myself to look at it as I would college or law school - it was a several year process.  Thus, I am now convincing myself to look at the past 6 months as a bad semester, and doing my best to re-motivate myself.  The loss of 100 pounds (or 90 as it stands now) is a great thing.  My reality is that I have much more to lose.  Per my analogy, I have become complacent with a bunch of college credit, but not the degree.  I've allowed myself to think that its okay to not finish something I started, which typically is not my modus operandi.

It's time to get back on that wagon.  Not the wagon of counting calories all the time.  Not the wagon of taking walks in the evening.  Not the wagon of pushing myself on the treadmill in the mornings.  The wagon of making these decisions on a daily basis; the wagon of deciding to positively affect the quality of my life, and my health; the wagon of making an active and fit lifestyle important.

"Fall seven times, stand up eight." - Japanese Proverb

"If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking." - Buddhist Saying