I can’t fig­ure out which one of the terms in the title of this post is most appro­pri­ate or fit­ting. I can’t put my fin­ger on the exact emo­tion just yet, but I know that I am strug­gling. Specif­i­cally, I am hav­ing a hard time with weight management.

To put it plainly — try­ing dif­fer­ent approaches to nutri­tion and fit­ness, with no real tan­gi­ble results is emo­tion­ally exhaust­ing. I am seri­ously try­ing to ward off “the Fuck­its.” (See my first Oper­a­tion Twenty12 post to under­stand what that means.)

I started with the idea of ‘going pri­mal,’ a con­cept devel­oped by Mark Sis­son. For one rea­son or another, I’m still not sure why, I drifted away from the Pri­mal Blue­print. About a month ago, I started doing a lit­tle read­ing on a book by Tim Fer­ris called The 4 Hour Body. Intrigued by the sim­plic­ity, I ordered the book, and have attempted to fol­low the sug­gested path for weight loss and fit­ness. After a few weeks on the 4-Hour Body reg­i­men, I feel no more con­nected to some­thing that works for me than I did at the begin­ning of Oper­a­tion Twenty12.

I don’t know about you, but there is noth­ing more deflat­ing than to stop on a scale and see no change, or have the num­bers increase. W.T.F.? I had a moment this morn­ing where I was on the verge of tears after the dig­i­tal read­out appeared on the scale. I think that hav­ing to take my son to school is the only thing that kept me from stay­ing home today. I’m call­ing in “sick” (with despair). It’s a long road with no end in sight.

Am I being a tad melo­dra­matic? Per­haps. But this shit is real, and it hurts. I mean, really hurts…in a way that I had pre­vi­ously underestimated.

I was bend­ing the ear of a friend at work today about this (I appre­ci­ate you lis­ten­ing, Fran­cis), and while talk­ing I was reminded of the point of Oper­a­tion Twenty12. My goal was not to build Rome in a day, if you will; but, instead, give myself the entire year to make changes, improve­ments, tweaks, or sim­ply engage in a healthy dose of self love. I have dis­cov­ered that I am far more accept­ing of oth­ers than I am of myself.

What also came out of my talk with Fran­cis is that I have a rather embar­rass­ing streak of tak­ing the path of least resis­tance. Though I’m not afraid of hard work, I do seem to find a way to get out of, or dodge, things that require a good dose of phys­i­cal exer­tion. Back in 1985, I received an hon­or­able dis­charge (med­ical) from the Marines while in boot camp. How­ever, to be hon­est, I never pushed back too hard against the dis­charge because boot camp was wear­ing my ass out. To this day, I still feel like a quit­ter for not fight­ing through some legit­i­mate pain to fin­ish boot camp. I think since that time, I have prob­a­bly only pushed myself once to reach a goal. In May of 2003, I was tip­ping the scales at almost 300 pounds. I read about the Atkins diet, and jumped in with both feet. I stayed in the Induc­tion Phase through­out the sum­mer, and worked out every day. By the end of the sum­mer, I was down to 238 pounds and felt great. How­ever, my goal was to get down to 200 pounds. I found that no mat­ter what I did, los­ing more weight was seem­ingly impos­si­ble. Whereas I should have been patient, and tran­si­tioned into the sec­ond phase of the Atkins diet, I gave up Atkins alto­gether. I kept most of the weight off for over a year; only gain­ing seven pounds.

Sub­se­quent to that ini­tial expe­ri­ence with Atkins, I have been unable to repli­cate the weight loss — usu­ally just a short-term effort. With each attempt and fail­ure, I would get a new case of the “Fuck­its!” and put on some more weight. I joined two dif­fer­ent gyms. Again, because I have appar­ently become aller­gic to hard phys­i­cal effort, I have resisted work­ing with a trainer, or even join­ing the free fit­ness classes at the gym. When it comes to weight loss and work­ing out, I’ve sadly opted with flight in the “fight or flight” choice.

I am sure that I am not the only per­son who reaches a cer­tain point, stops to looks at his/her body, sighs heav­ily and thinks, “How in this hell did I get here?” If we are to be hon­est with our­selves, the answer is usu­ally pretty obvi­ous, but it doesn’t make the sense of defeat any eas­ier to han­dle. Nev­er­the­less, I am going to do my best to get back into the spirit of Oper­a­tion Twenty12, and shake off feel­ing sorry for myself. I know that feel­ing emo­tion­ally and phys­i­cally defeated can be over­come, but I may need more help that I imagined.

If you have any advice for me, or want to share how you turned dread and defeat into per­sonal vic­tory, please do so in the com­ments. I want need to hear from you.