Being Honest

As I mentioned in last night’s post, it was adapted from two posts I wrote about five years ago.  The adaptations mostly fell into three categories: fixing typos, changing timelines (saying “five years ago” instead of “last week,” etc.), and … making it a bit more honest.

Here’s an example.  In 2008, I wrote this:

I’ve got a great life. I grew up in a very happy home with awesome parents and five wonderful siblings with whom I got along just fine. When I was 26, I married the most wonderful girl in the whole wide world, and five years later she inexplicably still loves me like crazy. We have a beautiful daughter and an adorable son, to go along with countless good friends and just enough great ones. I can’t imagine being happier.

In last night’s version, it looked like this:

I have a great life. I grew up in a very happy home with awesome parents and five wonderful siblings with whom I got along just fine (still do, even!). When I was 26, I married the most wonderful girl in the whole wide world, and ten years later we love each other more and more every day. We have a beautiful daughter and two handsome sons, to go along with countless good friends and just enough great ones. I am very happy.

You can see a few tweaks there, but the one I want to talk about is that last line.  When I wrote “I can’t imagine being happier” in 2008, it was a filthy lie and I knew it.  I was happy, but when a smart guy like me weighs 400 pounds and has health problems and has no idea if he’ll get to see his kids grow up, he can probably imagine being at least a little happier.

Does it matter?  Maybe not in the grand scheme of things.  But as I was reading through that old blog last week, I was struck again and again by how dishonest I was being with myself.  I’d say things like “I will lose the weight” and “when I get to my target weight” and “I can’t imagine being happier,” but I never really believed it.  I hoped I would lose the weight and get to my target weight, but most of all I just wanted outsiders to believe that I believed it.

I’ve lost weight before.  Thirty pounds here, sixty pounds there.  But every time, my mindset was the same: “I need to lose as much as possible as fast as possible, because there’s no way I’m going to keep this up.”  The fact that I had that approach was a surefire sign that I would not ultimately be successful, but I wouldn’t admit that to myself at the time.

You want to know what I was thinking in the back of my mind back then?  “If I portray enough confidence in my eventual success, maybe someone will read it and give me the top secret info that will make it happen.”

I shouldn’t speak for all overweight people, but I’ve been one long enough and talked to enough of them that I am going to anyway: fat people want a silver bullet or a magic pill.  We’re told all our lives that the key to weight loss is diet and exercise.  Well guess what?  I’m fat because I really like food, and how am I supposed to exercise when I weigh 400 pounds?  So we go along, losing the same 20 pounds over and over again, hoping deep down inside (but never admitting it) that some new breakthrough diet or medicine will come along and allow us to lose weight without having to do anything impossible like diet and exercise.

And that’s why I always knew it wasn’t going to last, because I knew I wasn’t actually going to stop eating ice cream for the rest of my life.  And when you’re in all-or-nothing mode, there’s not much difference between “I will someday eat ice cream again” and “I will someday eat too much ice cream every day again.”  And once you’ve accepted that you will someday eat too much ice cream every day again, there’s not much to keep you from deciding, “Might as well be today.”

If we’re honest with ourselves, we won’t even start an approach that is doomed to failure.  That might seem like a negative — some progress is better than nothing, right?  Maybe, maybe not.  If you spend all your time bouncing from one fad diet to the next, you’re not spending time figuring out a successful long-term strategy.  Couple that with the illusion of success — “Hey, I lost 20 pounds!” — and you have a recipe for the yo-yo dieting that overweight people are so prone to.

It wasn’t until I started being honest with myself — specifically, I found a lifestyle change that I could stick with forever — that I really believed I could be successful.