32. All Over the Place

Prior to writing this I think it is important to let you know that I am making no effort to focus. Typically I go into a post with some particular idea in mind and try to break it down. Even then I end up far from my original points, in this post I have no real point to drive to. I will in fact probably talk about a variety of things I have already talked about, things that mean nothing to anyone but me, or whatever else jumps into my head. I have had a very stressful 3 months and I don’t really feel the need to focus right now. So read on if you’re interested, but I am not sure you’ll kick yourself later if you miss this one.

My current work is extremely stressful lately. It is one of those jobs that has good months and bad, and it is nearly impossible to predict when you are going to have a slow month. I have managed to string almost of quarter of scrapping by together. I don’t mean that I am in danger of being fired to the best of my knowledge, or even that at the end of the month we are in serious danger of not paying our bills, but it keeps being one of those things that makes you wipe the sweat from your brow and say “that was a little too close.” I don’t like to make all my business happen with a week left in a month, it cuts into my sleep. It cuts into my patience. It generally turns me into a short tempered idiot, which as I am have mentioned is something I am working hard not to be anymore. I also tend to make rash and stupid decisions.

Just this week I was panicking about how slow December has been, and is a fit of frustration driven bad decision making I bought a bag of spree’s and ate it. Now some of you are thinking it’s bad because I broke my calorie goals, not so. The entire bag was 550 calories and I just had to not each lunch, and have a slightly smaller dinner…. However, it is important to note that I have not had that much sugar in one sitting for over 5 months. I started feeling sick about half way through the bag, but because I was angry and frustrated I force fed myself the remainder. I lasted about 20 minutes, then promptly emptied the bag back out, along with my breakfast, and had trouble keeping food down the rest of the day. Smart huh?
I get like that. Every single time things are going horrible wrong I get that way. I stay strong for a time, praying and saying how things will work out. Then time passes. Then more, and before I know it panic is bouncing back and forth in my brain like a game of Chinese ping pong. I lose it, and do something gloriously stupid. Sometimes it’s eating a bag of candy, sometimes it’s running till blisters burst on my feet (something that is very hard to do at this point), and it all goes back to faith. Sometimes I think you’d have trouble filling a Dixie cup with mine. It’s something I am working on, and I feel like a make it a little further every month before I panic, but so far I have broken every single time.

What’s more is that when I brake it is almost always a day or two later when everything turns, and the pieces fall into place and my family is provided for, for another month. After a few years of this you would think I would be able to have a little trust that things would work out if I just put my head down and kept working to the best of my ability. You would think that, but you’d be wrong. I think part of what makes the idea of faith some impossibly hard for me is its very nature. When it comes to the changes I have made to my body I needed to make myself aware and accountable, so I could take control and I could make the changes. I used “I” four times in the previous sentence. When it comes to faith what I was taught and continue to learn is that you have to give up that control, hand the reigns of your life over and trust that things are going to be ok, and not just ok but things are going to be good. It is a hard thing for me to understand.

This is how the typical cycle goes for me. 1st of the month, “ok God, I have faith that you will provide for me and my family, I am going to go out there and make the most of everything you provide.” 10th of the month, “still holding strong God, but maybe it’s about time you make something happen.” 20th “alright I’m driving, not sure what’s going on, maybe I did something wrong but I’ll handle this, we’ll try again next month.” A day or two later, “well… I did it again, I lost my mind, lost faith, and was proved wrong.” I want to be stronger than that, but that is the truth. I make it almost to the point where things work out and fall flat on my spiritual face. I’m young. I’m weak, but I am trying very hard to learn and grow. I need to be strong, I want my child to see a man whose faith is a rock, who knows without flinching that he and his family are well provided for.

I don’t know what kind of man I am. I know what kind I want to be, and that that person and the person I am now are not the same. What gives me hope is that I know who I am today is closer to who I want to be than who I was 6 months ago, and that has to be a good thing doesn’t it?

31. New Ideas

So with the myriad of changes I am attempting to bring about in my life there is a concept that I would really like to keep in mind in all my interactions. Basically the idea is that just because something isn’t a big deal to me, doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal. This is the fundamental underpinning I am building my attempt letting things go. I don’t want to get all wrapped up in being frustrated with other people doing what I believe is stupid, or get angry because my values and goals are not the rest of the worlds.

