Day 88 of 103in365: 24/103

Hey There!

Another week in the books and another 3 LBS in the books too!

This was a really stressful week for yours truly. I did things a bit differently in response to the stress than is my norm, and thus still lost 3 LBS instead of gaining or staying the same.

Thing the first.

I did not comfort myself with unhealthy food.

This is a big deal for me. My normal response to stress for most of the past 15 to 20 years is to hit the drive through, get a pizza, drink my weight in soda or pick one or more of any number of my goto unhealthy behaviors. Instead, I more or less stuck to the rules I have been following (Bob's Skinny Rules) and did not have soda or fast food and ate almost exclusively healthy food. (Total disclosure: I may have had one corndog and one homemade donut on Saturday, but that was it! Honest!)

Thing the second.

I moved around instead of sitting around.

Now, I did not do as many workouts as I had wanted to, but I was active more than my previous norm and I did not sit around waiting to forget my stress or for things to magically get less stressful. I worked out alone and with others, and moved.

Thing the third.

I reached out for support.

I am generally pretty good at asking others for support and advice, but this week I purposefully sought the council of more than one friend and planfully spent more concentrated quality time talking things out with my amazing wife. Through their support, especially my wife’s, by Saturday things smoothed over and now, as the kids say down at the schoolyard, “It’s all good!”

They say to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Loving stuff like that as I do, I like to generalize that concept to other contexts in my life outside of employment. I tell myself that I need to act like the man I want to be in the future, not the man I may have been in the past. I also tell myself that I need to act, make decisions and respond to life like a person who has the body and the fitness level that I want to have, not the body and fitness level that I have right now. I have said this in the past and I will say it again. I need to act and think like a fit person, not a fat person. I need to listen to the fit voice, not the fat voice.

(Digression) There are some people that say, they are fine with being overweight or “fat”.  This may indeed be true. It also may instead be that they have accepted what they do not think they have the ability, motivation or courage to change. I have never been one of those people to say that I was “all good” with being fat. It is only recently that I have dug deep and found my motivations, my abilities and the courage to do something about it. If I can do it, then anyone can do it! If you are really truly OK with being large, then that is your right. More realistic though, is that you are not truly OK with it. You simply must find a way(s) to dig deep and figure out how to get something different for yourself. I had to start a blog and make big goals. I had to seek out exponentially more accountability than I have ever had in my life. Ultimately, I am just taking it day by day. I know you have the courage and ability to find out what you need to do! All that being said, I believe it distills down to what Stephen King wrote, “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

Take away for this week: Bob Dylan said, “Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you’d like to act.” Thanks Mr. Dylan. That is another way to say what I have been trying to say. Another oldie but goodie is, “If I do what I have always done, I will get what I have always gotten. If I want something different, I have to do something different.” That is not a Dylan quote, but it is still one that I tell myself almost everyday. When I try to talk myself out of working out or I try to talk myself into being OK with eating how I know I should not eat, I tell myself that quote and make myself chose if I want something different or not. It is not about the two or three more significant choices we make every week, but rather the hundreds of little ones we make constantly.  One way to measure if you are likely to get closer or further from you goals, is to take note of not how often declare you want something different, but how often you act like you want something different. 

Have a great week!

Scuba