1509 Mondays!

Hello, and welcome to the 1509th Monday of my life, give or take one or two.  Let's get started with the basics: Who are you?  Why the title?  What does it all mean?!  Well, I'm Jeff.  Nice to meet you.  I'm a 28 year old man whose 29th birthday is knocking on the door.  I'm currently living in the greater Minneapolis area working in the field that I love (higher education).  After moving away from Iowa after five years, I finally found the girl of my dreams...in Iowa. But we're solid and a rock and have been making the distance thing work.  All in all, my life is pretty great except for one major thing: I'm fat. Whoa! Some people find that term offensive, but in my case it seems to be the best term to use.  According to most BMI indexes, I'm somewhere between obese and morbidly obese, and to me both of those things sound 1000% worse than fat.  I don't have an exact weight right now because I stepped on a scale this morning that fluctuated 10 lbs depending on which way I leaned, but I'm going to pick one up today on the way home and update everyone tomorrow on the exact damage.  Being overweight isn't anything new to me.  I've been larger than healthy for almost my entire life, save for a few years in high school where my body decided to shoot straight up and spread the gooey goodness out enough to give the illusion of fitness.  It is also something I've stressed about my entire life.  This isn't a pity party for me, but (the almighty but) when you're bigger than everyone else, you notice it.  And in your head they notice it, whether that's true or not.  In my life, I've never had a friend bigger than me, so I guess I always filled the fat kid role in every group of friends.  Fortunately, I've never had a friend who has made me feel that way.  In fact, I am and have been surrounded by some of the most supportive people anyone could ever ask for.  During different stages of my life, I've had friends that offered to work out with me, friends who tried out diets with me, and friends who've been there to push me through when I get ready to quit.  I even somehow conned an otherwise reasonable office full of women into running a 5k with me this past May. Again, I'm a pretty damn lucky guy.

So, what does 1509 Mondays have to do with all this?  Well, as a person who struggles with his weight, I often find myself using Monday as a new jumping off point.  For instance, I'll eat well on Monday through Wednesday, slip a little Thursday, and then completely fall off the wagon for the weekend with the understanding that I'll start up new on Monday.  As much as everyone hates Mondays (and believe me, I'm not a huge fan when that Monday morning alarm goes off), in the world of Jeff, Monday means hope.  A fresh beginning.  Well, here I sit, 1509 Mondays later, and I'm close to my worst health I've ever had (I think I was slightly worse last year at this time, but it is a horse race).  There have been new beginnings that have been great and have seen me shedding pounds and feeling healthier every day, but the large majority of them feature me coming up with some new pep talk that seems to fade by mid-week. 

So, where does that leave me?  Well, I turn 30 in roughly 56 Mondays from today.  Because of where I'm at in my life right now, I know that there will be some major life changes ahead of me in those 56 Mondays, and in a perfect world, I'd have at least another 2,500 Mondays left for me to enjoy.  That's never going to happen at the rate I'm going.  Hell, I can't carry an empty cardboard box up a flight of stairs without having to catch my breath at the top.  So, here's my challenge to myself.  In the next 56 Mondays, I'm going to lose weight and be more fit.  That doesn't really seem like that hard of a thing to do, right?  I struggle with making some quantitative weight goal because I've learned in the past that when I have that goal and don't hit it, I end up bouncing back up hard.  Would I love to lose 100 lbs?  Absolutely. Would I be happy with 50?  Ecstatic.  So, instead of having goals, I'm going to have milestones. I'm not really sure what I want those milestones to be yet, but when I hit them, I'll know it.  I would love to take another stab at a 5k someday, only for real this time.  I'd love to wear pants in the 30's instead of the 40's, a goal I was able to hit pretty easily last year but that I let slip away.  I'd like to own a suit jacket that I can buy off the rack at JC Penney, only I want to feel so good about being able find my size on the rack that I still want to go to the specialty store to get a great suit tailored for me.  I want to carry an empty box up a flight of stairs.  Those all seem reasonable to me, but sometimes reasonable just isn't as practical as it sounds.

I promise my posts won't all be novels, but I've decided to share this journey with my friends and family.  The easy thing will be to ignore the posts when they pop up on my Facebook page, but just know that all of my past success has been based on the support I've received from all of you.  I've tried so many different diets and plans (more on that in another post), so this time I've decided to start with the basics.  I'm not going to do a fad diet, and I hope it doesn't come back to that.  I'm going to use the good ol' Food Pyramid that I learned about when I was in the 2nd grade, and I'm going to try to not sit in a chair for 30 minutes a day.  Seems pretty simple, but we all know better.  The best thing I've learned about myself through all my different weight loss attempts is that I need to be accountable to someone.  Well, here I am world.  My success and failures will be on display for the whole world to see.  I'm kind of putting myself out there, and I'm not always the most gracious loser, so I'm hoping the possibility of the world knowing I didn't make it will be enough driving force to keep this dream of being average alive.  It sure can't hurt.

With hope,

Jeff