Not exactly a great year.
In fact - I've not been doing well. I'm stressed, I'm exhausted, and I've managed to kill each & every single good habit that I worked so damn hard to earn the last two years.
...and today, exactly one year from my historic low weight of the last 20 years, I stepped on the scale.
I have backtracked 79lbs. That's 6.5lbs a month, or EXACTLY the reverse progress of where I was two years ago.
I'm less than 60 days away from turning 50...and I'm just as fat and out of shape as I was when I turned 40. In fact, I'm just as fat & unhappy as when I turned 30! I'm still, twenty years later, so DAMN angry & frustrated that it makes me want to shake my fist at heaven & cry.
The worst part is that I have seen, felt, and tasted success. A year ago, I had the world by the tail, I had 14 months of STUNNING success behind me, and I felt like I'd solved the rubic's cube that had plagued me for two decades.
Ah, Hubris!
I'd "solved" nothing. I'd simply figured out how to get to the halfway point. I figured THAT out like a champ! The second half was a puzzle yet to be cracked, but it turned out to be the plateau that bit me in the ass.
You see, I'd figured out that nothing succeeded like success. Standing still sucked the motivation out if me, which caused a shockingly quick drop in motivation, which very quickly caused backsliding, which turned into a negative spiral in less time than it takes to find the next drive thru.
Add six months of life changing events, six months of sprinting through stress, six months of being too busy to 'really' pay attention, and I find myself the worst version of everything I hated about myself.
I no longer do Aqua Fit. I moved away from my old gym, where the great old instructor quit, anyway. The new gym is ... "new" ... an unknown quantity. No sense of comfort & familiarity there, and my old scheduled routine has been replaced with other bits of chaos that feel tougher to work around than they should.
I'm no longer riding my bike. My last two rides were July 6th & August 2nd. My finger got tired scrolling back further than that. I love riding my bike, but damn if the 'rush of life' hasn't drowned every last ounce of give-a-fuck.
I do still meet with the Trainer a few times a month, but with my base level of fitness dropping so precipitously, we're not lifting the weights I was so excited about, we're caught in the quagmire of basic core conditioning that I despise. Every week I'm a little worse, and every week I hate it more.
However, the real deal-breaker has been my damn diet. Nobody can out exercise a bad diet, and my old/fat ass certainly can't, either. The old sugar demons & rationalizations come roaring back, then the guilt & binge behavior rears it's head , and then we're back in an ugly place that nobody likes to talk about (but we all keep a Tide Pen, just in case)
I'm so sick of it. I mean, DAMN, I was sick of this shit 20 years ago. Back in 2009 I finally gave up, and while I wasn't "happy", at least I didn't hate myself. Even my Doctor told me "quit fighting it & beating yourself up. We'll just manage everything through medication".
Oh, wouldn't that be nice? Take a pill, and let all the ugly stuff in life just ... float away.
I went to lunch the other day with some co-workers, and they took me to a Chinese Buffet, now that I'm no longer a "salad nazi". The Buffet was ok-ish in my opinion, but everything was either fried, in sauce, or dessert-like. Afterwards, out in the parking lot, two of the guys were laughing about how that had been "totally worth it" while they injected themselves with insulin.
That moment freaked me out.
It was surreal. I can't go "there". I refuse. I won't give my gluttony free reign & simply shoot-up with insulin & take an assortment of pills everyday.
That's not "life", that's a death sentence.
So, I'm stuck. I'm in no-man's-land. I'm caught between not being able to maintain the difficult but good lifestyle, and not being willing to sell my soul to Big Pharma.
I've got to find a path, somehow...
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