The Time It Takes

Having turned fifty a few years back, what I mostly remember about the event was realizing that fifty is the age after which, if your friends hear you suddenly died of something like a heart attack, they shrug.  Before that, they would have said, “he was so young!” but once you’ve passed the big five-o, not so much.  Especially if they knew you were heavy, and especially especially if they’re thin, because, as we’ve already discussed, thin people just assume you could have lost that weight if you “really wanted to.”  “He should have been like me,” the scrawny ignorant bastards would have thought.  In the nicest, sweetest and most well-meaning way, I knew they would tell themselves that if I keeled, I had it coming.

If for no other reason than to deprive them of that misguided satisfaction and to save them from all that bad karma, I have to do this and do it now.  Of course the real reason is I love what I’m doing and experiencing in life far too much to see it wrecked by health problems.  I was feeling sluggish, blood sugar wasn’t controlling itself as well as it should, and in short, major commitment was needed.

In late January I found an article in the NY Times that inspired me, and I think that helped get things rolling again.  It was on people who make big changes in their weight or body.  The article (“Fitness isn’t an overnight sensation” by Gina Kolata) captured some of what I’ve known about big weight loss projects, mainly that these projects take time.  Time is either your friend or your enemy in this kind of project, so we might as well face that head on.  And there are three very distinct aspects to this “time” issue.

Character and weight loss

Pop quiz: Which person in the picture above has the most “strength of character”?  Answer fast — left or right.

You guessed left, right?  The thin woman.  Why?

One of the obstacles in launching a big weight loss project is the psychological mix of messages we tell ourselves about weight loss.  The simple fact is that it is hard to accomplish significant amounts of weight loss.  The stats show that — most of us fail at it, often time after time after time.  (I’ve been working on it since age 8.)

The other simple fact is that it usually seems like it should be easy — to anyone who hasn’t tried it.  In fact, one of the things that isolates overweight people is that thin people (including your doctors and those perky little 22 year old dietitians they send you to) so often look at you and think, “why don’t they just…” and the implied rest of the sentence is, “be like me.  Do like I do.  I manage my weight just fine.”