Weight loss – pressure, and time
Recently, a line spoken by Red from the movie Shawshank Redemption comes to mind: “That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time.” (imdb.com) Red was talking about Andy digging his way through a prison cell wall, slowly, one grain at a time, and eventually getting all the way through to the other side. I think he could just as well have been talking about trying to lose a large part of yourself through diet and exercise. According to my bathroom scale and the time of day, I’ve lost about 30 lbs. since mid-January. Which is really awesome; I’ve lost as much as some of the contestants on the Biggest Loser special edition shows. It is truly a challenge though, every single day. Especially at work, where there’s always someone that has treats (cake, candy, chips, etc), and it’s so damn easy to have a handful of this, or a piece of that, because I work in a very frustrating and stressful environment and food’s an easy comfort. Even if no one has treats, there are vending machines full of evil and temptation, made worse because they’re convenient when you didn’t get a chance to make a healthy lunch and snacks to take to work.
I can generally manage all right at home. I can even go out to eat at a restaurant and do all right. Work is a problem. I spend nine hours a day at work, always under the watchful eye of the clock and the sheet that keeps track of how much work I’m doing. Not keeping up with the numbers today? That apple fruit pie for .85 in the vending machine would make the day better. Right? Bzzzt… wrong answer! I think something that gets missed in the overall plan of losing weight, eating right, getting fit, and being healthy is that there’s more to it than getting the right number of calories and the right amount of physical exercise. There’s the mental side, the emotional side, the Zen that you have to learn (or relearn) in order to make it all work. If I end up in a truck parked on a mountain in Afghanistan next year, or I’m still at my current job sitting in my half-cube, I can’t go and do something to relieve the stress. I’m on duty, I’m working; I can’t exercise, I can’t meditate, I have to focus and I have to just manage it.
The day will come when I step on that scale and see my target weight smiling back at me, and I’ll jump on a treadmill and run 1.25 miles in ~12 minutes, and I’ll look back and see that it took two things: pressure, and time.
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