How Far I’ve Come
Current Weight: 283.2 lbs, down 0.9 from last week
Currently Reading: Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
and 12 Rules for Life
Just Finished: Mastery and Children of the Nameless
Currently Playing: God of War
Sometimes it is hard to see progress in terms of one step to the next, only being down .9 pounds from this week to last week is disappointing, and it is easy to negative talk myself. A cold derailed me the last three days, but that gave me time to reflect on my journey, I used sickness to consider where I could make improvements, so let’s give context to this week’s number:
I went ahead and left last Friday’s weight on the screenshot, otherwise you might not believe the results. 6 pounds in two days? Between consuming beer for the first time in a few weeks and going out to eat for lunch and dinner my body puts it back on fast, it is a problem with my body type and seeing such a radical change gave me a chance to make a decision, do I get negative and ruin all my gains or do I re-evaluate and re-tool my methods? Okay, I know intermittent fasting has been great, what did I do wrong? I ate twice in one day, and in both cases I did not watch what I ate. Going out to eat was not the problem, using that as an excuse to make bad choices. Time for a new rule, when out to eat get vegetables and lower carbs, preferably cut if that is an option.
But why not get negative? A week’s worth of effort can get undone in two days, my body and choices work against me and I enjoy beer, so why even try? The answer is simple, two days worth did not undo all my work and in the war of time I am winning.
Since 2016, a peak of around 345 lbs for me, I am down more than 65 pounds and in the past 3 months, I am down over 20, a third of that loss. Each time I took a step forward, I’ve been hit and gone back and I can use it to learn a new lesson. One of the thoughts of been meditating on this week was given to me by Mastery about Pilot Cesar Rodriguez, Cesar Rodriguez is known as The Last American Ace and when learning to be a pilot he suffered a lot of adversity. The instincts of a pilot did not come naturally to him and he had to get it all through practice, he had to work extra hard to earn his skills and it enabled him to face adversity better, by the time something came around that his class took time to handle, Cesar had already garnered the ability to handle adversity and work through it with hard work. It is this drive, this discipline that I am earning now, I did not fail any of those times, I was just learning a different lesson.
Every facet of how you live your life bleeds into all the others, how you allow yourself to think, how you allow yourself to feel, how you treat yourself, how you treat others, and what you allow yourself to do. It was always a battle of weight and how I see myself, but now it is more. I want to be more disciplined, so I workout, I want to concentrate better, so I meditate, I want to be smarter, so I read. Each effort helps all the others and let’s me reflect on where I stand now versus where I stood in 2016, the year I started my job after graduating college, another milestone to self improvement.
