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Old Tue, Apr-14-09, 07:52
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Judynyc Judynyc is offline
Attitude is a Choice
Posts: 30,111
 
Plan: No sugar, flour, wheat
Stats: 228.4/209.0/170 Female 5'6"
BF:stl/too/mch
Progress: 33%
Location: NYC
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Refuse to Regain Blog:
April 13, 2009
Going The Distance
By Barbara Berkeley

I loved this entry on Jonathan’s www.jack-sprat.net blog. With his permission, I’ve reproduced it below:

Persister

While I was out running this morning I tripped and had kind of a tough spill. But fortunately, other than my phone, nothing was damaged. (Well, my pride was a bit wounded.) I have a bruise on my chest and a scrape on my knee, but no blood was shed, no muscles pulled, no joints twisted, etc. so all things considered, it was a relatively fortuitous fall, and much less scary than when I have tripped and fallen in the dark running on a weekday morning. I was able to get right back up and continue on, even if I was a little bit shaken.

As I continued, and got back into the rhythm of running, I started to get annoyed. I noticed that time and again, someone would run right past me, sailing forward as if I were standing still. It really began to bug me that they could all go so fast, so easily. Regardless of age or gender, everyone seemed to be just cruising along at top speed while I felt as though I were plodding. All of my running and training and efforts, and here I was, slow as the proverbial tortoise.
So I’ll be honest and tell you that at that point, I strongly considered giving up. My phone is smashed, but I can still use the keypad, and I thought about giving Devin a call and asking him to come get me. It was a sort of petulant, pouty feeling, one which I often had as a child.

This week, in the blog “Refuse to Regain,” Barbara Berkeley talked about her dissatisfaction with the word “maintenance” to describe the process of remaining slender after having lost weight. She noted that it didn’t really do justice to use the word maintenance to explain such an “interesting, compelling, challenging process.”

I agree that it’s hard to come up with just the right word. I’d suggest “persister” if that was a real word. Because what I did today after first falling and then being passed by a whole bunch of runners was stop and assess the truth of what I was feeling, acknowledging the frustration and difficulty….and then I JUST KEPT GOING.

In the end, I ran over six more miles until I got home, and as I was getting pretty close to finishing, I had that blissful, “this is the best day ever” kind of feeling. Legs pumping, lungs pulsating, eyes and ears taking everything in around me — it was awesome.

That’s what weight maintenance is like to me. There are lots of times when I trip and fall and think about giving up. There are times when I get angry that “everyone else has it so much easier than me.” There are times when it just seems too painful, too unpleasant and too scary to keep moving forward. But then I pick myself up, brush myself off, and keep going. And I never, ever regret it.


One of the most important mental attitudes any maintainer can develop is the confidence that he or she can persist. Like any of the skills of maintenance, this confidence comes with practice. Getting to this feeling may take awhile, which means many moments of simply forcing one’s self to keep going without being at all sure of success. Many of you have written to describe this experience in relation to exercise. You started off by simply forcing yourselves to do it. You grew more confident in your ability to persist. Finally the persistence morphed into love.

There is a commercial currently running on TV which shows a man going out in the morning for a run. He heads onto a wooded path and begins to jog. In the first mile of his run, roots trip him and plants send thick vines out like lassos to wrap him up and keep him from moving on. But he persists. As the early going passes off, he breaks through the sabotaging foliage onto a clear, wide path. The rest of the run is laid out easily and joyfully before him.

The topic of persistence has particular meaning in the days following holidays. This past week, with its Easter and Passover foods, tends to be a hard one for the dietarily remodeled. Holidays link food with family, love, ritual and even the divine. Special foods have always been part of cultural tradition and none of us want to completely sever that connection. Yet we learn to persist through the moment even if those chocolate bunnies nip at our heels or those matzoh balls plop pounds of weight on the morning scale. Even if we cannot control the moment, we manage to stumble back from the fall. The path lies wide and joyful ahead of us and we can truly say that “this is the best day ever.”
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