Yeah, I’m calling it a full two months early. 2009 sucked the big one.

I got in a car wreck—that I caused— this summer for which I still might be on the hook for about three grand. Then I got laid off at the end of September. A small mountain of emails, a metric ton of resumes, and several weeks later I get word that my old job was hiring. I’m going back to work there next week, but only with a four month contract. But don’t get me wrong, I liked my old job and am very happy to be going back.

I’m not talking or complaining about all those external things, though. Yeah, they sucked and yes to one degree or another they could have been avoided entirely, but this year was garbage for one big reason for me: I gave myself two very clear goals in 2009 and failed to achieve either.

I was back home in Oklahoma last December for my sister’s wedding. I remember so clearly sitting in my favorite chair—my Great Uncle Guy’s wingback— sketching out ideas for a design business logo and thinking clearly about the year ahead. There were only two things on my mind: “Health &am; Wealth”

Health &Wealth and Not Much of Either

So here we are with less than sixty days left in the year and what do I have to show for myself? Not too damn much at all.

Looking at my last post of 2008, you’ll see I was 312 pounds. I weighed in at 316 this morning. And in a moment of self-disclosure, I haven’t been to 24hr Fitness since I badly sprained my ankle in August.

This week I’ve been getting back in the habit of the weight complexes. They may be brutal, but they don’t completely replace a strict weight training plan at the gym. Better than nothing, though.

And as for wealth – instead of actually getting my rear in gear, getting myself into the community, networking, filing the LLC paperwork, and hustling… I’ve sat around in typical ENFP Will fashion and daydreamed: about starting the business properly, about a Northwest tourism and travel site (Click and see how poorly that’s been worked on.), about my epic fantasy novel / worldbuilding project, about the Seahawks, about a hundred different things. And I’ve done nothing.

So yeah, 2009 sucked. And if I don’t take some lessons from it (very first instinctual guess – I need to learn focus and discipline), I’m going to be ending 2010 in the same way over 300 pounds.

Hands down, one of my favorite and most motivating quotes ever, because it cuts to the core of a lot of my personal laziness and excuse-making. It’s not a nice, happy, “you’re special and wonderful” type of marshmellow cupcake quote, but it’s true.

If I want it – losing weight, being successful in business, finding an amazing woman, anything – the single largest determining factor is simply how much I want it. Do I care enough?

And if I’m honest, most of the time I don’t. But more and more often, I do.

For most of us dealing with significant weight loss and/or other health issues we could have prevented but didn’t (in my case, bad teeth, significant acne scars, and Acanthosis Nigricans darkening on my face), there’s a tremendous amount of regret we tote around regarding our past.

I’m happy to be very much heart on my sleeve about all the regrets I have about my past – across the board in a lot of areas of my life, not just with my weight. But sometimes, all the regrets pile up like a millstone hung from my neck and threaten to drag me down. Why did I do this? Why didn’t I do that? To be specific, why in the world did I wait until my mid-twenties to finally start giving a damn about my health and appearance?

But I letting the regrets kill me is only going to do just that—put me in the grave. I feel like I’ve been living half-dead for too long and never realized it. Why would I want to keep stressing over what I did or didn’t do and thereby contribute to an attitude that isn’t part of the better Will I envision becoming? I shouldn’t, regardless of how much it might temporarily feed my own occasional depressive tendencies.

What would have been the best time to get healthy, take care of my teeth, and clean up my skin (and learn to be more sociable, financially astute, not naive, etc)? Way back at the start of high school. But that didn’t happen. It can happen now.

So for me, I may look back and regret a lot of stuff, but I would be best serve myself by learning from it and leaving it all behind. I move forward and refuse to repeat what I’ve come to regret. Time to plant that Oak tree today.

It’s sure been a while, hasn’t it? Almost three months since my last post, and what do I have to show for it? A good fifteen pounds. And, everything I said last time still stands. I’m still uncomfortable putting myself front and center by exposing all the inner workings that go along with losing weight and reinventing your life when you’re over 300 pounds (and once was 440).

