Beliefs, Behaviors, & Habits — Part II

How a firm decision and a simple daily habit enabled me to lose 80 pounds and keep it off.

As shared in yesterday’s post, I’ve fought a lifelong battle with my weight, cycling within a ±20 pound range around a weight I’d accepted as my fate. Yes, I used all the excuses — big bones, slow metabolism, too much stress, not enough time to eat right, no time for the gym, and so many more.

And I convinced myself I would never be able to weigh what the doctor’s charts said I should to be healthy.

But one day I decided to do the work. To figure out the problem and solve it. To stop pretending it didn’t matter or that I couldn’t do it.

To be clear, this wasn’t the first time I’d made that decision. But it was the first time I went all out and all in on doing it.

Here’s what I learned…

It takes a lot of deep work to solve such a problem. It is a slow and arduous process. And it is worth every minute.

And, though it's not fair to project my journey onto others, I’m convinced there are a lot of people who are very much like me — people for whom overeating is a symptom of a deeper, and often darker, problem.

Until that problem is addressed, the battle with the scale will continue.

For me that problem was depression. It started in my teens, attacked with a vengeance in my mid-thirties, and came back even stronger in my mid-fifties.

I medicated by eating sugar. A lot of it. Every day. Morning, Noon, Night (and in between).

You see, sugar triggered a serotonin-like response in my brain, quieting the voices and easing the angst. Sugar made me feel loved and cared for as it transported me to memories of making cookies and custard with my grandmother. Sugar gave me the energy I needed to fuel my creativity and drive my work forward.

But sugar kept me stuck.

It was my unacknowledged but ardently defended addiction. Something I oddly felt was OK. I mean, at least it wasn’t drugs or alcohol. Besides, I could give it up any time as my many cycles of losing 30-ish pounds and keeping it off for a while proved. And my closet already had the requisite three sets of clothes to help me manage the ups and downs on the scale!

Yet, someday I would kick the habit, lose weight, and become healthier.

Someday I’d reach the point where I would never again push my annual physical down the road to give me time to get my weight down.

But first, I’d have to deal with my reality.

After hiding for years from the trauma I experienced when I was ten years old, I committed to sorting it out in December of 2017 when I realized none of my three sets of clothes fit.

I wanted to stop walking around angry and on edge all the time. To discern the meaning within my experience, because it had to mean something. To find a proactive path to managing the highs and lows of my depression.

After months of deep work journaling through the realities of what happened to me, going to therapy sessions a couple of times a month, and allowing myself to start talking about it in places where it was safe to do so, I gained clarity on what the journey had meant.

A cornerstone of my process was my commitment to finding a way to share my story to help others avoid the pain I’d experienced. I had long ago accepted the need to help others but had never figured out how. Though I was relatively certain it involved my speaking and writing about it, that didn’t seem like something that would help my business.

It turns out I was wrong.

Doing the work to release the message I had earned from my journey was the path to the moment when it all changed…

The central focus of my journey to unlock the meaning of my journey led me to create a keynote speech around the story. And on July 2, 2018, I saw a 4-minute demo video recorded a few weeks earlier and felt this overwhelming disconnect — the person on the screen delivering my message wasn’t me.

Yeah, I know it sounds weird. But that’s exactly what I felt.

You see, the person on the screen was the guy I had become while hiding. He was the sugar-addicted, overweight guy who’d been occupying my body since the day I first discovered sweet stuff calmed my brain.

But he was not me.

That afternoon I decided to figure out how to get ‘me’ back by finding the answer to this question: What had I done wrong in all my previous attempts at changing my diet and losing weight?

Then came the Aha moment.

A mainstay of all of my ‘diets’ over the years was my beloved ‘cheat day.’ One day every week or so where I allowed myself to eat or drink anything, aka pizza, soda, cupcakes, cookies, ice cream, anything…and often everything, multiple times!

The aha was acknowledging the real problem — admitting I was a sugar addict.

So on that day, I made a simple decision — Stop eating sugar. No qualifiers, no one day a week promise to myself, just a simple commitment to stop.

And it worked.

After a couple of challenging weeks as my body detoxed, it became OK not to have sugary treats every day.

A new habit was quickly developed by doing these three things:

1. Acknowledging my addiction to sugar.

2. Deciding not to eat sugar.

3. Not eating sugar.

Today I weigh 80 pounds less than I did when the journey began and I am in fact healthier according to my recent physical.

More importantly, I feel better, and though my depression still surfaces from time to time, it’s nowhere near the demon it used to be. Without the highs and lows of being addicted to sugar, it’s become easier to spot the signs of its arrival and move beyond it faster.

And now, when I look in the mirror or see myself on video, I see me.

P.S. If this resonates with you, I encourage you to get started on your journey to overcome whatever it is you’re dealing with or to at least move forward in the way you manage it. It’s worth the effort. I wish you well as you embark on doing the work.