Journey of a thousand miles

As I was doing some reading this morning, I was reminded of the saying, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".  When I started Optifast, I knew it would be a journey for me because I didn't have just 40 pounds to lose.  I knew it was going to be significant.  As the weight started dropping off, though, I got in this mindset that I should be losing a minimum of double digits every week.  A little insane?  Definitely!  As my friend Melissa blogged about, it is a process.  I have been fortunate to have lost more than the average person almost every week.  I mean, when I think about it, I lost 45 pounds in the first month alone.  Now that is crazy.  Granted, I started off needing to lose a lot but I never expected to shed so much in 30 days.

As time marches on, it's now been five months that I have been on product.  And it will likely be almost as long until I reach goal weight.  That little girl inside of me, who is super impatient, is loudly stomping her feet in the corner screaming about how unfair that is.  Ten months of no food, not even healthy food, let alone the stuff that got me here.  That's a long time.  Women conceive children, deliver them and take them home in a shorter amount of time.  While I don't have desire for food, I do think about how I have been able to do it so long already and how I will be in the second half of this.

The truth is that I don't have some magic source of willpower.  I don't have this resolve inside that says I am just going to do this!  If I did, trust me, I would not be doing a medically supervised liquid program.  I have people that contact me and flat out ask me how I am doing this, especially when it seems to come so easily to me.  I don't know.  When I came to the Optifast doors, I knew I had to follow directions and not try to say "Yeah, but" at every opportunity.  I needed to give up the fight and let go of all the notions I had about how to lose weight.  I was desperate enough to shut up about it and put that one foot in front of the other.  No one can appreciate the true challenges that come along with this type of program, not only the physical ones but moreso the emotional ones, until they have done it themselves.  This program is unique in that it does take off the weight, but it does not end there.  In fact, for most people who've already been through the program, they say this phase was the easier part.  The hard part is maintaining it and living regular life.  I can well imagine that's true. 

My daily journey right now as I face more weight to lose is to focus not on how long it is going to take me to get to a satisfying place, but to focus on where I am right here and now.  That road of a thousand miles is one foot in front of the other that, for me, must be done with peace.  I can't spend the time doing mathematical formulas as to how many calories I'm burning every day, looking at my carbohydrate ratios, trying to get away with eating foods that are "free", obsessing about how long it takes me to walk while I'm exercising or any of the other things that sometimes plagues people when they are losing weight.  Instead, I need to celebrate my daily successes.  I can honor the journey I have already been on and feel the power of that.  And each day that I arise, I can remember that all I have is that one day to be present in, not the past and certainly not the future.  There is beautiful peace in that, a peace I would rather live in humbly and by the grace of God.  So if you see me exercising, I am not timing how long it takes me to walk a mile.  And if I cry on the way home from one of my weekly Optifast meetings, it is not because I did something wrong ... it is because I am in a place where it feels like the weight is just being taken from me, but with love and encouragement.  I feel this miracle in my life so deeply and if there is ever a time where I take it for granted and think I should have lost ten pounds during the week, God reminds me where I have been by a person I meet, an old picture of me at my heaviest, the look of shock on someone's face when they haven't seen me in a long time, the happy smile on my face when I look in my own mirror or even just the gentle breeze I feel when I am outside putting that one foot in front of the other.  I get to celebrate all of that every day.

Round two

Monday night was the end of my 20th week of weigh-ins and a new crop of people came into our group at the Kaiser clinic.  For those that will be continuing in the fasting phase, we stay in the class and new people join us who are just starting their journeys.  About 11 of us are continuing on from the first class, but it was so great to see the eagerness and excitement of the new people.  Our group now has 25 people in it, pretty big for us since the 11 of us were the ones who made it through to the end of the first group.  It was hard to see people dropping out since our group originally started with about 20, but it is what it is.  We are a tight 11, so supportive of each other, and I know we will also be that way with the new people.

Our counselor welcomed them and gave them some highlights of successful stories.  One of our 11, for example, has lost 172 pounds.  Pretty impressive, but she was quick to point out that she has done it over the course of several years with some weight gain in the middle.  Then, he turns to me and says, "Kathy, if you don't mind sharing, can you tell the group how much weight you've lost in the last 20 weeks?"  I just knew he was going to call me out!  He is always so thrilled to see me each week because my rate of loss is pretty astonishing (by his admission, not mine).  He's told me that in the 30 years that he has been a counselor at the clinic, no woman, and very few men, have lost as much weight faster than I have.  So, I addressed the group and told them that as of that night, I had lost 135.5 pounds in the last 20 weeks.  That was followed by a round of applause, coupled with oooh's and aaaah's.  People were asking me if it was all just Optifast or if I was doing something different, almost as if I had the secret to eternal life.  If only!  I described that, no, I just do the Optifast 70 program, but I do exercise a lot now, although that isn't a requirement of the program, just something I enjoy doing now.  When I think about it, it took me about 5 or 6 weeks before I started doing any exercise at all and now I'm up to at least 3 miles each and every day.

