Have you ever been so fat that everything you did made you lose your breath?  I have.  Forget losing my breath walking short distances or doing light physical activity; I would lose my breath doing things like tying my shoes and rolling over in bed.  I can recall being 300 pounds and being out of breath while eating (which clearly didn't stop me!).  I finally pieced together that if I was gonna get all breathless, it ought to be from burning calories, not from inhaling them.

Now that I'm getting back on track with healthy eating and exercise, I'm returning to some of the things that first helped get me started, and that I've relied on along the way as reminders of why I'm abandoning obesity.  A friend of mine lets me use his parents' DirecTV login in exchange for my Netflix (Millennial cord cutters, baby!  Holla for the tech barter economy!) -- not an even trade, but he's not complaining.  It's allowed me to re-discover My 600-lb Life on TLC, a show I haven't watched since well before my great run at weight loss in 2015-16.  There's even a Where Are They Now edition that catches up with a few of the people who were on episodes from back when I did watch semi-regularly.  I'm using the episodes to help me remember:

  • Even though I have a lot of work to do, I can do this on my own.  It's hard to think of finding yourself in any stage of obesity and considering yourself lucky, but many of the show's patients are only just getting to where I am now, and that's after gastric bypass and excess-skin removal surgeries.  I still have the chance to save myself from those extreme measures.
  • Where I don't want to end up.
  • I'm not alone.
  • Life can get better.
  • It won't do to deal with the physical and ignore the psychological.


Simultaneously, I've been re-reading this article over and over again.  It surveys six nutritionists for what they would recommend in terms of a change to make if they could only recommend one.  They're all in some way expected or obvious, but for some reason, reading it in print is really getting through to me right now.  I keep coming back to the section called "Figure Out What Needs the Most Attention in Your Life."  If you treat the symptoms and not the cause, things don't actually improve in the long term, and a new problem or problems can arise as a result.  That's true for diseases and it's true for pretty much everything else.  It's why "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is a truism.  However, this write-up gives a bit of a different spin on that notion without ever verbalizing it, and introduces the concept of six cylinders of health:  feet, forks, fingers, sleep, stress, and love.  I'm choosing to adopt that outlook more narrowly, strictly in terms of weight loss.  It's helping me keep things in focus and in balance.

Finally, three quick updates:

  1. I got my earring back in!  YAY!
  2. I've joined yet another DietBet.  The elliptical and I are about to rekindle our relationship in a big way.
  3. I FINALLY WENT TO THE GYM TODAY, Y'ALL.


I have a date with the scale tomorrow night, a happy coincidence of my usual weekly weigh-in and my weigh-in for the new DB (as well as a Transformer DB I started haphazardly in November and have royally screwed up to this point -- but am determined to rebound for!).  I don't have crazy expectations, but I am looking forward to seeing what changes the scale may reveal.