Some people think he’s crazy to be doing
such things. He’s an excellent,
experienced pilot who has been flying for decades.
He has always told me that you can never really avoid risk in life. You examine it, you
take action to minimize it, you weigh the rewards and then... you go for it!
What does risk have to do with weight loss? Here’s my premise: if there were no risk
involved, we would simply eat the precise number of calories needed to fuel our
day, exercise to the optimal point of health and poof! That’d be the end of it. None of the back and forth, up and down, excuses; no
meetings, backsliding or regrets. We’d
just do it.
We see the body and the associated lifestyle that we want;
why do we not simply reach out and take it? We want that sleek figure, the one with no extra handholds,
the one that looks like it could do any physical feat in the universe. We want to have energy, sleep well and, let’s
admit it, ladies... we’d kinda like to be admired for our physical beauty.
What stops us? What is the risk we're avoiding? We’re
very complicated, but could it be that some part of us is afraid to be living
“that” life, in “that” body? We say we
want all that energy and activity and admiration, but are we also a little
unsure about what we’d do with it if we got it?
I have seen over and over and over, many too many times for
it to be coincidence, people who lose impressive amounts of weight and just as
they’re about to reach their goal and make that lifestyle permanent... they
turn back. You Weight Watchers, you’ve
seen this happen, right? Someone is on the
verge of a major goal and they stop coming to meetings, and it’s never a good
outcome.
What is that thing that makes us turn back from the very
thing we’ve worked so hard to get? Have
you done this: made progress and when you realized you were succeeding, somehow
scared yourself back to your original weight?
We all cling to the familiar. It’s why Americans travel thousands of miles
to experience Europe and end up eating at McDonald’s. It’s familiar. It may be oil-laden, too salty and drip all
over your suitcase, but it’s home.
Would it help to acknowledge and think about the risk? What is it, on the other side of the weight
loss line, that scares us? Are we afraid
to lose the weight because we might gain it back and disappoint everyone… especially ourselves? Do we think that
bread and chips and cookies really might be the only things standing between ourselves
and despair? Do we fear to lose friends
when we start behaving differently than we used to? Does that sleek lifestyle look like something
we can’t really sustain, something that is meant for someone else?
Do we want to end up at McDonald's for the rest of our lives??
Give it a think.
We’ve all got something in our closet that is keeping us from claiming
the lifestyle we really want. What might
it be? What is the real risk? What can you do to minimize the risk?
Then it will be a matter of weighing the risk against the
reward... and going for it!
