4XLT

Today’s Weigh In: 306.2 pounds

I had a really fantastic mini-vacation / long weekend last week. I lived life. I partied hard. I had a great time. And, yes, I chowed down like a bad mofo. And then got back last Sunday night, weighed in on Monday morning, and cranked in at 305.8. I’ve been floating around the 306 mark again ever since.

I haven’t been to the gym since I’ve gotten back to Portland, and I haven’t blogged since before I left – coincidentally, no weight loss. Actually, that’s not coincidental at all.

I can’t ignore the fact that when I blog, I am paying more attention to my health, and consequently make better decisions like eating right and getting to the gym. When I’m not blogging, I have always failed to work as hard as I should. While I’m certain there’s something underlying that fact that isn’t settling real well with me, I’m not going to be delving into the why’s at the moment.

When I started this blog in December 2007, I was at the very beginning of a weight loss journey that has seen me lose about 140 pounds now so far (at least 60 left to go to make my weight loss an even 200, but probably a good 80 to get lean, not factoring in the loose skin). At the time, I was so desperate to change my life and lose weight that I was recruiting anything and everything to get started.

As the pounds began dropping, I was excited about it and almost as excited to see people read the blog and write about it. But as I’ve been on this journey, I’ve found that the weight loss has intertwined itself with other life changes as well. Socially. Spiritually. Personally. On a few occasions I’ve written about some rather personal issues that I’ve slogged through in the course of it (you can find them if you search around – I’m not going to link to them).

And in the midst of all these other goings-on in life, a funny thing has happened with how I view my blog. At the beginning, I was proud of the work I was doing and how I was writing about it here. I was happy to invite my friends to check it out. I was pretty open about the fact that I was trying to work my way down from the mid-400s. In a weird sense, having this blog and being out and public about my weight loss was a sense of power over it.

But oddly enough these days, I feel exactly the opposite. I don’t want to write about all the inner / mental game stuff going on, but I recognize that it makes the blog worth reading – no one wants to read throw food lists and work out routines. That’s just boring. But at the same time, I’m not comfortable any more putting myself out there in personal ways (and more power to those of you who do), especially seeing how this blog is directly tied to me and my professional work (being hosted on willphillips.org). It’s weird, I sent the link to the blog a few weeks ago to some friends who hadn’t read it and felt really off about it after I clicked the send button. At a church small group meeting, I shared briefly about how I was close to the 200s and I felt even more peculiar about it.

I’m not sure that its because of the blog insomuch as any more I’m just not comfortable being vulnerable with most people about anything that really matters to me. And the weight loss stuff rubs elbows with a lot of similarly personal changes in life and worldview and the like going on these days. To be truthful, I’m very happy having a fun but shallow relationship with pretty much everyone I know these days. That suits me just fine.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do here. Might start up an anonymous blog somewhere. Might stop the blog alltogether, but I don’t think that’s a wise move.