July 13th, 2009 I embarked on a fantastic journey to lose weight, improve my overall health, and have fun doing it. The project would use the Nintendo Wii as the primary exercise tool, and take 90 days to complete. At the beginning of the project, I weighed 177 pounds. The goal was to reach 149.5 pounds by October 10th.
Today it’s October 7th. According to the plan, I should be within striking distance of my target weight; preparing to celebrate my triumph with a nice healthy carrot (which, according to the plan, I would have developed a taste for).
So, how far do you think I’m off by? Two pounds? Five? It couldn’t be as much as ten – could it?
Let’s try 29.5 pounds.
Why is that Mii smiling?
I’m actually two pounds heavier than when I began back in July! How could this have happened? I guess the simple reasons are:
- I stopped being mindful of what I ate
- I stopped exercising
- And I stopped updating this blog
Ah. It turns out to be pretty straightforward.
I’ve been stressing out about what to do with this blog for weeks. I felt the options were:
- Scrap the blog and consider the project a failure
- Scrap all the old content and restart the blog from scratch
- Or, pick up from where I left off, acknowledging that I screwed up
I gave serious thought to all three.
Scrapping the blog would eliminate the gnawing feeling of guilt, absolving me from dwelling on how I didn’t follow through.
The balance board never forgets
According to the stats for this blog, very few readers have visited since it first went up. Even fewer repeat visitors. I could have just thrown away all the old content and started fresh. A clean slate sounded very appealing. After all, who would know? I liked the idea of pretending the initial failure to launch never happened.
But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that plastering over my mistakes wasn’t the right way to go. For one thing, even if the readers didn’t know that I had failed the first time out, I would. And that would bother me. For another, failure is instructive. To pretend that it didn’t happen would be a disservice to the readers and to myself.
Lots of people start exercise plans and diets with the best intentions, but barely make it past the first couple of weeks. It’s hard to make a change in your life. You’re often working against deeply ingrained patterns in yourself and among your social group. It’s only natural that the friction at the outset is going to knock you around and make you screw up. But, I don’t think that’s a fault.
The fault would be allowing those early stumbles stop you from trying again, and again, and again until you reach your goal.
That’s why today I’m trying again. It’s Day One – October 7th, 2009. This is the soft relaunch of Miniimize Me, the 90 day Wii weight loss project. Now is the beginning of a fantastic story, I look forward to sharing it with you.
