The year it happened

In December of 2004 I weighed 298 pounds.

At one point it may have been more, but I’m not sure because I’d given up weighing for a long while.

Today I weigh 265 pounds.

I don’t feel the need to make any New Year’s resolutions per se, because I feel like they’ve already been made. But I’m making one anyway, if for no other reason then to reaffirm my commitment.

So, my resolution is this:

Keep going.

Now, if I’ve been working at this since 2004, you might ask why am I mentioning it now, on the cusp of 2007?

The simple answer is that this past year is when I made the decision that losing weight should be a goal, rather than just something I’m kinda doing.

I know… I promised when I launched this blog that I’d stay away from navel-gazing, but I hope you’ll indulge me in this situation. If nothing else, it’s starkly contrasted against my old navel-gazing in that this will be wholly positive navel-gazing.

Readers of my past blogs will remember how I used to lament, at length, about not knowing what to do with my life, how it was hard to work toward something when I didn’t know what I wanted, how I couldn’t find anything to be passionate about, blah, blah, blah.

And then I was sitting there eating my muffin and drinking my coffee when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.

I realized that asking myself what I wanted to do with my life was a fruitless effort. People die every day not knowing what they wanted to do with their lives. Hell, I’d say most folks don’t know. Intellectually I knew this all along, of course, but in the absence of knowing what to do about it, I opted to maintain the status quo.

So I asked myself what was out there that I could work toward? What could I do that would at least improve the situation? What could I do that I could feel passionate about? What about my life would I like to change?

That was it. I’d floundered around and finally asked the right question: “What about my life would I like to change?

“I want to feel good about myself,” was the answer.

Because I didn’t feel good about myself. (Some days I still don’t, but the ratio is improving.) In fact, I didn’t really like myself at all. Only very observant people or those very close to me would have known it if I didn’t mention it, and I myself had to have it pointed out, which is yet another fine example of something I already knew but didn’t realize.

I also knew that not liking yourself makes it hard to accomplish much of anything.

And I didn’t like myself because I was fat.

The phrase “fat acceptance” gets thrown around a lot. I’m not a believer in that philosophy, but I had more or less arrived at that state not in the positive “this is how I am and I”m OK with it” sense, but in the same way an amputee might arrive there in the negative “this is how I am and I’m just going to have to live with it” sense. This was not a good place to be in my life.

So what to do about it, then?

Well, the first thing was to stop being hard on myself, which is a harder habit to break than you might think. If I can’t say positive things about myself, then I should at least try to fake it until it become natural.

The second thing, obviously, was to lose weight.

And since that particular tale isn’t really navel-gazing, I’ll be breaking that into another post to follow.

(Soon! I promise!)