It’s been a long time since I wrote about the transformation
I underwent in the past year with regard to diet, exercise, and my vastly
reduced waistline. One could easily assume that having accomplished my goal, I
was done. Oh, if it were only that simple! The truth is that for someone even
mildly addicted to food, it is an ongoing, daily, lifelong challenge to
maintain the consciousness, discipline and healthy choice-making required to
maintain what is widely considered a healthy weight. This comes as no surprise.
Like the cigarette smoker who says, “Quitting smoking is easy, I’ve done it
many times.” I too have said all along that I have no problem losing weight
(although it was easier when I was younger, no doubt), but maintaining that weight
loss is another matter. In the same vein, when undergoing the rapid weight loss
of the severe first sixteen weeks of my program, I often commented that I find
extreme behavior relatively easy (960 calories of protein bars and shakes per
day, for example), but moderation a much greater challenge (say 2000 calories of
real food per day required for maintenance). It’s time to reflect, not only on
the state of my maintenance, but also on some curious parallels I’ve been
noticing with regard to maintaining focus in other areas of my life.
First, let’s do the numbers. My original weight loss goal is
a little fuzzy. As far as the clinic was concerned, I was to lose 40 pounds. In
my mind I had loftier goals which got progressively more ambitious the closer I got to them. To be firmly
in the “normal” BMI range I would have to lose 45 pounds. To guard against the
5-pound bounce back that we were told is common I would have to lose 50. As I
accomplished these goals in succession, the poet in me got greedy. I thought, “Wouldn’t
it be nice to lose 65 pounds at age 65!” I never did manage that, but I was
very pleased at the end of a day of Yom Kippur fasting to have reached (for
about 15 minutes) 60 pounds of weight loss! An artificial measure, true, but it
felt great saying I had “dropped sixty.”
The promised bounce back came quickly, as I flew back East
for my cousin’s wedding the following weekend and inhaled all sorts of sumptuous
Southern delights. For a while I still felt pretty good to say to myself and
others—somewhat apologetically—that I was down fifty pounds. But now
that that number has shrunk to forty I have to do some serious reevaluation. I
still look damn good, I say in all modesty. Some would say I look better now
than when I was down fifty to sixty pounds. I still fit into most
of the new wardrobe that I purposely bought at my low in order to keep myself
aware and motivated, but “truthfully” some of those pants and shirts are starting
to shrink a bit.
Back in August 2012 I wrote a blog about what it was like to
abandon my healthy eating for a couple of days but to bring myself back to the
plan right away (viz., Screw It!, http://yesh-indeed.blogspot.com/2012/08/screw-it.html)
In that essay I affirmed my commitment to maintain the healthy lifestyle. I
suggested that I only needed to look at my “before” picture to find the
incentive to do so. There is much truth to that, but one could argue that it is
more effective to look at the “after” picture, to keep a positive image of the
goal in mind than to dwell on the negative vision of the past.
I commented above about seeing parallels between maintaining
focus on healthy eating and focus in other areas of my life. This seems to be
coming up repeatedly lately—mindfulness is the pop term for it. In a recent
blog (viz., Every Moment, http://yesh-indeed.blogspot.com/2013/06/every-moment.html),
ostensibly about meditation and prayer, I expressed my excitement about realizing
that “every breath—even every keystroke or mouse click—every moment can be a
meditation, a prayer.” That’s easy. It just takes constant mindfulness of the
spiritual aspect of every moment—nothing to it (apologies for my sarcasm).
That mindfulness constitutes the same practice required to perform at a high level in virtually every
aspect of life—whether it be the work ethic I apply to accomplishing my professional
goals, or the proper conduct I aspire to in my speech and interpersonal communications
throughout the day—not only with loved ones or the homeless man standing on a street corner asking for a donation, but with the “idiot” driver who cuts me
off, or even the inanimate phone tree voice that seems designed to frustrate my
quest for information when I call a major corporation.
I have come to look at all of these performance goals as
having the same set of instructions as provided by my
first teachers of Transcendental Meditation over forty years ago. In all cases
we start with an intention—eat well, behave civilly, repeat a mantra. Then we
naturally lose focus. We become distracted. We pig out. We lose our tempers. Our minds wander. Eventually we notice that we are no
longer engaged with the mantra (or other activity) and our job is simply to
notice, not to cling to the distraction, nor to resist it, but to gently return
to the original focus without self-judgment.
These instructions apply across
the board. These are the instructions that will allow me to return to making
life sustaining choices in all venues—the dining room, the gym, the highway, my
home office, the meditation bench in my garden. It is so simple and so elusive
all at once. Consciousness. Mindfulness. Distraction and return. It is the same
return we speak about at Yom Kippur—making teshuvah*—an endless cycle of
intention, distraction, and return. This is why achieving my healthy weight goal
was not an end, but only the beginning of a lifelong challenge.
*The Hebrew word teshuvah is usually translated as
repentance, but is more accurately translated as “return” and signifies a
return to the original state.
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