Your skill in Confidence has increased by 1.

January 27, 2008 01:23 PM

If you've followed my blog any, I've mentioned the whole losing weight thing. I started out last April above 260 lbs. Then came The Plan, which I sadly quit before the 8 weeks were up, but in its aftermath I managed to carry on some of the eating and exercise goals with good results. Of course, the start of IT Biggest Loser at work renewed some of my commitment.

So, I started IT Biggest Loser at the beginning of December at 226 lbs. I'm now probably close to the 220 lbs. mark, if not past it. I'm not really sure--I think we missed the last 2-week weigh in. Or at least I did. Also, some oddities with the scales (one of the participants lost and gained 20 lbs. over the course of two 2-week weigh-ins) doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence. I'd love to win the $300 prize, but I don't see it happening if anything wonky happens with the final weigh-in.

But, 220 is pretty good considering I started out at 260 less than a year ago. However, it's not really the weighing that's motivating. It's a nice benchmark, but if you do it too often, it's just not inspiring. The change from day to day is too small, and your daily fluctuations in weight will alternate between getting your hopes up and dashing your hopes entirely. (For example, when I started seriously trying to lose weight last April, I didn't weigh myself for at least 2-3 weeks.)

It's really the little things that are motivating. Like being able to wear XL shirts again, and starting to realize that wearing one of my old XXL shirts feels like wearing a tent. (In fact, I dug through my closet and found I can now wear my old 1999 Mu Alpha Theta state convention t-shirt from high school.) Similarly, I've gone from a 46-48" waist to a 40-42" waist, and even dropped from an XXL belt to being able to wear a Large sized belt.

It's a nice motivation because it's objective accomplishment. With other things, I will occasionally do something I find neat, realize no one's really paying much attention nor do they care, and then get really de-motivated. In this case, it's all numbers. And oddly enough, people do notice.

It's also one of those things that I'm doing by myself, so I'm driven by motivation rather than pressure. It's not the kind of thing where I overestimate what other people are doing and constantly feel like I'm falling behind. It's also less about what I do (i.e., items on a checklist), and more about what I control through discipline.

Since a lot of my exercise has come from DDR, it's also nice to notice that I've gotten better. Having finished most of the initial songs on DDR Universe 2 and DDR Supernova 2 (and not willing to endure the pain of quest mode to unlock more), I went back and started trying to clear out DDR Max on Heavy. And I actually did pretty good until I got to the 9-foot difficulty songs. There is nothing like the feeling you get when you realize, "hey, I'm pretty close to being one of those guys that you see at the arcade." OK, maybe that's exaggerating, but at least I'm getting there.

DDR's good exercise but has left me with comparatively little upper body strength, so I started lifting dumbells. I'm up to 15 lbs. from starting at 10, and it's a nice contrast to DDR--if I leave them in my room, I can pick them up and do a few sets if I have 10 minutes to kill. After a few weeks I'm actually seeing some results which, again, is a motivation.

The downside to this is that I only have two mental states: "I fail at life" and "I am awesome." (Well, technically, there's a brief intermediate state that I would label "cautious pessimism" but we won't get into that unless someone wants me to draw a state machine of my thought process in Visio.) So now I worry that I'm more prone to acting like a complete arsehat. :P

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