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Wednesday, March 3, 2010

What happened to Week 2 of my weight loss challenge?


First of all, I want to apologize for not posting Week 2 of my weight loss challenge. My commitment to weight loss still remains, but now I know it will require more effort than initially thought of. Let me explain. Week 2 was a rough week. Succumbed a couple of days to my old habits, overeating on those days. If that wasn't enough, I cut down on my exercise. This is the worst formula for losing weight. As a result, I didn't lose weight. I was afraid of weighing myself. And when I did, I got 316, which, unfortunately, was my starting weight on Week 1. My first thought was of hiding away, make the best effort for week 3, and post the results for that week , ignoring week 2 completely. Bury my mistakes away, pretending it never happened, and maybe my mind will somehow overcome by sheer necessity. This is a mistake I had made in the past, where procrastination plays a big role in it. When a change is in need, I always procrastinate, waiting for the "right" opportunity in an uncertain future, effectively ignoring my responsibilities at the most important moment, indeed the only moment we have: the present.

I will give one personal example of this: Before moving into the Augustinian community, there were (and still are) some habits that I knew I needed to change. I thought "Oh, moving into the community will be the perfect opportunity to change this, I will simply step it up, and pretend I never had the habit(s)". One of these bad habits is that I am a very disorganized person. My room is almost always a mess. I knew that keeping my room clean was important when living in community, but I never made any efforts to completely eradicate the bad habit. I thought "Oh, I'll simply start cleaning my room once I move in, and all this bad habit will be forgotten in the past". I convinced myself and fantasized that the simple act of moving in will have an almost magical effect of changing my persona, reborn in a new person, where the old habits were not overcome, but forgotten, and somehow eradicated in the process. But your habits follow you whenever you go. They move with you whenever you are. This old baggage we cannot leave hidden in our old house, hoping that it would never resurface in our new house. The only way of breaking this old baggage is by replacing it with something new, something better. And that's creating a new habit to replace the old. And this takes time and effort. Making the long story short, I cleaned my room for the first two week, but then stopped doing it. I didn't replace the old habit by creating a new one.

Disappointed, I shared my struggle with my brother Frank in the community. He used to be fat, and was showing me pictures as proof that he was. He encouraged me to keep forward in my plans. He told me that he wanted to lose a few pounds as well, just enough to reach his ideal weight. He proposed that we work together in this, and I agreed. He quickly drew up a chart, with my name to the left, his to the right. In it included my weight for that night, (he weighed himself as well), and the dates for the future weeks and space to put our weight for those weeks. We posted the chart in the main bathroom of the house, for all to see. That was last Thursday. Since then, I had greatly improved my eating habits, and exercised a lot more. I expect weight loss for this week, the weight in being tomorrow (Thursday). So yeah, my weight ins are changed from Monday to Thursday. And tomorrow I will post the results for week 3.

In the end I decided not to shy away from my mistakes and share this with all of you. Instead of ignoring week 2 completely and post the results for week 3, I thought that this can only help us to learn from my mistakes. It is better to share our struggles, instead of screaming on the mountains our achievements. If all of you know my struggles, my human brokenness, then we can all better enjoy our achievements, when we finally meet our goals. This goes not only to weight loss, but more importantly, in our lives with Christ. Amen.

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