Don’t Despair – Change Is There!

I have been trying to lose weight for years. Lately, it seems harder and harder to lose anything. One of my goals for this year is to finally get my weight down. To do this, I am changing two habits: 1. I am recording everything I eat every day and 2. I am exercising daily. By changing the lifestyle, I am hoping to see the results.

I weigh myself a couple times per week. So far, the results have been up a pound, down a pound, back up a pound. It has frustrated me that I don’t seem to be making much headway. It gets rather discouraging.

I was talking to my wife about it today. She is a speech therapist for a local elementary school. She works with children to help them get past their speech problems. She explained how it can be very difficult as it takes so long for others to see progress. A child can struggle for weeks to get a single sound in a specific instance. It can be even longer before the sound can show up in conversation. When it does, it can seem to others like the child is making miraculous progress. No one sees the long effort to get to that point.

Changing a habit can sometimes seem like growing bamboo. When planting bamboo, nothing is seen above the ground for three years. The plant spends the time growing an incredible root system. In the third year, the bamboo grows to enormous heights – some species grow sixty feet in a single season. It couldn’t support that kind of growth without the three years of developing a strong root system. However, unless the gardener knows what is going on unseen, it would be a very discouraging three years.

The point is we have to be patient as we wait for the evidence of change. We need to slog on, keep pushing ourselves to continue on with the new habit, even though it doesn’t seem to be doing any good. We have to cling to the discipline of doing the right thing for the right reason and have faith. It takes patience to wait for the results that must surely come.

I weighed myself this morning and I have lost 4 pounds.

Postscript: I wrote this on Saturday. I weighed myself again this morning and I have dropped another 1.5 pounds since Saturday morning. I haven’t weighed 230 lbs. for a long, long time.