The Myth of Happiness - From a Recovering Fat Guy
My experience with my weight-loss journey has taught me that the first step to success is accepting where you are at and letting go of thinking you have to lose weight to be happy...
I have struggled with my weight for most of my life. In the past I would lose some weight, only to gain it back shortly after.
When I was in the military I would put extreme effort into losing weight. I would work to meet the standard and as soon as I passed the body fat test I would let go, and the pounds would come back on. It was a constant yo-yo.
Losing weight was always goal-oriented. I would push myself to the extreme and then one of two things would happen. I would either reach my goal or I would burn myself out. Then I would gradually, or sometimes immediately, let myself go.
There was no consistency in my approach to my health.
The reason for this was two-fold.
One - Rejection of Where I Was At With My Health
The first reason I didn’t have consistency with my health was that I was unwilling to accept where I was. In other words, my motivation was a rejection of the current state of my health — I was rejecting the current moment in time. I would focus on someday in the future when I would be skinny and thus happy. As a result, I was not happy right now, in the present moment!
This is the myth of happiness - Most people think you have to do or change something to be happy. They think that happiness will come to them someday when they have all their ducks in a row. They think they will be happy when they have accomplished all their goals and have fixed all their flaws.
The problem with viewing happiness in this way is that it implies that happiness depends on something outside of you. That you can’t have happiness without someone else or something else.
In my case, I didn’t think I could have happiness without losing weight and being skinny.
Two - An Outcome-Based Approach to My Health & Fitness
The second reason I did not have consistency with my health is I had a goal-oriented outcome-based approach. In my mind, I needed to work hard to get to some goal, and then I would be magically healthy for the rest of my life.
This led to me always looking for the “golden ticket” or “magic fix” that would solve my problems. It led to me taking unsustainable approaches to weight loss.
This pattern of inconsistency would repeat itself over and over until I had the willingness to let go of my story about my health and fitness.
I had to accept the truth of where I was at. I had to let go of thinking that being skinny was the key to my happiness. I had to be willing to let go of my fantasies about finding a magic bullet.
Letting go of tying my happiness to my weight loss allowed me to choose to be happy even when I still weighed over 300 pounds…
The truth is happiness is a choice. It's a choice to accept life as it is, right now in the current moment, regardless of the circumstances.
Happiness requires only one action on your part. Letting go of what you are clinging to as a dependency of your happiness. When you do this you are no longer waiting for someday to live your life, you are living it right now.
Letting go of tying my happiness to losing weight allowed me to shift my thinking.
I went from thinking there is something wrong here, ie. I weigh 316 pounds, to finding gratitude for where I was and seeing the bigger lesson of the moment.
In my case, the lesson was to learn consistency. I needed to practice being healthy for an extended time. I had so much weight to lose it was going to take a long time to get to a “healthy” weight - in fact I’m still working at it today.
This is a gift because it forces me to slow down and make sustainable weight-loss choices. It has allowed me to view my health choices as the actions I will be taking for the rest of my life. It has caused me to realize that my health and fitness are a journey without an ending.
I recently met with my endocrinologist and I asked him what would be a healthy weight for me. He said that I should aim for a 30-inch waist or use the BMI, which according to him is actually quite accurate.
I shared my concern about what I do when I get there — That in the past when I achieved a goal I tended to just let go. He said that is exactly where most people fail and his advice to me was to just keep doing what I’m doing, forever.
I found peace in his advice because it took my frame of reference away from some distant point in the future. My focus immediately shifted back to the present moment and the actions I am taking right now.
I’ll close today with something I wrote back in March of 2022; It was one of the moments when I first accepted the truth of my health situation. The moment I realized I had let go of what was not working in my health and fitness.
What do I have to let go of to be healthy?
March 13, 2022
This morning I woke up after the fourth or fifth day of completely letting go of eating healthy. I’m not even going to sugarcoat it, I drove the train off the tracks and over the cliff.
I can look back and see where the dominoes began to fall; I let the stress of work and a busy week throw me out of my workday routine…
On the other side of the stress and the unhealthy binge, I am pulled to overcorrect the wheel in the other direction. The pushing thoughts are here. ”I’ll start a super strict routine”, “I’ll fast for a week”, “I’m going strictly low carb”...
I have a really hard time staying in a sustainable, steady state. I yo-you from one extreme to the other. Extremes are what I know; I have a really hard time with - consistency. (I struggled to even think of the word to put there)
This makes sense. Growing up with an alcoholic parent was extreme. There was no consistency. When my mom was drinking it was chaos; When she was sober she pushed hard to be perfect, for us to be perfect.
Normal was a perfect house or a disaster zone. Normal was never consistent.
So what do I have to let go of to be healthy? I need to let go of my fantasies.
First I need to let go of the fantasy that I’m going to find the magic solution where I push myself really hard and “then I will be healthy”.
I also need to let go of the fantasy that I won’t be pulled into chaos, and that I will heal myself in a way where I won’t be triggered to completely go off the rails.
Finally, I need to let go of the idea that being healthy is something I will get to “someday”. Being healthy is something I have to do right now, every day, over and over.
The lesson of this moment is that I’m not going to heal my way to health…
There is no magic fix waiting for me around the corner. I am being called to surrender to the truth…
The truth is that I have no idea how to be consistent with my health; I daydream about being skinny while plotting the perfect plan to get there. That when I’m “on fire” and working my ass off all I can think about is the next pizza.
The opportunity is to learn to work with the parts of me that want to pull me to extremes. To build a consistent, sustainable structure I can lean on. So I can provide those parts of me what they need to feel safe, soothed, seen, supported & challenged.
When I look at my health in this way, I see I already have everything I need; I’m doing this in other areas of my life. My challenge is to integrate my health routine into my daily rituals in a consistent and sustainable way. And to create space for and be with the parts of me that struggle with it.