It's your process, fuck the rest.

Walking, riding, eating right and staying hydrated, welcome to my life right now. This is the way it needs to be, I enjoy life like this better than any other way so that makes being a stress eater very frustrating. I see motivational sayings posted all over the internet and facebook etc and I think most of them are pretty silly mostly because I think every person struggling with weight loss though sharing THAT common denominator is in a different place.

5?? pounds.

I can state "The decision is yours! You have the fork in your hand! just put it down!" and some of the people will completely relate and say "hell yeah!" while others will want to say it and feel that way but truth be told they are not at that stage in their process. I find that weight loss and better health is less one dimensional than that and one day to the next can be completely different experiences not from different people but from the same person. When I am on point I feel unstoppable, I am a weight loss superstar dammit and this fat will not continue to loiter around on my front step and that's the end of it, but when a bad day peeks in well yeah. When I am off its a struggle, I mean every minute of the day, Staying true to the process is not easy in those moments and no matter how much I want or need to stay dead solid on track something inside is trying to get me to fail at that task.

I know life, if you want to call it that at more than 500 pounds, I know life at 300 pounds and I know life at 400 knowing how the other two feel after being there so recently and frustration is dug in deep on all levels. When I was 500 pounds I thought there was no fixing it on my own, I felt like it was a hopeless venture and I would be stuck there forever so I tried. That adventure brought me all the way down to 300 pounds, I got invites from talk shows to appear on them and I even went to the Dr Oz show because of it, I have made friends because of the weight loss, I rode my bikes constantly became very active and felt amazing. Then less than a couple years ago I lost my mother, I was 330 pounds on that day and I know because I posted a blog post here and got the call immediately after I posted and days like that tend to stick out in a persons mind. Some other "stresses" dominated my life and I put on at least 100 pounds over the last year and a half or so, currently I am just under 400 pounds after losing at my best estimate about 30 pounds.

320 lbs

Losing weight and better health is not a one size fits all kind of thing, BUT in general if you eat less (and healthy foods) and move more the weight should come off even if its not as fast as you would like. I am extremely motivated and pig headed once I get something in my head and for the life of me I could not drop any weight in the last almost two years no matter how hard I tried or pretended to try or or or.... 

I think that its awesome that blogger X, Y and Z are at that point in their process that they can tout how easy it is as long as you put the fork down or how YOU ARE IN CONTROL OF WHAT YOU EAT! rah rah sis boom bah! awesome... but.. Something I have learned is that no matter who we are, we all struggle with the same problem in very different ways and that is why there is no "miracle pill" that works or will ever work. 

 320 lbs

I am at a point in my process where I can see things from so many angles all at the same time and I almost feel like this is what I needed on a personal level to get and keep the weight off permanently, you know, to see 500, 300 and then start coming back up again so that in a way its like that whole not missing something till its gone thing. I am just under 400 pounds, I need to get back down to a maximum of 300 pounds and I almost feel like I needed to taste that freedom so that I can appreciate it the way that I should have when I was there the first time around. 

Walking with my children, riding my bike with my daughter, riding my bike alone on a trail covered in dead leaves on a cool Autumn day, appreciating everything that I can do effortlessly because I am not carrying the equivalent of another human being on my bones  are just some of the things that I enjoy about not being super obese. 

305 lbs, I need to get back here like NOW!

This post is purely written for me, I contemplated not posting it to the blog but I use the blog to reflect back at moments and how I felt at a given moment so it shall be posted. Take from it what you want to, take nothing at all if that works for you but remember we are all walking a road that is filled with obstacles, we all struggle and though the end results that we all seek may be the same, the road taken is rarely even close to the same.  

Stay focused, Stay as positive as the moment permits and with a ton of hard work I believe that we can all meet at the end of that road and share our stories of how we got there with one another. 

That's all I got. 

As Ever
Me   

A long winded reflection and quite possibly an eye opener.

This morning I woke up to the most fantabulous day that you could ever imagine, its 70 degrees the breeze is blowing into the window as fat white clouds float silently through the sky and no humidity in sight. spending the day out in the yard will likely happen after the am cartoons, breakfast and a shower, ok enough about that. My weight loss to date has been out of this world and when I made the decision to eat better and take the extra poundage off of my body I did not expect to be this far along in this short time and I am extremely happy with my results thus far. I was reading some of my older posts last night and I realize just how far I have come in the way of recipes, how often I eat and just the amount of weight loss knowledge and experience that I have now compared to then, now remember we're talking about just a little more than five months ago. right now I can walk into a restaurant or go to someones home for dinner and pretty much know what amount of food I can eat that is reasonable and healthy for me, I now know that eating a can of tuna 5 slices of white bread with two table spoons of mayonnaise with the better part of a bag of Sun chips and literally a quart of milk is not a healthy lunch, well the tuna is good for ya right? and the Sun chips are after all baked aren't they? and I am using 2% milk, thats gotta count for something doesn't it? that is honestly how I rationalized it in my head when I was making lunch for myself, and then wondered why I seemed to be blowing up in size, I mean I was eating good wasn't I? everything I just listed adds up to 1480 calories and thats using 2oz of sun chips as the amount that I ate on any given day with that lunch, 1480? seriously I eat less than that in a whole day at times now! that was just my lunch and I honestly in my heart felt that I was not eating bad because there was Tuna in there and the sun chips are baked and it was 2% milk, that example is an actual lunch meal that I would make, and often I might add.

