Get so much further ahead than those who wait.
Risk is a lot about timing and weighing the pros and cons, and determining what amount of chance a person is willing to take in the face of how much reward and potential loss could result.
When it comes to depression, the body and mind are perpetually telling us to sit. To wait. To comfort oneself. But the best way to combat the effects of depression is to get out and do. To try. To find something that sparks our passion and feeds our creativity and/or gets us active.
When I was ill, I got certified as an event planner, and opened a wedding planning business. It kept me functional, and it kept me from diving deeper into the bowels of a living hell. I reached out to other professionals who had to leave the workforce to deal with their illness. I found the standard support groups weren't exactly in the same ring of hell to which I belonged. We all suffered from the same illnesses, and had many of the same symptoms, but we didn't live similar lives. Some of these people were on welfare, were blue collar workers and they didn't necessarily understand or empathize with the level of political pressures that came with the work I performed every day. It is the one and only time where the class system has been so obvious to me. In every other situation, I considered myself to be as average as the next guy. And in this situation, it wasn't that I didn't have a sympathetic approach. Nor did I consider myself in any way better than the others in that support group. But I was different. As unique as they were. We simply didn't speak the same language, weren't drawing on a lot of the common experiences that are integral to the success of any support infrastructure. How is that supportive of either of us, when you can't even bridge the language gap?
So I did the next best thing. I surrounded myself with things that kept my mind sharp, kept my focus, forced me to get out of bed every morning, and meant that I was spending my time devoted to things that made people happy, and that were a result of people's happiness. It really boiled down to working in a happy environment, would be the only thing to yank me out of the darkness. It forced me to fake it like I felt it. No one hires a wedding planner who isn't happy.
And this thing with my weight loss is no different. People who do things, take action and who don't sit idly by spending too much time weighing pros, cons and who are willing to take measured risks, are the people who advance. That's to say go forward by any measure. Be they baby steps or leaps and bounds. He who waits is last.
I'm stuck in that 28-32 lb loss bucket. I've plateaued. This means I'm likely going to have to do 2 things. First, I'm going to have to kick it into high gear and start moving. I HAVE to devote time to exercising. There's no two ways to avoid it. And I'm likely going to have to schedule my first fill. I find that while I'm eating just a fraction of what I used to eat, and generally picking healthy options, my weight is stuck, and I'm most definitely hungry every 2-3 hours. The surgeon recommends not eating for 3 hours prior to bedtime, but I find that by 9pm I'm ravenous again, and if I go to bed that hungry, there's not going to be any sleep. And well, that's a recipe for disaster where it concerns my mental health.
So, today I'm committing to myself to do a work out at lunch hour every day 5 days each week, and when the weather is nice, I'll be walking down the street to pick up my mail as opposed to picking it up on the drive by the mailbox. I'm also committing to keep my food diary so that in 2 weeks time, when I haven't lost any more weight, I'll have all the things I need documented to request my first fill of the band. I'll admit, I'm about as nervous to go through that process as I was to go through the actual surgery. I had high hopes that I'd come out of surgery right at my sweet spot. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. And someone who takes action, gets a hell of a lot further ahead than the guy who didn't.
Onward and upward!
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