But, just like I said last time, “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.” So, that brings me here back to 4xlt.

While this entire summer has been a complete waste on the weight loss, front, it isn’t to say that it’s been a waste all together. Honestly, there have been some definite highs – namely in the form of having a good time with friends, and learning a lot about myself. Even more so, but certainly more cryptically (sorry), having the startling but welcome realization that all the presumptions I’ve been walking around with about myself and life and other folks may not be completely true. Or true at all. Period.

But beer, crappy food, little sleep, and no time at the gym do not my future self make. And regardless of how my choices for the last nine months may have shown, I most certainly am not satisfied with being who I am today.

Starting Again Today

I’ve made some piddly-ass, worth-nothing declaration to myself for at least the past two weeks, and exactly nothing has come of it both times. Well, no longer.

Several weeks ago, T-Nation’s Weekly Dose linked to an article on using weight complexes for cardio. Much in the same way as my “this has got to change” declarations I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’d always tell myself that I need to give this a try – and then do nothing.

Today that changes. Sports Authority is having a 20% off sale (at least on their weights, but maybe more), so I took $40 I really could have used elsewhere (in other news, I’m getting laid off this week, but I’ll gripe about that another day) and bought myself a 45 pound plate.

And tonight, promptly started sweating and gasping and having my too-tight muscles threaten to kill me. I got to be honest: in some sick and twisted way, it felt really good to be sweating and gasping for air and moving weight around again..

I’m not going to promise the moon just yet, but what I will is to go through my complex daily for the rest of the week. I’ll give myself bonus points if I do it twice with a morning set, too. I also resolve not to get lax nutritionally with fast food (yeah, got back into that crappy habit this summer, too) for the rest of the week.

Next Monday, I’ll look at my goals. But, before I start my typically windbag way of talking the talk without walking the walk, I’m going to prove it to myself first.

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.

For the first time in eight years, for the first time since high school, I weigh less than 300 pounds. I’m never going back.

Still here. Still watching my eating. Still watching a bit of an direct correlary to the amount of food I eat and how much I lose, but not in how your would suspect. I wonder if that by going so low on my caloric intake (sub 2000) for several days in a row that my metabolism starts to shut/slow down and so it holds on to any food and water for dear life, thus the fluctuating weights? And when I eat more than my minimum maintenance level, my metabolism kick starts again? I dunno, that’s just my best guess so far.

My water intake’s been right where it needs to be, and I know that keeping hydrated and flushing toxins out of my body at a firehouse rate certainly helps things.

That’s about my only guess. Past that, there’s not too much to write – or more honestly, not too much I want to write about. I guess you can say I’ve been really questioning this blog and why it exists and if I’m comfortable with what I’m writing here (in the sense of putting myself out there in regards to certain parts of my life).

I can’t say I’ve come up with a conclusive answer, but I do know that when I blog consistently, I am thinking more about my health and weight loss, so I make better choices, and end up losing weight. That right there is a good reason to keep it up, but I may change focuses to write more strictly about the What, When, and How of my weight loss rather than the Why.

My body is fighting me really hard to get through to the 302 mark, much less 299. I weighed in Saturday morning at 204.6 after eating fine on Friday. Weird and frustrating.

Saturday, I helped some friends move all morning and worked up a good sweat. Things were going just fine. My nutrition was okay, sans the two big homemade cookies and Barq’s Root Beer I had while moving, but I figured I could dial back my nutritional intake the rest of the day and come out ahead. That was all fine and dandy and going pretty well until about 11:00 that night when I hit up Applebee’s with some friends… and had a burger, fries, and beer.

Well crap. or so I thought. I woke up Sunday morning at a svelte 303.2 – the heck?!

