Monday, May 23, 2011

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

I've had some tough days this week.  I've really been pushing myself to workout more and eat less and it has been anything but easy.  I am very frustrated about everything.  The number of sacrifices I have had to make just to reach a twenty-five pound goal is ridiculous!  I am really towing the line and while you can tell I am losing weight, it is frustrating just how slow the whole process is.  The amount of effort compared to the amount of results seems disproportionate.  I can really feel the difficulty increasing as I age.  Perhaps having a medical problem has magnified the whole situation to be an even bigger challenge, but I can tell you that ten years ago, heck, five years ago, the amount of diet and exercise I've been doing would have equivalated to twice the amount of weight loss.

It is especially frustrating when you watch a guy, in this case my husband, eat and eat, and drop weight like it's nobody's business.  He is without question, disciplined, and he is a results oriented guy, but I wouldn't say he's working harder than me.  He has less to lose, yet can lose it faster and easier.  I can somewhat deal with this fact but for the feeling of superiority that comes along with it.  That advisement he likes to give me as if he is some fitness expert and I am just some fat barbie in a pink track suit spinning my wheels at the gym. The truth is, if what worked for him, worked for me, well then I'd be able to drink coffee all day instead of water, have beer on the weekend, eat giant bowls of peanuts in between each meal, have the occasional ice cream sundae, and my workouts would be just a little bit of sparring with the boxing man in our garage.   My regimen has been a little more involved than that.

Men just don't get that our bodies respond differently; that it is a much bigger hill to climb, and that he who just entered his thirties, is having a much different experience than me who is about to enter her forties.  My father did it to my mother her whole life, and my grandfather did it to my grandmother her whole life, tried to convince them of how easy it is to lose weight that is.  I can feel my blood boil when my husband does it to me.  I think my husband is filled with much better intentions that either my father or my grandfather who were often cruel about the matter, but it still makes me angry.  My husband noticed my depressed nature about the situation this week, but probably isn't aware of just how much of a mental game it is for me.

I grew up with a mother who talked about being on a diet, and was quite literally on a diet, every moment of her life.  Not a day would go by that she wasn't attending a Weight Watchers meeting, or buying a new diet book, or going to the doctor for a new pill.  I can recall just how much of my mom's time, how much of her LIFE was spent trying to lose weight!  As a little girl I can remember thinking, "God wouldn't it be easier to just do it already, lose the weight!"  Now I understand just what she was experiencing and how frustrating dealing with defeat felt while others who had no idea what you were going through critiqued your weight-loss efforts.

To this day my mom still buys every diet book that hits the market, despite no longer being overweight.  I guess old habits die hard, but I don't want to spend the next three decades of my life still obsessing about this crap!  My advice to anyone out there with a weight problem is to beat it now, because it sure don't get easier with age!  You can do it at any stage in your life, but the hill gets harder and harder to climb as you age.  It just isn't worth putting off until tomorrow what you can do today.

It is a really depressing fact for me to realize that I have become my mother. Here I am thirty years later staring up at myself like the little girl who once stared up at her mother, saying, "just do it already!"  With all that I saw my mother go through I never thought I'd be dumb enough to fall into the exact same trap.  I'm betting that with all my mother saw her mother go through, she thought the exact same thing.  But here I am.  I guess history repeats itself.

“The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat are really good friends.” ~Author Unknown

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