REALIZATION #1 - YOU CANNOT BE YOUR MOTIVATION - You don't love you THAT's why your FAT!

I have heard people say that you have to learn to love yourself before you will resolve your weight issues. Well if I was to have waited around until I liked me, I would likely have never gotten started! I already didn't do good things for myself and the evidence of that was what I was trying to obliterate. If you try to tie your motivation to your self worth you will tie a large stone to your foot that you will have to carry, then drag and which will ultimately stop you dead in your tracks. You need to look outside yourself for motivation. You need to tie your measure of "success" to an external force to which you are inexorably accountable. Someone or something which will not accept failure. Be accountable to someone who you couldn't stand to disappoint. This is why it can't be you. I disappoint myself all the time. We all do in small and large ways. We learn to negotiate that type of disappointment in ourselves in order to move forward from day to day. Find someone that you will share your intentions with then measure those intentions out. How much do you want to lose total? Tell your "accoutabili-buddy"(obscure?) that you intend to lose that amount of weight.

DO NOT PUT A TIMETABLE ON YOURSELF!!!!

Here's another myth, you don't need a deadline to get healthy. Goals are not necessarily creatures of time. Goals can be based on results that are not bound by time restrictions. If your goal is to wear a smaller size jean there is no expiration on that ambition. It will take just as long as it takes and not one second more or less. If you set and end point then you will "finish" and go back to what you were doing before which OBVIOUSLY didn't work! My timetable for get healthier is over the next 80 YEARS! That'll make me 120. I might have accomplished all I want to by then but who knows!

My motivation was/is my family. I realized that my ignorance, my poor example, was having real affects on my children, and my wife. I was choosing to live in a way that was not only destroying my body and shortening my life, a fact I could live with but was also devastating the health of the people I love the most! It came about on the last Saturday in July of 2009. Justin and I were lazing around the family room both of us engrossed in reading. I looked over at my beautiful boy who was dressed in his favorite summer Saturday morning uniform...underpants. He looked like a miniature me, but not in a cute "awe he looks like you" sort of way. I was not unaware that he was overweight. I am not blind, nor am I stupid but I see my children the way I think everyone does...as the perfect soul they are. I had talked with my wife and many others about what I should do about his weight. I was concerned.

HA!

I have made nearly every decision regarding what food that the boy has eaten his entire life. He didn't come by his bad eating habits naturally. He was taught very methodically by me! I DID THAT TO HIM! I was responsible to make sure that he stayed healthy and I was failing him. I was crushed at first. Then I thought about something my wife and I had recently discussed. My son was doing his level best to imitate me in many ways over the summer. I had an opportunity at this moment, while he still wanted to be like his old man, to make a change. But not in what I told him and not a change to him. It would have to be a change I made to me that he would want to follow and it HAD to be a permanent change. I understood almost right away that I could not "fall off the wagon" or "go on a diet" because if I failed to lose the weight in the specified time or returned to my bad habits I was giving him permission to be overweight all his life and to yo-yo diet and face that disappointment. I was going to have to rethink eating, and food and exercise and well the way I live my life! Not too overwhelming eh?

Luckily realization #2 was right around the corner....(to be continued)