The Brat Fights the Fat

So tomorrow, I'm taking a big risk and doing my final Toastmaster speech (at work - it's a corporate club) about my weight loss journey. Wish me luck!

Here's the planned speech...

Inspiring Me
Good afternoon Toastmaster, fellow members and welcomed guests. The purpose of today’s speech is to inspire my audience. I’m going to twist it a little and instead try to inspire myself, and through inspiring myself, hopefully I’ll inspire you as well. Toastmasters is a journey, you start off unsure and hesitant and as you go along you learn and improve and with any luck at the end of the road you emerge a stronger, more confident speaker. What most of you are unaware of is that my Toastmaster journey was paralleled by another journey and that I brought you along on for the ride as well.

Most of us, at some point in our lives, will or have battled with weight issues. Whether it’s, “I wish I could lose 5 pounds” or struggling to lose 50; whether it’s noticing that time and gravity have changed your body or have danced with the dieting yo-yo for years. I’ve found that we all have different motivations, different approaches and different mirrors. Today I’m going to take you along the path of my other journey and show you how you were involved. I’ll start with my motivations, then I’ll talk about what I did and finally, I’m going to talk about my obstacles and how I have and will get past them.

I started my weight loss journey back in January of 2006 and those of you who’ve heard my ice breaker speech were introduced to my primary motivations... my kids: dirt boy and shoe girl. I wanted to lose weight so that I could keep up with them and so that I could be a healthy happy role model, especially for my daughter. When I look back at how I looked in high school and how I felt about myself. I wish I could go back in time and slap myself. But, since I can’t do that, I’d like to see if I can stop my daughter from experiencing it. I don’t want her to live her life on the dieting seesaw. In speech #7, I talked about another major motivator for me – diabetes. My dad has insulin dependent diabetes and both of my grandmothers have non-insulin dependent diabetes. That combined with a history of heart problems, makes being overweight is a ticking time bomb. I don’t want to die young, nor have my kids worry about me, as I worry about my father. I don’t want my quality of life as I get older to prevent me from doing the things I want to do, and I want to have the energy to want to do those things.

So, how am I going to achieve that? Well, each person is different, but I’ve found a couple of keys to my success. I discovered that I need some form of support and that I need to employ strategies that work for me. In my third speech, Blog It!, I gave a clue to one of my best sources of support. I discovered a wonderful supportive community of people on the internet trying to lose weight. Blogging is a way of chronicling my journey, a way of staying accountable, and sharing what I was going through with others. Seeing that I wasn’t the only one going through these challenges and struggles helped a great deal. We post comments on each other’s blogs offering suggestions, competitions and support; consoling and motivating each other, even though we’ve never met. As a techno geek, this was a great way for me to get the support I need. Though there are many others, including friends and family, support groups and weight loss programs, the important thing was finding what worked for me. This is true in terms of exercise too. Finding an exercise you enjoy can go a long way to increasing your chances of actually doing the exercise. In speech #5, I shared with you my discovery that I could actually run and even more shocking, that I enjoyed it (at least once the endorphins kick in). I’m not saying that it isn’t a challenge to find the time or the motivation to get off the couch and go, just that if you can find something you enjoy, you’re at least increasing your chances. I also discovered that when I exercise, my eating habits improve, whether it’s because I don’t want to undo the good I’ve done by exercising or if it’s that my body craves better food when I’m burning calories, I don’t know and I’m not going to question.

Now before you get to thinking I know what I’m talking about or that I have all the answers, let me tell you about my challenges. I did really well in the first six months of my journey, I lost 25 lbs. I felt better, bought some new clothes and got a little cocky. Then in July 2006, I had surgery. The surgery was successful, and I’m glad I had the procedure done, but it effectively stalled my journey. To tell you the truth, my journey came to a complete and utter standstill. You’ll notice too that the stall in my weight loss journey also matched my stall in my Toastmaster journey, interesting coincidence. Obviously right after my surgery, I couldn’t do much, but even after I was cleared to resume all my normal activities, I didn’t. I was afraid; afraid that if I started running again it would hurt and I was afraid to fail. And I used that excuse for a very long time. I slipped into a vicious cycle of excuses and guilt. I can’t work out because I’m too busy, I slept in. I’ll start my diet on Monday... oops, I forgot to pick up groceries, I guess its McPukes again. I could go on, but you get the idea. The biggest challenge I face is ME, but I’m also my biggest source of inspiration. Why? Because I haven’t given up; because while I have not lost much lately, I also haven’t gained; because my reasons for going on this journey remain the same. And most importantly because this is a journey, a long one, where the destination isn’t significant, it’s that I’m taking the journey, and what I’m learning along the way.

So regardless of what kind of journey you’re taking, Toastmasters, weight loss or life, you might want to keep what I’ve learned in mind. You need to know why you’re taking the journey, accept that everyone needs help along the way; that you need to find the best route for you, not for everyone else. Know that there will always be roadblocks along the way, but as long as you keep going, then you ARE succeeding. Good luck on your journeys.