So let me give a few examples from my marriage. My wife and have hugely different opinions on a lot of things, and very different reactions to a variety of situations, one of which being how we react to getting sick. For my wife she typically takes a day or so off work to rest and recover. During which time she tends to feel like crap and just rest. In the most recent instance she was telling me how bad she was feeling and stopped mid sentence and said “I know it’s no big deal to you, but..” Which is where I cut her off, because the truth is it is not a big deal to me. I have to be extremely ill before I let it get in the way of pretty much anything. I don’t mean throwing up, I mean hallucinations. This is probably not the best way to deal with being sick, but for me when I get sick I never even consider not going to work, or doing my work outs. In my mind the best way to get past some virus is to burn it out of my system with work and exercise. However, what I am realizing is that for some/most people this is not going to get them better, and while vomiting and sickness are minor distraction to me, for my wife it’s a much bigger deal, and that’s fine.

The flip side of that coin comes in with my struggles to lose weight. Self control is a huge deal for me. It seems like it shouldn’t be, because I manage to get up the motivation to run, or do my weight training everyday, so you would think I would be able to keep myself from eating something bad for me. For whatever reason I can’t. I can keep myself from buying food I don’t need, but if it is in the house I WILL EAT IT. For my wife, she can have all kinds of snack food and candy around and have no problem eating a handful of chips, or a serving of Sour Patch Kids. For me the only way to deal with a half full bag of sour patch kids is to consume it, and I will, without fail, 100% of the time. I can not stress this enough. We could eat some of the candy, and she could hide it so I wouldn’t eat the rest, and I would search the house till I found it. This is not an exaggeration, I have done this. Much the same thing will happen if sun chips happen to be inside my walls. It starts with me telling myself I would just like a handful, getting one, eating it, then deciding another wouldn’t hurt. This goes on until the bag is empty. My wife has a hard time understanding it. She has frequently told me I need to get some self control, not understanding that for me the most self control I had was not buying it. If it was in the house it was a big deal, I was going to eat it, and while I am slowly limiting that absurd reaction in myself it is still a big part of me. After a long conversation she has been great about helping me out by taking the chips to work, and keeping that sort of thing out of the house.

I guess all I am trying to illustrate by those examples is simply this. What matters to you doesn’t mean a thing to me, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Just because there is something in you, something that makes you tick, or some trigger than you can not overcome but no one else seems to have a problem with, doesn’t mean it’s stupid or pointless. A friend of mine who is trying to lose some weight too comes to mind. I called her up to see if she had been working out, she grudgingly told me she hadn’t because of a huge number of factors that were stressing her out and distracting her from her goal. In the middle of her explanation she started in on the “I know, I know, I can’t let life get in the way…” ect.. I think she feels the need to say that because I am so OCD about working out. However, while I may be in a place where I have the discipline to work out everyday, not everyone is in that place. If you’re not ready, willing, or wanting to do what I do, it doesn’t mean it’s no big deal. There are things I make into a mountain you would consider a mole hill and vice versa, so I’m not going to make light of something someone else considers a huge obstacle just because I can move past it, because tomorrow the situation could be reversed and I would like benefit of the doubt.

30.

My wife and I found ourselves at Disney World again today, and we decided to take a picture that we had taken about a year ago. I just pulled up the last one and figured I'd so a side by side.

29: Image 7

So it’s been awhile since I wrote a good post. I have been very busy and it’s been hard to knock out the kind of time I need to really sit down and think about some things. However, I am now getting close to my goals and it brings up an interesting problem for me. You see part of what makes losing weight bearable for me, even though I hate every step, is the satisfaction of watching the numbers drop from the scale, and the inches from my waste. Hopefully soon there wont be anymore inches or pounds to drop, but it creates an interesting problem for a person like me.
I am obsessive compulsive. I talked earlier about how I was probably diagnosable when I was younger, but it has evened out with age, but it has by no means vanished. I think that is a big part of what has allowed me to make this happen. When I can turn that focus onto something positive I can get just about anything done, and done fast, unfortunately it tends to be focused on minutia, or negative things. So when I get to the light at the end of the tunnel I am faced with a interesting problem. The only reward for my efforts will be remaining the same…

