Becoming Myself

Today, for the first time in 64 months, I am the captain of my own destiny.

More in a bit.

I need to get out of my current job, but I have nowhere to go. Holly’s in classes until 2009, and Richmond is dead as far as the job market’s concerned. The only options are to make my own value locally or online, move by myself (or commute eight hours a day), or stay with the job I have. Of the three, I’m the most interested in the first - although I’m not very good at it, and I don’t have any practice - and least interested in the second, although if someone offered me $80k to work in Chicago I’d take it in a heartbeat.

Ah, dilemmas. If only Holly and I had gone to school in New York…

So what have I done to become myself over the past [fnord] weeks?

• I cut my hair. This is the shortest I’ve had my hair since I graduated from high school.
• I subscribed to Architectural Digest. Even if I don’t want to be an architect - and that’s up for grabs at the moment - I want the exposure to modern design, style, and aesthetic.
• I renewed my World of Warcraft subscription. As long as I don’t let it consume my life and don’t let anyone tell me how to play, I’ll be happy with it. (On the same topic, tonight I successfully healed a pair of 70s through Hellfire Ramparts at level 57, and picked up a bunch of good Outland gear.)
• I wrote 7,000 words on my novel. I’m still several tens of thousands of words behind if I want to win, but my goal is to make the full 50,000 by the end of the week. (I can actually make it if I write confidently for four hours a day.)
• I bought myself a Moleskine notebook. It’s lined, and small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. I bought it so that I can take notes to myself. I’ve tried this with a voice recorder and with an electronic notekeeper, and it’s just not the same.

There are a lot more things I need to do before I’m really on the path to being me again. One of them is being better about money. We owe a lot to a lot of people, and I’m not going to feel comfortable until that’s paid off. We’re making legitimate strides toward that goal, and most of our debts should be paid off in the next six months, and I’m proud of that, but I want to be debt-free, and that’s going to take a lot of doing. (I’m not counting student loans here; that’s a whole separate class of debt.)

Another obstacle that I know I need to overcome is that I feel inherently sedentary. It’s not necessarily a permanent trait, but on the whole I tend to do the thing that gives me the most immediate pleasure instead of doing the things I want to do, and that just isn’t the way I want to be. The first step in overcoming this obstacle is probably a purely physical one: I need to get outside and exercise, and consciously do the things I want. Going straight from “in front of the computer” to “outside and adventuring” is a big first step, but baby step just aren’t working.

Finally, I want to shed the depression that’s haunted me for the last few years - and when I say “last few years” I mean “last decade or so, perhaps more”. At this point I feel like even though I know there’s a biochemical cause for my depression, I also know that there are emotional and practical causes instead of excuses. When Holly asks me if she can buy an album off iTunes and my immediate reaction is to get sad and withdrawn, I know that money is a trigger; when I have a long discussion with my parents-in-law about plans for graduate school and halfway through I just want to leave because I feel like I’m never going to amount to anything, I know that being active and doing the things that I want to do is a trigger. And now that I’m identifying triggers, maybe I can do something about them.

In the meantime, I have a long drive ahead of me tomorrow; Holly, Stephen, and I are headed back to Indiana by car, which is about a twelve-hour trip. So I’m going to go to sleep, and in the morning I’ll start working on being even more like my real self.

Today I change my world.

I Am Losing Weight wasn’t doing the right things for me, so I had it liquidated. The back posts are still there, if anyone wants to read them, but this blog is no longer about losing weight. In a way, neither was I.

See, it’s not the weight that’s the problem. Sure, I weigh something like 300 pounds (I haven’t actually weighed myself in months, and my bathroom scale, in what might be interpreted as a clever ploy to make me feel ashamed of my weight, isn’t accurate above about 225 pounds; I can feel the mechanism grinding together when I step on, and I have to wiggle a few times to get the needle to not just stick), but that’s not necessarily a problem; 300 pounds may be, with my genetics, structure, and lifestyle, my ideal weight - the weight to which I gravitate when I’m just being me.

It’s the “being me” that’s the problem. I live a largely sedentary life and I’m dissatisfied with that. All my life I’ve wanted to be an adventurer - an archaeologist, a journalist, a pilot, a SCUBA diver, and dozens of other occupations that have interested and continue to interest me - and when you get down to it, a sedentary life just doesn’t lend itself to being an adventurer. Sure, I can pretend to be one by playing games, or by writing about them, but that’s the characters in my head - not me.