And to make matters even worse, I ate right spot on all throughout the day Sunday, even refusing to eat a single thing at Red Robin after church. And my weight in this morning? Back close to 304. Bah.

PS: Go read this article: Seven Keys to a Successful Body Transformation – it’s a really good overview to things. My favorite line(s): “When you turn on the TV and come across a show about weight loss, you’ll see a lot of crying, hugging, and syrupy-sweet one-liners about having a positive attitude. Well, fuck that. In the real world, successful people get pissed off…Now, how does a self-pitying whiner deal with discomfort? He quits. How does a guy who’s willing to be an asshole deal with it? He gets ticked and fights through it. And he wins.”

So, I’m not going to sit here and complain about things. I’m going to go home, cook some chicken, throw the sandbag around, sweat some, and win.

Well, I hit another weight loss spike yesterday, but I can’t claim it’s anywhere as surprising as the one from earlier this week. A friend of mine from college (Go Pokes!) plays in a band called Other Lives (formerly known as Kunek). Really great stuff – kinda this Radiohead meets Sigur Ros meets folk thing going on. Well, I ended up going to bed pretty late as a result, and that in tandem with my two beers shot me right back up to 304.6 yesterday.

And in a supreme sense of oddity, I ate pretty poorly yesterday and was prepared to see a 304 or even 305 (gasp) this morning, but ended up at 303 again. Weird.

Well, the weekend is approaching, and I’m dead-set on hitting 301 by Monday morning.

Enjoy your weekend. Have fun. Live on purpose. Lose weight.

I am reminded of something my friend and fellow weight loss / health blogger Billy said to me once: “Work hard to change yourself now, and when the time comes unless the best Will possible on the world.” I can’t remember if it was in an email or a comment here at my weight loss blog, so I may have mangled it slightly (or greatly), but the sentiment remains.

I feel that I’ve got so much awesome change – and the potential and desire for so much awesome change – going on in my life, that it’s easy for me to try and become better at everything all at once: health/weight, socially, professionally, personally, etc. And in doing so, I just end up spinning my wheels. And when I spin my wheels, I get nowhere. And in getting nowhere, I just get frustrated.

But when I take a step back, I come to the realization that there are some pretty important things I want to experience and become (forgive me for being somewhat vague). And for these parts of my life, becoming healthy (aka thin and strong) is by necessity a significant portion of the foundation that must be in place first.

At times (like today), it makes me consider becoming some kind of a health hermit until I reach all my related weight loss goals. Not that I would become completely anti-social (hard for an extrovert like myself), but that I would commit so specifically to changing this aspect of my life first and foremost that it would trump anything else for the next several months. Part of that would be to just be at the gym way more than random hangouts. Another part of that (HUGE part of that) would be the mental discipline to disengage from a lot of the superfluous or otherwise pointless (at this point) mental entanglements that can snag me so often.

Sure, it may not be just the very most exciting life, but if I’m thinking about the long term and creating the life I want to live instead of settling here at 300 pounds and all that goes with weighing three bills, it may be just the solution I need.

One Third of the Way Through My 21 Day Challenge

A week ago, I decided to give myself three weeks to lose 15 pounds (roughly) in order to weigh below 300 pounds for a quick weekend trip to see my family. I’m exactly on track for that. I needed to drop four pounds a week and have lost just that.

Although, I have to admit that I’m still pretty chapped about my mystery two pound weight jump yesterday. Yeah, I know that weight fluctuates and day to day weigh ins don’t matter as much as the long haul, but still – it irritates the fire outta me because I should be at a 301 right now and I’m a pound and a half up. The only thing I can figure is that someone must have spiked my peanut butter with a ridiculous amount of sodium.

Regardless, I should be satisfied that I’ve stuck to my plan and my word, worked hard the last week (the easy weekend notwithstanding), and dropped exactly the weight I needed to drop. However, finally being back in the swing of things and being so close to 299 makes it hard to be satisfied in anything else than that.