Normally, I’m not a huge fan of canned sayings, which often strike me as cliched “feel-good” trifles without a lot of substance (and let’s face it: when held up to scrutiny, many of them don’t make any sense at all). But I suppose it’s like anything else, such as TV shows, movies or music: 90% of it is crap, and the remaining 10% are the things worth spending your time on. And so I have found a couple of sayings with regards to weight loss and overall health that strike me as true, necessary and profound, and I have them pasted on my bathroom mirror for daily motivational reading. They are:
If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. Think about that for a moment, and let it sink in. You could have all the money in the world. You could have a huge mansion, “things” galore, girls hanging off your elbows at all hours. But if you’re not healthy, you have nothing. If you’re bedridden, you won’t be able to enjoy that mansion. If you’re so sick that you can’t stand up to pee in the toilet, what does it matter if you have enough money to buy up your local shopping mall? Your health is the most important possession you have, because it is a prerequisite to everything else. It directly determines your quality of life, regardless of your other material wealth. If you don’t have your health, you may as well have nothing, because you can’t use or enjoy any of your stuff anyway.
Diets don’t fail. We abandon them. This is also completely true, and utterly profound. Saying that your diet failed is simply passing the buck. Diets are diets, they have no decision-making ability. You decide to follow them, or not. Viewing them as things that we either follow or do not follow puts the accountability right where it belongs: on the person following the diet. Diets don’t fail, we stop following them and then it seems like they failed. But it is we who fail to follow instructions. This saying keeps me on track, and reminds me that my weight loss is completely under my control.
And I think I will add a third saying to my mirror, something my friend Diane told me yesterday that she read somewhere: Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. In short, it isn’t worth overeating or overindulging for the fleeting enjoyment of food to the detriment of your weight and health. Being obese for 20 years, I can attest that while I enjoyed food quite a bit, it came with a heavy cost: loss of physical fitness and an increasing inability to do even menial daily tasks. Walking through the mall to shop with my wife, I would develop lower backaches, every single time without fail. Playing with my small children, finding a comfortable position in bed at night, walking up a flight of stairs – these things all became chores because my love of food led me to carry around 65 pounds of extra weight every waking moment of every day. What kind of trade-off is that? There is nothing that tastes so good that it’s worth losing that kind of mobility over, not to mention years off your valuable lifespan.
Find some motivational sayings that press a button with you, write them down, put them on your mirror and read them to yourself every day. Remind yourself of why you’re losing weight, so you don’t lose sight of your goal. Motivation matters!
