Fat to Fit, Part II - Commitment

In Fat to Fit, Part I, I described what led me to decide to get healthy. It's very much an ongoing journey. Here's what happened next.

In September, 2011, I decided to eat healthy. In October, 2011, I decided to make exercise a part of my daily life. The word decide is critical. It wasn't desire or necessity. I had wanted and needed to do these things for decades. Nothing changed until I made a decision.

People confuse desire with motivation, as in "You have to really, really want it".  The difference between desire and motivation is the difference between  "I want"  and I will". I  had really, really wanted and needed to eat right and exercise regularly for years. For the reasons discussed in Part I, I finally made the leap to "I will." The pain of not changing was now greater to me than the difficulty of changing.

A decision inherently includes a commitment to do whatever is required to implement that decision, easy or not, convenient or not, and, especially, comfortable or not. I made that commitment. Specifically, this included:

• Recording everything I ate and drank - and I mean everything - every day as I consumed it.
• Engaging in formal exercise at the gym five days per week. For me, this meant going to the gym before work, Monday through Friday, at 05:15 a.m.
• Finding ways to be more active every day.
• Thinking about what I was doing as a process that occurred one step, one bite, one meal, one day at a time. Seeing it as a way of life, not a diet which I knew from my history I would eventually abandon.
• Refusing, absofuckinglutely refusing to judge my day to day efforts, their results, or myself as either good or bad. Instead, I took responsibility for my choices as healthy or unhealthy with predictable consequences. If I didn't like the choices, I could make different ones since I had the power over what I did.
• Remembering to enjoy myself along the way by seeing it as what it actually was: an adventure, challenge, and opportunity for growth and learning.  
  
  

And that is exactly what I have done, to the best of my ability, for the last 15 months. 

In Part III, I'll describe the tools I've discovered that have really helped me achieve what, for me at least, is simply amazing. In Part IV, I'll  discuss the obstacles along the way. In Part V, I'll conclude by discussing what I've learned and what's next in my journey to health.