Each day is a special gift from God, and while life may not always be fair, you must never allow the pains, hurdles, and handicaps of the moment to poison your attitude and plans for yourself and your future. You can never win when you wear the ugly cloak of self-pity, and the sour sound of whining will certainly frighten away any opportunity for success. Never again. There is a better way.
~Og Mandino (American Essayist and Psychologist)
As I have written about before, in the last year or so I have been trying to lose weight. I have been quite successful, up to a point. I have about 20 pounds to go, and I simply cannot seem to get them off. I lose a few pounds and then gain them right back. A holiday comes and I go nuts eating food that packs on weight, and spend a month getting back to where I was. And there is always an excuse!
I have two "diet buddies", my sister and my best friend. We report to one another our successes and failures on a weekly basis, and try to keep each other going. They have both had great success as well-- there is a lot less of us than there used to be!
However, recently all three of us have been struggling with our "diet mojo" and have put on weight. This has prompted a flurry of emails. We each have our own reasons for our failures, and each of us readily acknowledges that they are merely excuses and we should get back on it. Except we continue to struggle. It dawned on me that we are each facing our own hurdles in life and that we need to look at them like the athletes who run the hurdles do...
1. Find a coach or a team to hook up with that will provide you with training, incentive, and the companionship of kindred spirits all working towards a common goal.
2. Prepare yourself to tackle the hurdle by making sure you have the right equipment, that you are physically in as good a shape as you can be, and that you have studied the hurdle so you know it well. How high, how close together, what the track surface is, whatever...
3. Remember you jump hurdles one at a time, not the entire course of them in one jump. That means that each small hurdle must be tackled before you can finish the race. Trying to leap all the hurdles, or even two at a time, will result in you falling in a big heap on the track!
4. When starting to learn a new athletic event, the athlete can be assured s/he will fall or fail at first. No athlete will win another event if s/he stays wallowing in the previous failure. S/he learns from mistakes, puts more energy and training and work into making him/herself better.
So... with all this in mind, I move forward to better success in my weight loss quest. And I will look at all hurdles in a new way-- as challenges to make me better. Life can sure be hard to do well sometimes, but with a little preparation and the right mindset we can each jump over the hurdles in our path.
As a nurse, you know that our bodies want to hang on desperately to keep every ounce of adipose tissue we wear. It gets very peevish when we are winning that battle against it and will do all it can to sabotage our efforts. I am at the point that, so long as I am engaged in the struggle, no matter if it works or not, I am far better off with each day I attempt to eat well and exercise. Am I disappointed that the numbers on the scale are stubbornly stable? Yes! However, my revised perspective allows me to keep going and, at least, be happy about my improved lipid profile if not my external profile reflected in the mirror. Good post, Barb.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, since I am my father’s daughter, there is nothing about me which is small. I have spent most of my life measuring my self-worth by my size and that had to stop. Starved to skin and bone, I am still a size 12. I know. I did it once and was able to and keep in that range for a number of years. You have to come to terms with who you are to some extent.
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