When you're starting new in program, they give you a binder full of information, assignments and other things you'll need along the way in the journey, as well as a book called Maximize Your Body Potential.  You are told you will need to bring these two items to class, so I saw all the new people had these things in their hands or under their seats.  I leaned over to one of the 11 and asked her if she had been reading the book or if she was doing the assignments.  She confessed that she hadn't even opened the book.  After a couple of weeks of the classes, we weren't bringing those items in any longer because our support group was not about the topics discussed in the pages but things the counselor would do with us.  I did start reading the book but I had put it down since we weren't going through it.  It sort of felt like homework to me and I figured that when the time came where we were supposed to start reading it, our counselor would let us know.  We both committed to each other that we would, at the very least, start reading the book.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that they gave me the book and the notebook with assignments or other reading for a reason.  Now that I am in the second round of this phase, I feel I am prepared to really start digging in.

Now that I'm in the book, I can't put it down!  There are sections in there about weight loss, but it is more about being successful in your weight management journey for life.  There is going to come a time when I will be re-introduced to food again and I have to make appropriate choices if I hope to be successful.  It also talks about a very important component that perhaps gets glossed over far too easily ... the emotional and psychological component of weight loss.  How do we deal with thinner bodies?  How do our families and friends deal with us in thinner bodies?  Losing weight is all about us, but it does not just affect us.  I took out a highlighter and really started marking some important components for me, such as:

• A major part of successful weight management is learning to identify and change underlying beliefs that don't serve you, to find new ways of understanding events, to replace negative self-talk with more adaptive thinking, and to cope more effectively with negative emotions.
• Weight reduction is a self-centered activity.  To be successful you must give it top priority.
• You  need to constantly bring your focus back to what you expect to get by losing weight and the costs you will pay for not losing weight.
• Involving others in your weight management efforts in a way that is nonthreatening to them is important if you are going to achieve and stay at your best weight.
• In order to speak up for your needs, you may need to challenge and change old ideas.

There were so many more fantastic gems, but really it is all about being successful in managing weight for the rest of my life.  My character trait/defect of being stubborn is going to come in handy here.  I refuse to become a statistic, one of those poor souls who loses a huge amount of weight only to gain it back.  I have already done that with 100 pounds before and I'm not willing to go through that again.  I am already in a place where I'm in a foreign land ... a smaller body, able to do things I couldn't do before, off of all of my diabetes medication and insulin, with so much more energy.  There is no way on God's green earth I am going to give that up, no freakin way!!  I have too many people who love and support me to let that happen.  And, really, I refuse to let that happen to myself.  Unless you've been where I have been - morbidly obese - you can't understand how painful a place that is.  There is obvious physical pain, yes, but I mean more the emotional hurt deep down inside.  It's a place so painful that I hardly could ever talk about it out loud to other people because then I would have to sit in those feelings and I know I would constantly have tears in my eyes.  Instead, I'd just put on a great smile and perhaps joke things away.  I have used humor far too many times to mask pain.  Dammit, I am worthy of so much more than being less than my authentic self.

I have also opened that notebook and taken a look at some of the writing assignments.  I will start working on those, too.  As much as opening the door to the past is very difficult to do, I must walk through that door to get to the other side.  Avoiding doing so got me to 417 pounds.  No more.  I am taking my life back and telling that horrid voice in my head that screams I'm not good enough to take a flying leap off the cliff.  So there!

Feeling it today

This morning when I got up, the sun was already shining through the windows, beckoning me to throw on my workout clothes, lace up my shoes and get out there for a glorious walk.  I love beautiful, gorgeous days like these and couldn't wait to feel the sunshine on my face.  As I headed out, I felt invigorated.  Yesterday was a pretty emotional day for me.  I spent the afternoon with friends from work at a going-away party for someone that got a promotion.  We all were sad to see him go, but happy for him and his new opportunity.  As I was looking around at the other people there, I was just so grateful that I work at the high school where I work.  I am surrounded by so many wonderful people on a daily basis who are so supportive of me, and I feel the same way for them.  Then, later in the day, I received a letter in the mail from my determatologist saying that the biopsy he just performed turned out to be benign.  I wasn't sitting in fear everyday about that like I would have been previously because I was living in faith about the results, whatever they would be.  As I was walking down the street, I just felt so good inside.

Then, as I turned the corner to head up a hill, I started crying as I listened to music in my headset.  Not sobs, but just the release of these emotions that have been building for a while.  I felt overwhelmed, like I needed to drop down to my knees right then and there in thankfulness to God.  Last year was a horrible year for me - I had cancer that required two surgeries to get rid of, I had an additional surgery due to a work injury on my hand, the man I was dating ripped my heart to shreds and I weighed 417 pounds with compounding medical issues such as diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, foot problems and so much more.  Contrast that to me on a 3 mile walk that I do everyday in a body that is 121 pounds lighter after just four months on Optifast, I am cancer-free, I am practically off all my medications and I was feeling, wait for it ... joy.  God has supremely blessed me and does so repeatedly.  I am just so grateful and incredibly humbled.  Who knows what He has designed for my future, but I'm excited to not only be in the moment but greet that unknown with a trusting heart for the first time in a very long time.