This Thing's Still Here?

Bloggers bless me for I have sinned it has been nearly 2 years since my last post.  I’ll be brutally honest with myself and with anyone else reading: I totally dropped the ball on this blog. It started off as a way to publicly log my progress on the road to a healthier lifestyle and while it worked for a good long while I fell victim to something that anyone doing anything worth doing should never fall victim to: boredom, pure unadulterated boredom. And then my own mental weaknesses saw me fall off the proverbial wagon and instead of powering through to get back on the wagon I kicked my own self when I was down.

I feel like I lose the weight when I’m not thinking about, that the physical aspect of it, while challenging, is the easier aspect of the weight loss. The mental aspect of weight loss is one I continually struggle with. In fact, I contest that if I were much more susceptible to peer pressure in my younger days and took up smoking I would likely be a thinner man today. Sure, in all likelihood my health would not be any better (possibly worse) but I digress. My point is I feel that the biggest reason that it’s so easy for me to gain the weight back is that my overeating is more like an addiction to food. I’ll come out and admit that I eat when I’m stressed, depressed, or just bored. A lot of people eat when they’re those things but to exacerbate problems, I get bored of dieting pretty easily.

I put a lot of effort into eating healthy meals and working out consistently and while past workouts have solved the boredom problem, I still have trouble maintaining my enthusiasm for preparing healthy portions. And I tend to injure myself a lot when I work out intensely (especially in the feet). Then I lose steam and get deflated when I gain the weight back until I hit rock bottom for the hundredth time. The other day I realized I couldn’t tie my shoes without having to groan and struggle on my way down to tie my shoe laces, the buttons on my dress shirt were just barely keeping things together if I sat down a certain way, and I get winded after only three flights of stairs. There was a moment in the three decades I’ve been on this planet that I could go up five flights without breaking a sweat.

While I hate the idea of resolutions, I figure the start of 2013 would be a good place to start taking control of my life. On this blog I intend to keep track of (and be brutally honest about) my progress on the road back to 180 (for realsies, this time). On my other blog, I intend to get my creative juices flowing on a regular basis once again. It should be noted that the last time I engaged in such a project I still consider to be the most rewarding year of my life, despite how exhausted I felt at the end of it. And to up the ante on the creative end (and perhaps as motivation to get my ass moving and out into the real world, ironically) I have decided to start uploading vlogs on a regular basis for an entire year, at least one video per week.

Upon writing this I realized that a good chunk of my life will be propped up for the entire world to see, digitally speaking. That’s not to say that too many people will end up seeing my stuff but it’s all there for the viewing if anyone so chooses to view it and normally that would freak me out. But I actually find myself kind of excited, enthused in fact, that I’m feeling a different kind of vulnerable. It’s a vulnerable that I’m in control of and maybe that means this unfamiliar ground is one I should be treading. Maybe it’s a sign of a change that I need in my otherwise stale life. Whatever the outcome may be, I promise to myself to keep posting honestly and regularly for the following year (at the very least). Here’s to a great year!!!