When you hear stories about people changing their lives, there’s usually some Ah-ha! moment where they knew something had to change. I don’t know if I believe most of those things. The media’s job is to tell a story, and an Ah-ha! moment (AHM) is a pretty critical part of a good life-changing story. But something would have to be pretty darn dramatic to actually permanently change your life in an instant. Every time I think I have an AHM, I wake up the next morning and nothing has changed.
I used to think you had to have an AHM in order to successfully lose weight. It’s one of those silver bullets I talked about earlier — “If I could just have that life-altering experience, I’d all of a sudden have the willpower to withstand the temptation of ice cream and mac and cheese.” Instead, we go along not having life-changing experiences, and we keep getting fatter.
Well, as someone who has now lost 103 pounds in the last nine months without an AHM, I am here to tell you it’s not necessary. Stop waiting for it and make something happen. I used to think, “If there’s no AHM, what will make this latest attempt any different from my previous attempts?” What I finally figured out is this: an AHM is an external force — “My dad had a stroke at age 52 and I realized I was on that same path,” “I went shopping for a dress for my daughter’s wedding and had to buy a size 18,” etc. — but what will make you successful comes from inside of you.
I know that last sentence is the cheesiest thing you’ve ever read, and I’m sorry. But as I learned from Brad Wilcox when I was a teenager, “There’s a reason people like cheese.” I’m not here to preach some hippy philosophy about getting in touch with your spirit animal or whatever. I’m just saying that no external force is going to help you be successful in losing weight (or meeting any important goals).
(Sidenote: A good example of how AHMs don’t work is what I wrote about yesterday, when I went to the doctor and stood on the scale and saw that I weighed over 400 pounds. That is pretty much the definition of an Ah-Ha! moment, and guess what? It was more than four years later when I was finally successful. It was an important moment in my life, it had a profound effect … but it didn’t get me where I needed to be.)
So no, I don’t believe in AHMs (external forces), but I do believe in flipping switches internally. I’ve had two switches that flipped for me that finally put me in a position to be successful.
The first one actually started from an external AHM. On May 18, 2012, I got an email from my sweet wife. I had noticed that she was in a bad mood when I left for work, so I had sent her a quick “I love you” email. This was her reply:
You tell me everyday that you would do anything for me, yet the one thing that I want most for you, is the one thing you can’t seem to do. I feel like I’m a big reason for you not accomplishing it because I think I ask too much of you and you can’t say no to me. So I’m trying to need you less, trying to ask less of you, so that when you decide it’s time it won’t come as such a shock that you can’t come home when I think you should be home because you’re at the gym. I think there was a part of me that expected to be able to change you when we got married. But I’ve realized that it’s really hard to try to change a lifetime of habits.
I don’t want to change who you are, Jeffy, I just want to change the part of you that makes me so scared. I often think about what the kids and I will do if you die. I know financially we’ll be fine, but emotionally we will never recover. I will never find anyone that makes me as happy as you do.
I love you, Jeffy, but our kids deserve to have a daddy who can really play with them. Someone who has enough energy to play with them when he gets home from work.
I know you’re scared and I am, too. I really do love you. You treat me so wonderfully, and I don’t deserve it because I don’t treat you very well and I’m sorry. I already feel awful for telling you all this, please don’t hate me.
Love you. Bethy
Holy crap, right? Talk about an Ah-Ha! moment that The Biggest Loser would just love. “I realized that if something didn’t change, my wife would be a young widow and my kids would grow up without their dad.” If AHMs really worked, that email would have done the trick, right? Well, it was another five months and eleven days before I started. I probably gained another 15 pounds between when I got that email and when I started.
Why? How? Don’t I love my wife? Didn’t I care what I was doing to her? Of course I love her, and of course I cared. Even now, reading that email again, it breaks my heart that I was doing that to her and our kids. And while that AHM didn’t immediately change my life, it did flip one little switch inside of me. The switch that said, “It’s not just about you, buddy.” It didn’t make me stop loving ice cream. It didn’t make me all of a sudden be able to resist the frozen burritos in the kitchen at work. But it did get me looking for the right answer, because I realized that even if I on my own am not worth fixing, my wife and kids deserve a healthy me. (Of course, we all know that I, on my own, am worth fixing, but believe it or not, obese people don’t always have the strongest self-esteem.)
The other switch was later. In fact, I didn’t realize it had been switched until I was two months into my Health Journey™. Beth and I were out on a date one Saturday night, and as we were driving home, I found myself calculating what day of the week my birthday would be on, so I’d know if we’d need to celebrate it on a different day so birthday cake could line up with Cheat Day. Just a random thought, except … my birthday is in June. This was December. Two months into my new lifestyle, I knew that I would still be doing it more than five months later.
I literally almost cried when I had that realization. After decades of trying to lose weight but always knowing I couldn’t stick with what I was doing for very long, I had found something that I believed I would be doing for at least seven months. And let me tell you, for me, once I knew I could do seven months, I knew I could do forever.
I don’t know when the flip switched, but I think it was pretty early on. I have always known that weight loss will only be permanent if the changes that cause it are permanent. That’s why I could never get fully on board with a plan that didn’t let me eat ice cream, because that’s a permanent change I wasn’t prepared to make. When I first read The 4-Hour Body*, I thought, “Hey, I might be able to do that forever.” But it wasn’t until a couple months into it that I realized I was doing it forever.
*Interestingly enough, I almost didn’t read The 4-Hour Body, because the title makes it sound like one of those elusive silver bullets. I’m sure glad I did.
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