There are basically three possible outcomes when I hit that mark. I increase my calorie intake to normal weight maintaining levels, continue to run, continue to work out, and live the rest of my life healthy. I may yo yo up and down, letting my weight have huge 40 and 50 pound swings for the foreseeable future. Or I get so stuck on the idea of limiting calorie intake, I put the blinders on and never get satisfied with the person I see in the mirror, and take it too far. I would like to sit here and say that I will even out as I hit my goal weight and live happily ever after, and that is what I am working for. However, it is in my nature to do things like the third options. I have a long history of taking things way too far. The simple act of writing this out, much like the rest of the blog, is part of my strategy to avoid that behavior.

The only reason I even bring it up is because of my mantra throughout this process, and my own self esteem issues. First off, from the beginning I have set myself minor goals while always having a finish line in mind. What I mean by that is, that I would tell myself “Boy I weigh “X” and when I get to “Y” that will be a big accomplishment.” In that equation Z is always my goal, but Z being something I wont reach for months, I need short term goals to make it feel worthwhile. When I hit that Y goal, I would indulge in a moment of victory and almost immediately think to myself “well that was pretty good, but really I haven’t accomplished anything until I get to (insert my new goal).” The thing I am faced with now is that my new goal is Z. My last goal. What’s more is that I don’t really know exactly what weight that should be.

The second thing that goes into this is my self esteem. Which is to say, my lack of it. Throughout the process I know that I am looking better, feeling better, and getting healthier week after week, but I still see the same old me in the mirror. I drive my wife half crazy asking if I am still looking ok, or if she things I put some weight back on. Essentially, I am physically shedding the bad parts of my body, but the mental parts aren’t leaving quite as fast. Slowly I am starting to gain some confidence with the changes I am making, but the mental game is not keeping pace with the physical. More than anything, more than hitting my goal weight, or fitting snugly into the bmi, I want to feel comfortable. I don’t want what other people are thinking about me or my body to even cross my mind. I want to get to a place where others opinions of my body never even enter my brain. To get there I have to first have to get comfortable with myself. I have been husky, fat, or obese as long as I can remember, taking my view of my own body out of that frame of reference is a lot harder than I thought.

28: Progress Reports: 1.

27. Image 6

So something else has occurred to me about that point at which I decided to change, a factor that with all the big stuff I was thinking on slipped my mind until I was talking to another race volunteer at the barefoot 5k I attended last weekend. We had the awesome job of standing at the 2.5k mark and telling the people who wanted to run the 5 to go left and everyone else to hang a right. We also had to go to that point about 30 minutes before the race actually started, so we had time to talk.

Naturally, given the event, we talked about how and why we started using barefoot shoes. He had been a long time running and didn’t really use them much, but got back into running to drop 15 or 20 pounds he’d put on since college, which led to me explaining my own experience with barefoot running and weight loss. After a lot of back and fourth on the topic he mentioned something that jogged my memories on how I felt in my own skin when I was up at my heaviest. He was joking about how it must feel like I was suddenly without a winter coat, and it made me realize that I had felt something very close to just that.

People with my type of body have the ability to put weight on all over. You don’t really develop a gut, there isn’t any one part that gets super huge, you just sort of swell all over. It makes it easier to carry and ignore extra pounds. I got bigger and bigger, but I had never really had that idea that my gut was getting a little to big for comfort, or I really needed to address my love handles or moobs. I was swelling but everything remained proportionate and I was told I carried it well. It did in fact feel like I was carrying it well. Until it didn’t.

Around the time of my daughters birth there was a distinct change in how I felt in my own skin. This was not a mental feeling or some self conscious nonsense, this was purely physical. One morning I got up and noticed my body. That is a weird sentence, but I don’t know how else to say it. Prior to my feet hitting the ground that day I knew I was big, but never really felt like it was a burden to me. Once I hit that point though, I could never not notice that layers of fat I was hauling around.

