Let’s Get Started, Again, Part 2
Flash forward to a few months ago, one night before bed.There I was, standing in the bathroom of our master bath, looking at myself in the mirror (you may choose to imagine me without clothing, although when you read a bit further, you really going to wish you took the with-clothing option).
“Dude,” I said, “you have turned into one damned fat slug.”
Not that I was ever “curiously gay GQ model” thin or “Terminator” bulked up, but this was just pitiful. If it was a hundred years ago, I could have inspired Franz Kafka to literary greatness.
Somehow in the four years since the birth of my first child, I had let myself go more or less completely - and I’m the father!
Each additional child seemed to compound things (or at least served as convenient excuses for me not to change, because, really, who has time with these kids and this job and that other thing and… and.. and…). I had learned to love good beer and happy hour far too much and too often, while giving exercise and healthy eating the opposite treatment. I spent my days as a desk jockey and my nights as a couch potato. I went from being rather fit in 2003 to being this guy: too fat, too bored, and probably borderline depressed, caught up in a cliched downward spiral.
Things simply had to change, and no one could do that but me.
Which brings us to the present… I wish I had taken a before photo, because I look a fair bit different now than I did three months ago. Imagine a fat slug in boxer shorts standing there thinking how much it sucks to be sluggy.
You’re right, probably best I don’t have that photo to post.
Now I work out five days a week and have been eating considerably better. I’ve banished beer to the weekends, except for allowing myself the odd happy hour after work to keep up the social connections and as a reward of sorts for good behavior. Mmmm, beer.
I’ve already gone from 5 foot 7 and 3/4 (shorter people know just how tall they are, see) and 198 pounds to, well, the same height but 182 pounds. Pants I used to have to fight my way into fresh out of the dryer now slip right on (and even start to fall off without a belt). I can see muscles I thought had packed up and let. Yet, I’ve got further to go.
But it’s not just my physical shape (formerly sluggy and somewhat like half a pear on two fat sticks) that has changed; I’m happier now. More focused. More intent on changing all else that needs to be changed in my life. More unwilling to settle for less than what I truly want.
I’ll be documenting the rest of the journey right here, or that’s the plan anyway. It could be something about finances or career, a link to a book I found motivational or informative, or maybe just something that made me laugh. It might be a post about a new skill, or something I am doing to improve an old one.
Hell, it could be just about anything that I think is helping make me better than I am.
You’re welcome to join in, looking for ways to be better than you are, and sharing with the rest of us (which, as of right now, amounts to me, random Googlers, and baby P sitting next to me on the bed). Maybe that’s all it will ever be, but I think putting it all down on this site will keep me motivated.
I’ll get things started by reposting some of the items from the old incarnation, the few posts I thought might still be relevant.
See you soon.