Weight Loss Success and Failure.

I’ve put off posting this because I wanted to wait until I’d either hit my goal or my reached my timeframe. It’s been a year since I really pushed on losing weight, so it’s time to talk about it.

Prior to 2020, I’d worked off about 15 pounds over a couple of years by watching carbs, but it was really slow. My new goal was to lose another 50 pounds in 2020. That would put me at a normal BMI.

In the end, I failed. I only lost 45 pounds.

I say I failed because I didn’t reach my goal within the time frame I set. Still, I succeeded because I am healthier than before by every measure. Too often we’re unable to see the good that can come from failure. Am I a few pounds short of my goal? Sure. Am I healthier? Yes, and that was really the point. Getting healthier is a pretty nebulous outcome. Fifty pounds is measurable, so that’s is where the goal came from.

Sometimes the challenge is not losing sight of the bigger picture while focusing on tasks. In this case, there wasn’t any negative content from failing. The deadline was arbitrary. It was there for focus. Does it irritate me that I came that close and didn’t finish? You bet.

I have plenty of excuses for why I came up short. There are some good ones in there too. A global pandemic is one. The stress of having my wife’s grandmother at home under hospice care for 3 months is another. In the end, I managed to lose 45 pounds while others put on a covid 15. I don’t have anything to complain about.

For 2021 I’d lose to lose another 15 pounds. Five more to get to a normal BMI and ten more after that to have some room for normal fluctuations. I’m working to focus that irritation of not quite hitting my goal into a final push. Frankly, I think that there are many good things that got started in 2020 that will finish in 2021. This is just one of them.

Losing the weight wasn’t easy, but if I can do something hard like this, you can do something hard too.