My last post was in October and indicated that due to work pressures I would post only once a week. Well obviously that did not happen. Part of the abscence has been due to work conflicts; however, the actual reason for the lack of activity has been due to not being happy with the direction of my blog content. I began to feel the content was becoming contrived and somewhat preachy.

Therefore, sometime in the near future I will overhaul the simplephilosophy site to focus exclusively on how to effect a positive change in your lifestyle and your life. The posts will draw from my personal journey over the past 9 months losing over 50 pounds through a significant change in my own personal habits and lifestyle. I will also draw from books I am reading that deal with cultural boundaries to personal change, developing the slight edge that will move you forward in life, and other related resources. My belief is if I am excited and happy with the content of the site, then I will be able to offer information that will truly impact others in a positive way. My true desire has always been to offer quality content that others will find beneficial in being successful in all aspects of life.

Watch for the changes and see you soon! Remember prior actions determine future options! Make today’s actions count so you can live the life you want tomorrow.

Steve

At some point in life you look in the mirror and exclaim, “That’s it I’m going to change”!  You may want to change the way you look, or change what you weigh, or maybe make a fundamental change in the way you live your life.  But it is always a dramatic and somewhat desperate vow to change. 

 After making the pledge that things will be different from now on, a list is made and promises are written down (because everyone is told, if it isn’t written down then it won’t happen), and you grit your teeth with a steely resolve that this time will be different.  And it is for a week or maybe longer; however, then life gets in the way and you find yourself falling back into old habits and patterns.  Before long, any change that was begun is long gone. I know this pattern all too well.  I performed it several times a year for about 15 years in an effort to lose weight and live a healthier life.  Until 1991, I never weighed more than 240 lbs.   While I was somewhat flabby at 240, I could still wear a size 46 regular suit and size 42 slacks.  Big but not huge, so at 6 feet tall I still looked athletic…like a football lineman, but not the Fridge. 

This was when the kids were small and I could still set my own schedule. As the kids got older and into activities like martial arts, baseball and golf, my time became focused on work and family activities.  Exercising then became a secondary activity.  If I ran out of time in the day for running or working out, oh well, there was always tomorrow.  After a while I quit trying to find the time to fit it in, and the pounds slowly began to creep on.  Soon 240 turned into 280 plus, my blood pressure began to increase and bimonthly visits to the cardiologist became routine. 

And You Thought Working Out Was Time Consuming

 What I found was being fat and unhealthy actually takes a bigger time commitment than being fit.  However, the time commitment is less rewarding, unless you like killing hours on end in doctors offices or waiting for tests to be run.  Often times at the end I found my trips to the doctor were unplanned.  I was having some wild swings with my blood pressure that my meds couldn’t control, so it off to the cardiologist when I could least afford the time. I finally realized last April, that when it came to my weight, I was living the old adage, “If you continue to do the same things over and over and expect a different result, you must be insane”.  I had done different permutations on the same old approach to weight loss and yielded the same result, temporary loss of 10 pounds and then 15 back on. 

What I finally decided to do was seek professional help in the form of a science based weight loss and fitness program.  While the science part of the program produced the weight loss results, it was the lifestyle counseling that was the missing ingredient in all of my past attempts to lose the weight.  My lifestyle coach was relentless when it came to really coming to terms with the reasons why I made the food and alcohol choices I did.  I was pretty much on a self-destruction campaign with “mass quantities of beer and pizza” (you 70’s SNL fans will get the Coneheads reference), instead of dealing with the emotional and self esteem issues that were bothering me. 

Habits are Physiological

 Ever heard the statement that it takes 21 days to change a habit?  The reason is your body needs to perform a physiological change to make the habit take effect.  Scientists, such as Shad Helmstetter (author of one of my favorite books on self talk What Do You Say When You Talk To Yourself) have found that habits form a chemical pathway in your brain.  When a habit is broken, the old chemical path actually disintegrates and disappears.  Similarly, when a habit is changed, the old pathway disappears and a new path, corresponding to the new habit, appears.  The time it takes for this change to occur is about three weeks or 21 days. Most people; however, run out of resolve or lose enthusiasm before the 21-day period passes.  That is why it is so easy to slip into the old habits.  Not enough time elapsed for the new pathway in the brain to be created. 

Weight Loss Double Whammy

 When it comes to weight loss and body composition changes, there really is a double whammy that happens.  First, there is the whole chemical pathway changed just discussed.  Second there are physiological changes the body goes through during the first three weeks of any program.  What I learned in the Lifestyle 180 Program is the normal “plateau” that occurs after about 2 weeks is due to the body making adjustments to the new food and exercise regimen.  To a person using an average scale it seems like you are killing yourself at the gym and depriving yourself at meals for nothing.  The needle on the scale isn’t moving; therefore, you get discouraged and either quit or make compromises, using the reasoning that it isn’t work killing yourself for nothing. 