What I want and need in order to be what and who I want to be is a lifestyle change. I know that in the modern parlance, “lifestyle change” means “diet”, but that isn’t what I mean. I do like food, but I’m not a compulsive overeater; going on a diet is just a way to punish myself for being overweight (if, as challenged above, we assume that I am overweight for my current lifestyle), and isn’t actually going to do anything about being who I want to be. When I say “lifestyle change”, I mean going from being sedentary nearly 100% of the time to being an active, engaged person. I mean doing things instead of sitting in front of a computer or a television imagining other people doing them. If that entails losing weight, so be it; I’m not going to argue if I drop some pounds, but it’s not the goal I’m shooting for.

Now, one of the hardest things in life to do is to pursue an abstract goal, and “I want to be better at being me” is about as abstract as it gets. It’s a good goal, and I think it’s an admirable one, but in the end there isn’t really an objective measure for it. I can’t look down at my clipboard and say “yeah, I’m 75% better at being me now”. So over the next few days I’ll be writing out a list of concrete, short-term goals that I think will get me further toward my overall aim. I’ll post them here when I have a decent idea of what they are.

In the meantime, I’m going to go get some exercise and some fresh air. No time like the present to start, and no way to start like hitting the ground running.

I’m reworking my goals.

80 pounds by October 31 wasn’t an unreasonable goal when I made it, back in January. But right now I need to lose a pound a day to make that weight, and I have a sneaking suspicion that that simply isn’t going to happen.

I think the problem was not that I set the bar too high, but that I set it too far away, and didn’t give myself a ramp to meet it. What I need is a more regular set of smaller goals to supplement the larger goal, plus a more defined reward schedule for meeting those goals. Also, in talking to my sister, it came out that perhaps I should make non-weight goals. Obesity leads to future health trouble, but it also contributes to current health trouble, and there are things that I can do to improve my health that don’t involve my weight.

So I’m rebooting. Here goes nothing.

Right now, I weigh about 300 pounds. (I don’t have a scale handy to check.)

• I will lose 75 pounds by August 25, 2008. That’s my birthday; I’ll be 29.
• I will permanently lose at least one pound a week, through exercise and monitoring my diet. I may lose more (in fact, I’ll need to to make my goal - 1.4 pounds per week, in fact), but one pound is the minimum. On the one hand, I know that a single pound might be due to any number of factors that don’t have to do with successful weight loss. On the other hand, to respond to “hey, I lost a pound!” with “are you sure that isn’t just water weight/fluctuation/scale calibration/whatever?” is an absolutely horrible thing to do to another human being. So I’m sticking to my goal.
• If I lose at least one pound in a given week (measured on Sunday morning), I’ll award myself one credit for future redemption. (I don’t know what a credit equals yet, but I’ll figure it out soon.) I’ll get a maximum of one credit per week.
• If I lose the full 75 pounds by August 25, 2008, I’ll take Holly on the vacation of her choice, to a maximum of $5,000. (There’s only so much I can save up…)
• I will improve my cardiovascular health by walking, running, swimming, and/or biking for at least 150 minutes per week. This lowers my chance of contracting heart and lung diseases and improves my stamina.
• Each week in which I get at least 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, I’ll award myself one credit.
• I will improve my overall health by improving my diet. Improving my diet will improve both my digestion and my metabolism, which will in turn improve my mood and my gastro-intestinal well-being.
• This includes not only eating less food but eating healthier foods. Celery and carrots instead of fries and burgers.

Make sense? Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

Wednesday, I walked a mile and a half.
Thursday, I walked a mile.
Friday, I walked about half a mile.
Today, I walked two miles.

I’ve been having trouble keeping to a meal schedule, in part because Alex is still steadfastly on California time and shows no inclination or desire to move to Indiana time. So he wakes up at 10 and wants breakfast, wants lunch in the mid-afternoon and isn’t asking about dinner until 8 or 9 PM. We have got to get this boy on a schedule. It would help if I were on a schedule. Perhaps I should decide on a bedtime and start setting an alarm again. It seems like a needless imposition on “summer vacation”, but then again, I’m not a student anymore.

Haven’t weighed myself for a while. The scale here only reliably measures up to 280, and I don’t have free access to the school gym’s scale anymore. I think I’ve lost a little weight, but I can’t really tell.

