Weeks 4, 5, and 6

Current weight is 312lbs. This represents a pretty significant slow down in weight loss but I believe a reasonable victory in my improving relationship with food.

Life has a way of throwing opportunities at us to test our efforts and desire for change. What I've noticed is that we have opportunities all of the time to choose either to continue down certain roads or to forge others. The familiar worn path is the hardest to abandon because it is the easiest to walk; even if we don't like what we see and experience down certain paths, as I have said before they are at least familiar to us. That unfortunately is enough in many cases.

When I was deep in the throws of my food addiction, the 'opportunity' to eat poorly was constantly presenting itself. I took those 'opportunities' as I then viewed them so often that it became very difficult to not take them. The nature of that compulsion is not that you physically can't refuse, if someone put a gun to my head and said don't eat that cheese burger of course I would have the ability to stop. It is that you've laid down the mental patterns so thoroughly that breaking those mental patterns is nearly impossible. You've mentally/emotionally worked your way around accountability for your actions. Even your self hatred feeds this mental process, indeed it is one of the most powerful of all emotions in compelling the continuation of the bad behavior.

It is a process of repeated deep seeded justification and lies that lay down patterns and thought processes that you convince yourself that you can't escape, or that you don't want to. It is a thick web that even close friends and family cannot penetrate because it must be extremely carefully constructed in order to live with yourself from day to day. It is the most ludicrous thing--you build a prison around yourself and then convince yourself that there is no escape from it.

There are other opportunities though, other paths. In many cases they are unknown or little known. It reminds me of the scene in the matrix you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAl8z-eSFy0

The easiest way to understand these paths is to remember an axiom by Steven R. Covey: 'there is a space between stimulus and response'. When we form bad habits, that space can become very small, and we can fool ourselves into thinking that it doesn't exist, but it does no matter how small, or how carefully we've tried to obscure it. It may even take some major effort to find that ability to act instead of react, but we can choose in that space to continue down paths we know, or to forge new ones that will draw us closer to the kind of people we ultimately want to be.

With the premature birth of my son this last week the opportunity to choose old paths based on the severity of the stress were abundant. It was not the physical path to the drive-through that I might have feared as much as the mental/emotional path to the way I used to deal with stress that was the danger. The past week of dealing with these external stresses has presented one opportunity after another to choose either old destructive paths or new ones. I was not strict on my program at all, but I also did not overeat, and I stayed far away from the drive through. It has left me with quite a bit more confidence that I have the mental ability to deal with stress in a more productive way than I have in the past, and despite the tepid weight loss I'm calling that a victory.