Turtle With A Weight Problem

Slow and steady wins the race. I’ve been mentioning my weight loss periodically because it’s the only way I can stay positive about it. I have to remind myself of where I started so that I can see the forest for the trees. I think I’m like everyone trying to lose weight. I expect it to fall off in a steady predictable manner, and most importantly, quickly. Every week I challenge myself to lose ten pounds, which is ridiculous. That’s what people weighing 450 pounds lose on The Biggest Loser. I’m not one of them. I’m not morbidly obese and I’m not on a fat farm. Real life doesn’t work like that. I’ve also mentioned that if I was on that show I’d be an awful contestant. They’d have to change the name of the show to Jillian Michaels Biggest Sexual Harasser. Anyway, the incremental, snail’s pace my body fat has been taking has been nothing but frustrating. I run ten miles, I eat like a rabbit, and I lose a half pound. Fortunately, there are mornings like this morning. I stepped on the scale and broke through an arbitrary benchmark. It’s not even a round number. It’s a number that stuck in my head because it’s what I weighed when I got married. I’m in a lot better shape and I look a lot better than I did then, but it’s a weird number and it made me feel good about myself. It also means that I’ve lost thirteen pounds since the beginning of the year. Back in January I expected to lose a pound a day and to have been done with the weight loss a month ago. Like I said, I’m not on a fat farm and I’m not in a NFL training camp. Those expectations are absolutely ridiculous and I know that they’re ridiculous when I first expect them, but it’s like my Spanish professor used to say when someone asked him about a word, phrase or idiom: it’s not logical, it’s psychological. It sounded cooler when he said it Spanish.