What do you do when you lose all of your progress in your weight-loss journey? What do you do when you are trying to get back to normal, but you no longer know what normal is? Do you bitch and moan about it? Do you complain about it? Did you give up on yourself and accept the fact that you’re meant to be fat, unhealthy, and out of shape? Or do you accept this failure as a learning experience and dissect every piece of your journey, find out the best things that helped you get success in the first place and discard everything else that didn’t work?
While I did everything and more listed above the only thing that seemed to work best was to address my emotionally pain, my pride, and my ego, break it down and dissect everything to get at what works best for myself. In essence I was getting to the simplest foundation of what this blog was built upon. This was exercising, running, living life, trying new things, inspire others and blog about it. No more, no less.
Initially, I worried about the 400 email subscribers, the 8,000 Twitter followers, the 10,000 page views a month, the sponsors, the things that really didn’t matter at the beginning of 300 Pounds and Running. Most of those things were gone and quite frankly you can’t worry about the things that were in the past… Good or bad. My Uncle John once said to me, “Leave the past in the past… The reason it hurts so much is because your ego and pride needs to be checked. Because what it used to be will never be exactly the same.”
Carpe diem does not mean seize the past. It means to seize the now. You got to feast on the now, relish in it because that’s all you got. I’m going to tell you that it’s hard to not bring it up past. It’s hard to have a conversation and not say I use too ________.
Break things and remake something better…
Last month I read this book called, “The Way of the Seal: Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed” by Mark Divine. It’s about different principles used by the Navy SEALs to be successful during their missions and how you can apply them to your life (It’s a must read).
One of the principles of the book is to break things and remake something better. One of the anecdotes in the chapter told the story of Alden Mills, the guy who made the Perfect Pushup. Before Alden created the Perfect Pushup, he created the BodyRev, a product that supposed to develop your core strength and upper body. Alden raised $1.5 million around the concept and even produced an infomercial around the product.
The problem was that no one knew how to use the product. Needless to say the BodyRev failed immensely and Alden lost a very lot of money. Instead of going back to the drawing board with the BodyRev he scrapped the whole project. One day, he took it apart the BodyRev piece by piece. He took the pieces and started to remake something better. What he ended up with was the Perfect Pushup.
The point of the story (and blog post) is that most of the times you have to completely break things in order to remake something better. We see it everywhere… Whenever a bone breaks it grows back stronger. When you lose your baby teeth, stronger teeth replaces them. Just as I realized that this journey was broken, I needed dissect every piece of it in order to remake something better.
I urge you to do the same! If you lost your significant of weight and you’ve gained it back or your journey just went to all hell… I want you to “break” your journey, pick up the pieces, dissected them, take out the pieces you like the most, add some new pieces and start to remake your journey into something better. Look at your habits, your routines, and the way you think and break them. It sort of feels like you are building your own Frankenstein but give it some time, you will be better for it. Period.
I ask that you please bear with me as I pick up the pieces and start to remake something better and I hope that you do the same thing….
Until next time my friends