Yesterday I read a bunch about yoga, although I never did watch that DVD, and I got a bunch done, albeit most of it for other people. I didn’t eat too much, and although I ended the day in a bad mood that was more due to tiredness and frustration than anything else.

Today I got up and walked a mile and a half before breakfast or coffee, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to watch that DVD start to finish.

Yesterday wasn’t really a good day for me. I overate, I didn’t exercise, and I had a lot of trouble keeping my mood up. On the plus side, I did read about yoga, and the meals that I overate were at least healthier meals than they could have been, and I know why I was having mood trouble (to bed at 5 AM, up at 8 AM).

But still.

Today the plan is to eat healthily and go for a walk with Alex and Holly. I might start actually doing some of the yoga I read about, too. At the same time that I got the book I got a yoga DVD, and today I’m finally going to unwrap it and see if it’s any good.

(EDIT: to change “up at 8″ to “up at 8 AM”, because apparently “8″ + “)” equals a graphical smiley. Where do I turn that off? I loathe graphical smileys in my posts in the same way that I loathe cockroaches and millipedes in my house.)

It’s 4:38 in the morning on Sunday and I can’t sleep. I’ve been watching cooking shows. Over the last three days I’ve cooked most of our meals, and with one exception they’ve been ovo-lacto vegetarian-friendly.

But I haven’t been exercising at all. (I walked a lot at Walt Disney World over my honeymoon, but I also ate a lot.) I haven’t started practicing yoga like I told myself I would. Instead I’ve been sitting in front of the computer all day, playing World of Warcraft or screwing around with PHP and MySQL so that I could get that goals page up and running. I suppose it’s good to have a list of goals, except that I spent so much time on the page that I didn’t get anything else done. And my characters are gaining levels quickly, but I’m gaining pants sizes.

(Okay, that’s not true. I haven’t gone up a pants size in years.)

I want to lose this weight, to feel healthier, to look better, to be healthier. I don’t want to have a heart attack in ten or twenty years. I don’t want to have to use a motorized cart to get me around Walt Disney World. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life not fitting into standard airplane seats.

But here’s the thing: maintaining this blog doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore, as evidenced by the fact that, well, I’m not doing it. I don’t feel like I’m getting any support out of it - and by that I don’t mean comments, although those are always nice; I mean that I don’t think that writing entries here is helping me get anywhere.

I don’t know. Maybe the problem is that I have this blog set as part of my morning trawl, which is problematic when I haven’t done anything yet that day. Maybe I’ll commit to one post a day, about the things that I’m going to do. I always say that writing things down helps me remember them better; maybe I can use this blog to give me a sense of accountability (like the posters were supposed to do).

We’ll see what happens. For now, I’m going to go back to bed and try to sleep some more.

(I just found this draft from five months ago. I think it’s still applicable, and I hope it’s still meaningful.)

Establishing habits is hard. So is getting rid of them.

There are two habits that I want to establish: post here every day, and exercise every day. Unfortunately, I keep discovering that, at the end of the day, I haven’t done either. There are usually reasons for both, but they tend to boil down to “I forgot” or “I didn’t make the time”, which really aren’t very good reasons for not doing things that I actually want to do.

There are two habits that I want to demolish: sitting in front of the computer all day, and eating too much. When I think about these habits, what comes immediately to mind is Leo McGarry from The West Wing (3-09):

I don’t understand people who have one drink. I don’t understand people who leave half a glass of wine on the table. I don’t understand people who say they’ve had enough. How can you have enough of feeling like this? How can you not want to feel like this longer? My brain works differently.

My habits aren’t that severe, but I do understand what he means. When I’m at the computer I want to keep being at the computer. When I’m eating I want to keep eating. A number of people I know will, when we’re eating together, pass me their plate if they can’t finish their food - and there’s a reason for that.

I acknowledge that these are problems, and I’m trying to fix them. But demolishing habits is easily as difficult as establishing them, and if I do think I’ve got the problem under control, a “relapse” is damaging both to the demolition effort and to my self-confidence.

I think that’s part of why I wanted to put posters up (this part directed at Jess). It’s not really that I want people to “catch” me at anything, although if they catch me overeating or spending a day without exercising it’ll be a good motivator not to do those things. It’s that I want support, both active and passive. (By “passive support” I mean that the more people who know about my goal, the more people to whom I’ll be accountable if I slack off, so I’ll feel like it’s more than just me behind this effort.)

Does that make sense?