100 Days

I’ll be totally honest here, I am sick of doing the food journal. Sorry, it is a pain in the ass. I had about 1,500-1,700 calories today. Maybe you see this as a sign of weakening, I see it as liberation.

Exercise: I did an upper body workout with 20 minutes on the elliptical.

So after the workout today, I weighed in at 280 even. It was a bit disappointing for two reasons 1) Last Thursday, I weighed in at 280.8. While I know I haven’t been super healthy the last few days, I figured I had lost at least a full pound. Apparently not. 2) After weighing in at 280.8 before today’s workout, I was really hoping to crack the 270s. But if I had gone five more minutes on the elliptical, I would have cracked it, so I can’t be that upset. We’ll see what the scale says tomorrow.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I laid in bed thinking about where to take this diet. You’ll remember yesterday when I suggested that I might just get back to 1,200-1,500 calories per day and up the workouts in an effort to take off 40 more pounds by the end of summer. I still don’t know if I am going to do that. However, last night, while I was just lying in bed, I all of a sudden jumped up in an enthusiastic outburst. The reason was that I wanted to begin that rush to 240 immediately. I was pumped up. It was very similar to the feelings I had back in December, when I got my mind set on this whole diet.

So maybe that is a sign.

I had lunch with my friend Melissa today. She started working in my office about three months ago. She said something that kind of made me cringe.

“When I started working there,” she said. “I thought to myself ‘wow, what a shame that guy is so young and so overweight.’”

I figure I was around 340 when she started. That kind of depressed me a little bit. How did I let myself go so much? And if she was thinking that, how many other people thought it, too? Obesity is a lonely place where no one is ever honest with you. It is a world of smiles and nods and the elephant in the middle of the room (which just happens to actually be you). As a fat person, you serve to make people feel good about themselves, if only for the fact that they are not you. Perhaps it would be rude for someone to say “hey, why don’t you stop being so fat.” Perhaps feelings would be hurt. But at the same time, it would be logical for the haves to push the have-nots, for the attractive to goad the ugly for reasons of hard-line inspiration. Why not?

We talk about mindless things in our daily lives, things that have no bearing on anything. So what is wrong with saying things of substance, even if a psyche is shattered? Perhaps that psyche wasn’t that good, anyhow. Perhaps that psyche needed to be broken down, stripped for parts and built back up into something sturdy and confident.

We worry what people are thinking, because we have no way of knowing. We wonder if our flaws are as obvious to others as they are to us. And sometimes the only thing keeping us from changing those flaws is that that we believe, through the silence of others, that we’ve been successful at hiding them.

And that’s not doing anyone any good.