However, if a person is weighing themselves on a scale that measures body fat, % water weight, visceral fat, lean muscle mass, and bone mass what you will observe is the body is undergoing constant change.  Body fat is giving way to lean muscle mass (which weighs more than fat) and most importantly for heart health; the amount of visceral fat has decreased. 

This is why diets do not work…it does not provide the proper feedback and information necessary for a person to hang in until the habit paths change and the weight begins to come off again.  Over the past 4 months I have lost 50 pounds, and I have endured two or three of these plateaus.  Each time I consulted the special scale at the facility and have been reassured that it is still working. 

 THE MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENT IS TO REALLY COMMIT YOURSELF TO THE PROGRAM AND STAY WITH IT.  IF YOU ARE MIXING THE PROPER AMOUNT OF CALORIES AND EXERCISE THE RESULTS WILL BE ASSURED.

It’s days like today that make it really hard to stay positive about anything.  You work like hell and get nothing accomplished, you find out a client that owes you approximately $10 G hasn’t billed it yet to his client, and for some inexplicable reason about dinner time you become sullen and depressed.

Five months ago, my answer to a day like today would have been to medicate myself with a pizza and a bunch of alcohol.  Today I poured a diet ice tea and cooked a healthy, home cooked meal for my family.  Neither solution really fixed anything; however, tomorrow I will know that I finally made a correct choice.

I’m not writing this to say “Yeah Me!”, I’m writing this to say it could be you.  Too many people in our society feel hollow inside and try to fill the void with food, alcohol, porn or some other potentially destructive behavior.  What causes the void, I believe, is the realization that the person looking into mirror is not living the life that they thought they would.

Masks

When we are young, maybe high school or college, we craft this image of what our adult lives are going to be like.  The type of person we will marry, the kind of cars we will own, and home we will live in.  The people that take ownership of these dreams and pursue them relentlessly will realize their dreams.  Approximately 98% of the population buy into the lie promulgated by well meaning people of influence (friends, parents, mentors) that dreaming is for children and does not represent life and reality.  In an attempt to move on with our supposed path in life, we begin wearing “masks” that hide our true selves.

Mid Life Crisis

Some time around a milestone birthday, you know, turning 40 or 50 we wind up looking in the mirror and realize we are living a life we never intended to live.  I know when I turned 50 I looked in the mirror and saw a morbidly obese person, stuck in a profession I am bored with, and realized I wasn’t following my passion.  The funny thing was I could not for the life of me think of what I could be passionate about. The only thing I knew was I had to lose weight.  So four months ago I joined a program through a local physical therapy practice to turn the parts of my life around that I could control.  This was my form of a mid life crisis.

A funny thing happened along the way…I thought all I would accomplish would be losing weight, getting healthier, and feeling better.  But what happened is I am beginning to get to know me.  A by-product of the weight loss and exercise program was coming to terms with why I allowed myself to go from an athletic 200 pound man to a 310 pound guy with high blood pressure, frequent appointments with the cardiologist and more meds than a septagenarian. 

I found out what I really like to do is help people.  It is a driving force behind why I allowed my sons (Gregg and Glenn Hawkins), already successful bloggers, to talk me into writing this blog.  You see over the past 15 years, in an effort to understand why I have been conflicted with my path in life, I have read and studied a lot of self help books.  Everything from Og Mandino to Dale Carnegie.  But what I struggled with was defining my dreams and goals for my life.  I tried every exercise imaginable, like “What if time and money were no object” or ” Write a list of 10 Things to Have and 10 Things to Do”, but nothing really excited me.  It was as if I was putting down answers I thought I wanted to hear instead of getting real about what I want.  Sometimes the toughest thing is to admit you have been doing it wrong for too long.

Getting Centered and Staying There

I titled this post Staying Centered, because I have found it to be the most important thing I can do right now to change the course of my life. What do I mean by staying centered?  Psychiatrists talk a lot about “finding your center”, which to me always sounded like a bunch of bullshit.  I thought it was a clever sounding cliche that meant nothing.  What finding your center is is finding the one thing that you are passionate enough about that it becomes the thing your life revolves around. The interesting thing is it won’t be a car or a house at the beach, it will be something much deeper, more meaningful and quite surprising.  It will create that “light bulb” moment when suddenly things seem to make sense.

I started to identify my “one thing” by writing in a journal.  It started out rather disorganized…I was somewhat self conscious about writing in a journal (although I kept it private and away from my family and friends), but as time went on it began to take shape and my entries were almost like a free association with myself.  Periodically, I would re-read my prior entries and a pattern began to develop.

What Does This Have To Do With Weight Loss?

Once I began to understand what was lacking in my life, I lost the need to fill the void with food, because the feeling of emptiness was going away.  Now when I feel lost or empty, I fill the void by writing in my journal or making a post.  I feel better for having made a healthy choice, which boosts my feeling of control and ultimately results in a better mood.

I feel like this post kind of rambled on, but I needed to cover a lot of ground in order to set up future posts in these categories.  What I plan to develop is a series of related posts that look more closely at why we allow ourselves to be diverted from our true path in life and why so many people compensate with destructive behaviors or negative “mid life crises”.