The Destination and The Journey

Yvette has a friend, who clearly has a great story. Her friend is 4 11 and lost 100 lbs. The results are dramatic.
I am hoping that I will have a picture like this to show off to others. Yvette sent me this picture and my first impulse was to just throw it up on the site to share, but I didn't, and it occurred to me that I had a lot more to say about it. This physically fit/weight loss journey has been a long time coming for me. You see, I try to save all of my files on my computer, I have some files that go back as far as my first 486, I do not have any from the 8088 XT, but we are seriously talking about almost 20 years. In thinking about my week (which I still believe will be very good) I got to thinking that I am at a very risky point in my weight loss. I cannot give up. I cannot repeat the same pattern that I have in the past, I need to continue the fight. You see, exercise has been the key for me this week and it is clear to me that I have to progress to running again. I tried to run before I really needed to lose a lot of weight, I just wanted to be in better shape. So back to the files, here is a composite of all of the "run trackers" that I have made in the past.


And here are the trackers that I have on weight loss. (One big one that is missing is when I was using fit day to track weight.) The reason I am boring you with these pictures is simple. I've been here before. I've started eating betting, exercised a bit and moved the needles. Putting aside my unhealthy experiment with slim fast, I've never come this far, this fast before. (In my Slim Fast time, I lost 34 lbs in 8 weeks, which was 13% of my body weight, I will do just 10% in the same time frame this time.)

Here is the net effect after all of my starts and stops.

So back in the day, I could run a mile in 7 minutes and 24 seconds, to put that in perspective, when I was in high school, the best I got to was a 9 minute mile. So, I got inspired a few times, and in 2003, I was on it, I got down to 9 minutes and 54 seconds, as recently as 2005, I could do a mile in 14 minutes and 24 seconds. I wouldn't even want to think about what it would take for me to "run" (ha ha) a mile today. Maybe the weight loss has fared better.

This is absolutely pathetic, and I do not look at it to get depressed. There are two parts to losing weight, fixing your body and fixing your head. Healthy thinking is as important as healthy living. You can see that I have had as dramatic a loss as I did when I went on slim fast, but I've had two major failed attempts in between. What is amazing is that I tried to lose weight at 190 lbs, what I wouldn't give to be 190 lbs now.

The bottom line is this, I feel very different this time. I am not alone. I have all of you doing this with me. I am no longer defined by my work. I have hobbies, good hobbies, that I look forward to spending my time on. I am feeling better. I hope soon that I will look better as well. I do not want to look back 5 years from now on the same graph, and reminisce about when I was only 300 lbs, I will not let it happen. I am stronger than food.