I think the most common question I get is, “How long have you been doing this?” And I tell them the truth; since January 2012. So, as of right now, just over a year and a half. To lose (almost) 65 pounds in a year and a half seems decent. But when I tell people that the math works out to less than a pound a week, they question it all completely. “Wow, that seems… slow.”
Didn’t your mom tell you? Slow and steady wins the race, guys.
Or maybe that’s just me. Because I was never the winning type.
Patience is probably the biggest virtue you can gain when you are losing weight. You need to be patient. I hear SO many people, myself included, saying, “Oh, I want to lose x lbs in x weeks.” Guys, you can’t tell your body how much weight it wants to lose. It’s gonna do what it wants to do. Trust me on this, you only have so much control over that number. Sure, you can control the direction in which it heads, but in this year and a half, the one thing I’ve learned is that it’s never going to be what you expect.
This is why I stopped giving myself timelines to lose weight. I feel like I’m always setting myself up for failure when I do this. Not because I personally end up actually failing, but I get this sense of failure when I don’t make it. It isn’t my fault – the scale went in the right direction, just not ENOUGH for me to be happy.
It’s really all about the way you look at things. 65 pounds lost in a year and a half? Better than 65 pounds gained in any amount of time. You have to learn to take what you can get, and look at things in a positive light. Sure, some fad diet can make me lose 16-20 pounds each month GUARANTEED. But I don’t care about that. I care about being healthy in the future, for myself and for my family. I’ve stopped caring about right this minute and started thinking in the long term.
Sure, the way I am living is making me lose less than a pound a week on average. But that’s better than the gaining I was doing before.
This is not a race. It’s not about who crosses the finish line first, and it’s not about how fast you get there.
Do not let the bumps in the road get you down. Take them as experiences to learn lessons and move along.
I sound like a motivational speaker right now, but it is SO true. I have learned more in this past year and a half than I did in the five years of my undergrad. Patience is key. The longer this takes me, the more I will learn.
This is not a race.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kait! 