Let me tell you its eye opening to me when I reflect on things like this, I can remember making BBQ chicken for dinner which would consist of a package of thighs/legs and a package of breasts, skin on bone in and more than a bottle of BBQ sauce dumped over it, cooked and served with corn bread, mashed potatoes and corn along with my huge glass of milk. typically I would have 3 thighs, I am a thigh man what can I say, a huge portion of mashed potatoes that when I made them used almost a whole stick of butter, two or three pieces of corn bread and a serving of corn that would feed two people, then when everyone else had eaten I would grab another thigh and possibly more corn bread on the way to the living room. there was usually one or two pieces of chicken left for lunch the next day, I don't even want to attempt to figure out what the calories in that add up to and to be quite honest, I don't want to know. now when I make the same meal? yes can you believe I make the same meal now and lose weight? we use skinless boneless chicken breast seasoned with Mccormick BBQ spices, the mashed potato is replaced with baked sweet potato the corn stays the same, there is no corn bread involved and my more than a quart of milk has been replaced with green tea, ahhhh there now doesn't that sound better? typically I will eat roughly 6oz of the chicken, 6oz sweet potato, 1 serving of corn and as much green tea as my little heart desires and when all is said and done there is left overs from three chicken breasts that were cooked so were actually spending less money because of this whole losing weight thing as well so its a win win.

That pint of Ben and Jerry's is still in my freezer from New years eve and its not getting eaten until Dec 31st 2008 because as I have posted before, if I am eating it, its going to be on my terms not because I could not control myself, that alone is something that I did not believe I would stick to, I honestly thought that I would have eaten it within the first week if not the first day on this new way of eating. I often wonder about that small insignificant pint of goodness sitting just feet from me every day and think about how I used it to not eat the wrong things early on in this trip by opening the freezer and saying "if I do not eat that for just one more day I have proven that willpower works" and the few times I have done that it proved to me that it was just a matter of willpower and there really is nothing else to it.



One hundred and eleven pounds later I don't even think about what I eat for the most part, its just natural for me to reach into the fridge for a snack and grab a pear now and I honestly don't even think about cake or cookies or any of that as an option on most days, we have some cookies and treats for the kids in the house and I couldn't tell ya if the cookies are good or not because I haven't had one. does this mean that I cannot have a treat when I want one? not at all, in fact just last night we went out to Dairy Queen and got cones for everyone, the only difference is that I did not order the triple hot fudge brownie thingy and I counted the 230 calories from the small vanilla cone into my daily allowance and moved on.

Jan 1st 2008 I woke up and was determined to do this, I will admit I did think that it would be just the next thing that I tried to lose weight but the difference was, one, I was scared that I was going to have to get a WLS surgery and two, the more I thought about how easy it really is to eat correctly the more I wondered why it took so long to realize this little fact and actually felt weak for letting food for lack of a better term control me to the point of weighing five hundred plus pounds. the bottom line is that its just a willpower thing, no one needs a 1480 calorie lunch, nobody. a persons body does not need that cookie or that piece of cake, no one needs to drink soda or a gallon of milk in a day none of those things are needed to sustain life, none of those things are needed in my body or yours period. once a person can get over the mental part of it the rest is easy, don't believe me? I have lost one hundred eleven pound in just over 5 months and the only thing that I do is eat following a 1500 calorie per day limit and moderate exercise which honestly consists mostly of some walks and riding a stationary bike every now and again. This is My life and it will not be controlled by anyone but me from here on out. the bottom line is that You are the one that decides what you eat or do not eat, its not Ronald McDonalds fault, its not the Canoli's fault and its not even your Auntie Margie's fault for making the most mind blowing peanut butter fudge that man has ever seen, take a look in that mirror and say Hi to the person that makes the decisions, whether the decision is to stuff a Del Taco double cheeseburger down your neck on the ride home from work or to choose the pear over the cake as a desert to your Salmon dinner. The opinions contained within this post are not only that of the author but they are fact as well, if you choose to use any of the techniques mentioned above be aware, weight loss WILL occur, you have been warned. if you made it this far down the page I thank you for reading.

As Ever
Me