Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m going to inter­rupt my #Reverb10 blog­ging to dis­cuss this blog post from The Simple Dollar on ana­lyz­ing your mistakes:

3. Figure out your biggest mistake.

What one ele­ment of your life is the one ele­ment you would give any­thing to fix?

I’m not talk­ing about the things you can’t fix, like incur­able dis­eases or the like. I’m talk­ing about things that, with some amount of luck or effort or inter­ven­tion of oth­ers, could see sig­nif­i­cant pos­i­tive change.

In my per­sonal life, this is easy.  My weight is the biggest thing I want to change, and doing so has been hard.  I have a long adult his­tory of strug­gling with my weight.  Serious “First World Problem” I know, but there it is.  Getting my weight down has been a spo­radic bat­tle of the last year, and I don’t think I did well enough.

When I went to col­lege, I weighed about 175 pounds.  By the end of my Sophomore year, I was push­ing 250.  And I stayed at this weight until about 2 years ago, flux­u­at­ing up and down 15–20 pounds depend­ing on the time of the year.

The rea­son I gained so much weight was a health prob­lem. I had acid reflux, but no means of get­ting med­ica­tion for it, so I self-​​medicated with ice milk.  Ridiculous, I know, but it was the one thing that made the heart burn go away for a while—that and stuff­ing myself as full of food as pos­si­ble.   I had no idea at the time I was get­ting fat.  That’s how unaware of my own body I was.  I expected it to work and that was that.  I was so focused on my mind that unless some part of me was sick, I was com­pletely ignor­ing the body sent in. 

Cut to 2 years ago when I strug­gled with some anx­i­ety issues after my father’s death.  A com­bi­na­tion of the issues and the med­ica­tion that solved led to me drop­ping down to 200 pounds in about 4 months.  Again, I didn’t even real­ize how much weight I was los­ing until one day, I got tired of try­ing to make my pants stay up by rolling the waist­line (I hate belts for rea­sons too silly to get into here).

Since then, I’ve bounced back up to 225.  That’s 50 pounds heav­ier than I want to be.   I go up and down fre­quently.  225 is where I am right now after a week of stay­ing pretty well on task.

How do I lose weight with­out the aid of med­ica­tion side-​​effects? Constant vig­i­lance and calo­rie count­ing is the only way I’ve found that even sort of works.   My tastes run toward the junk end of the food spec­trum, so I count calo­ries.  I use an app on my iPhone to do it some­times, but I mostly just try to eye­ball it.  And then occa­sion­ally, I expe­ri­ence an extinc­tion burst and go on a binge, eat­ing out at some huge meal or buy­ing way too much fast food.

Part of me doesn’t want to have to watch what I eat, the habits part that only cares about the plea­sure of eat­ing.  The rest of me is dead set on liv­ing as long as pos­si­ble.  So we strug­gle.  My body is a battleground. 

But I’ve been break­ing the prob­lem down into sin­gle issues.  Meal issues.  Learning again to eat only when I am hun­gry.  Not using eat­ing out as a reward for good activ­i­ties.  I need to return food into an enjoy­able food and remove junk food espe­cially from the pedestal I put it on in my child­hood.  That’s the plan now.  In another month, I’ll update you on my progress. Hold me to that too.

In 2011, I’m going to win the war, or at least a few bat­tles.  That way, when I look back on 2011 to see what my worst mis­take was, it won’t be “didn’t lose weight and get healthy again.”

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Tags: mistakes, simple dollar, weight, year end