Everyone in my situation (being fat) will eventually have that breaking point in their life. It always comes down to whether or not they do something about it or do they plunge into depression and get worse. I have never been a person to see the glass as anything but half full. What was my breaking point you ask? Well, it was several things really. Of course there was one that really got to me.
Since I got married the first time, had my first kid, then slowly moved towards the idea that I would be getting out of the military, got married again, then had five more kids – I have been slowly but surely getting more and more fat. I have always attempted to do some form of physical activity as time permitted but it was never enough to keep me from getting bigger and bigger. I have had gym memberships, jiu jitsu memberships, and I took up surfing (which is really funny to see). With the time I had to put towards these activities, it still wasn’t enough. I have been on diets of all forms where I would briefly change the way I eat and what I eat. That would generally have some good come out of it. But with the “I am GOING on a diet” comes the fact that you are thinking that this is temporary and will eventually be STOPPING the diet and returning to normal life.
In the past couple of years I purchased and used a scale to monitor my growth. I have been between 300lbs to 330lbs with close monitoring. I have never let myself get any bigger than this. As soon as I would get close to my “oh my god I am fat” weight I would immediately regain my focus, take up some physical activity, and go on some extreme diet. This would quickly put me back down to 300lbs. During my time as a consultant this was very easy to do. I had a fairly flexible life and could easily add SOME exercise and change my diet when needed.
Last year I took a job that was more of a full time thing that required a lot more of my time than I was used too. I continued to watch myself on the scale to make sure that I didn’t reach my magic number. And one day, I shit you not, my scale stopped speaking to me! I automatically assumed that the batteries must have been drained and it simply stopped working. No worries – I asked my wife to change the batteries. She did and I came home to weigh myself again. The damn thing still didn’t work. I had no idea that the scale had a 330lb weight limit!
<GRIN>
This really kicked me into action.
As my personality is not one to attack anything lightly (I am very obsessive about certain things) I immediately started to look at my life. What was the deal? I still had a gym membership but couldn’t make the time to GO (a process) to the gym and work out. I now worked really close to some great surfing but also didn’t have the time for that. I had to really step back from my life to see where I could FIT my work out in.
Along with assessing my exercising of late, I also took a close look at my eating. I was still living the life of a consultant. Bagels and cream cheese in the morning. Going out to a nice restaurant in the afternoon for lunch. Working through the night generally meant that the company would pony up a wonderful dinner of some form or another. But I didn’t have the exercise that I used to have.
Lots of eating and no exercise makes for a very rocky relationship with your scale!
Once my analyzing was complete I realized that everything had to change. I currently commute 75 miles to work every day. I live in the sticks as that is better for my family and work in LA as that is better for my career (and paycheck!). This couldn’t change.
I determined that I needed to make working out as easy as possible. I couldn’t have a process that surrounded working out. No more “getting ready” to go to the gym, then “going” to the gym, then “waiting” on machines for specific exercises, then “going” home, and finally getting ready for work. There is as much process surrounding the working out as there is actually working out!
In order to attack this issue I removed all the process and brought the gym to my home. With this problem solved I then needed to attack my other issue of diet. This whole concept of going on a diet had to change. So I did some research in the form of reading Muscle & Fitness and Men’s Health as well as reading a bunch of data on the internet. I moved away from my sloppy (but oh sooo good) food choices in favor of a body builders diet. I figure this appropriate as I was very interested in re-building my body.
In the end I quickly got my weight back down so that my scale would once again speak to me. But along the path of doing research I found that scales these days can tell you much more about your body than just how much it weighs. So I divorced my current temperamental scale and picked up one that now tells me my weight, body fat %, body fat weight, bone density, water density, and muscle density. I used this scale as soon as I got home. Talk about information overload. What this scale had to say I didn’t (yet) want to hear!
I went back to my old scale since we are on speaking terms once again!