It went from me feeling like me, to me feeling like I had a snow suit on 24 hours a day. Except this suite was weighting, and jiggled when I walked, pinched when I tied my shoes, and made moving through attics (part of my job) a nightmare. After a day or two of dealing with this new found self awareness I did something that will stick in my brain forever. I got home from work, stripped down to my underwear, stood in front of our full body mirror and jumped. I had thrown cinder blocks into lakes that make fewer ripples. While this alone didn’t tip me over the edge to make the changes, it certainly put a bit more weight on the fix it side of my decision scale.

26.

I get angry. I get extremely angry. I am not sure all of the roads that led me to being like this, but the point is I get really, really, mad. I do not take it out on my wife, I do not take it out on my child, I am not prone to yelling, and I do not start fights. When I get extremely mad I tend to be very biting, and short with everyone around me. You can see it on my face, but I am not going to blow up on you, I may belittle you somewhat, but will probably apologize quickly and feel like an idiot and get even madder for letting myself get out of hand.

Like I said I don’t know when it started. I have vague memories of my Mom telling me I had a temper and yelling at her that I didn’t, which is a great illustration of the problem. I kind of wish I got angry in the traditional way, pressure builds, you blow up, everything goes back to normal for a while. With me it’s better to think of it more as a reservoir. I can hold a massive amount of it before it spills over, but it seems to always be slowly filling and filling, the pressure getting higher every day. For a time it’s not noticeable because there is so much room to fill before you can even tell it’s on the rise. Because of this once I realize there is a problem it is more often than not, to late to calm back down. I know it’s coming when someone starts talking to me and I am picking their words apart in my head looking for some point of weakness to exploit, something to say back, or trying to find some snide tone in their sentence. I am primed for conflict.

What drives me most crazy about this is that like a reservoir it’s not something that can just be undone with the realization that the problem is there. It will be with me for days once I get to the breaking point. I work very hard to drain the rage, but once it’s topped off there is a lot of frustration to rid myself of, and not to many outlets.

More than my weight, this is something I want gone from my life. From a health perspective it pushes my blood pressure all over the place, keeps me awake for hours at night, and causes me to make certain decisions during work outs that cause a variety of minor injuries. From a life perspective it makes me hard to be around and generally unlikable. I want to break my things when I get that way. In the past I did, I believe a power ranger or two suffered a terrible fate, to my immediate regret. Shameful.

I have been making strides to fixing this, and I was/am doing really good, but the last two or three days I find myself in that state of agitation for no good reason. I am frustrated, finances are tight (this will never change), my job is in a slump (frequent), and I am hitting another work out wall (like clockwork). I am getting mad. I know this because my wife asked me to do something and my brain started asking “what’s that supposed to mean?” questions about everything she says. So far I have been able to shut it down, but I find that every time I do I stack another Jinga block of rage on the tower.

I need to find constructive ways to deal with the anger. For most of my people related triggers I am getting better at dealing with them. I am trying to really look at things from the other persons mind set. They still might be an idiot for doing what they did, but in their mind it was needed, it was appropriate, it was justified. Nothing I think or yell out a car window is going to change the fact that they thinks they’re right. So why waste the time in being angry that they aren’t as smart as me? This has gone a long way and helping me remember that I am in fact not superior to everyone around me, which keeps me from losing my mind do to other peoples actions (mostly).

Life however, is something that seems completely out my hands, and not being able to exercise control over it frustrates me greatly. Frustration can boil over into rage quickly for me (see: simple drum pattern that escaped me). More than over eating, more than blaming my weight issues on genes, more than any of that I wish I could change this. It is a point of shame for me. I should be able to keep a level head, let the little things wash over me, let go of the things I can’t control, and think before I react.

I have decided to approach this in the same way I approach weight loss, as it has affected my eating habits for years. For example I may be going along following some diet, then something makes me really mad, well I don’t destroy me toys anymore, so maybe I just destroy my chances at losing weight, and in anger eat 6 hot and ready original glazed (has happened). So I am going to take the anger apart where it starts and try to rebuild a functional human on top of it. I will most likely not be posting in as great of detail on this topic, as it involves people at a level I don’t think is appropriate to just dump on to the internet, but I am going to fix this, because I don’t want my baby to grow up wondering why her dad is so mad all the time.