Excerpt - 1,343 words
Please send all comments (good, bad, or disinterested) and feedback to slaughterhouse@jameslyden.com.
Author's Note:
This is from an early, introductory chapter of the book. A lot of what's in place right now is a bare-bones structure that will be filled in over the next few months. I hope you enjoy it. Think of this like standing next to a bubbling stock pot and the chef hands you a spoon. What's it missing? Is it any good? What would you change?
The book is at a very embryonic phase right now, and your feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you for your help!
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You may be 20, 50 or 100 pounds overweight. I cannot control or change how you arrived at whatever number that is. I cannot go back in time and take the bacon double cheeseburger out of your hand, or tell you why you shouldn’t skip that workout, or tell you that it’s OK for you to say that you’ll start the diet tomorrow. I didn’t even have the power to go back in time and do this for myself.
And in things that you couldn’t control either, like injury and illness, that isn’t anything I can change. This book is not a magic wand. What you weigh right now is something that I don’t have any control over at all. The diets that you tried that didn’t work, the exercise videos you bought and didn’t even watch all the way through, the treadmill that you’re drying laundry on – I can’t fix those.
So we can forget about the past.
As for the future, you and you alone can decide what you’re going to do with it. You’re reading this book and you’re doing the crunches in your mind, looking forward to being the next person to smoke me as we head toward the finish line at the Chicago Triathlon. You’re seeing yourself there waving at my family and friends, maybe pumping your fist a little, getting a few strides ahead of the guy in the yellow shirt. And yes, that scenario’s entirely possible. Another scenario is you reading this book and staying motivated for three days, or two weeks, or three months. And at that point, it doesn’t matter how fast you were GOING to be at the race where you were going to outrun me. You lost because you never showed up.
So if we knock out the past and we knock out the future, we’re only left with the present. And the present is not always your friend. The present is where the meeting runs late, and the kids have stuff to do after school, and you don’t have time to exercise in the morning because you didn’t get to sleep until 1 the night before, and there’s just no time. There’s an old saying, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.”
Here’s a good example of the present. Do you know who said this?
“He’d always say “Tomorrow. I’m going to start tomorrow, doc, I know what I have to do and I’m going to start tomorrow.”
The quote was Dr. Michael Newman. He was Tim Russert’s doctor. Now Mr. Russert was in the middle of covering an election of momentous significance. He had said three weeks earlier that Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee. This was the year that EVERYONE was interested in his field of expertise. The young people who had abandoned politics in droves were involved again, more so than ever.
And he was gone. The reason we know about that quote was Tim Russert’s doctor was on NBC News telling us about it after he’d died of a heart attack.
And that’s just his career, which I’m sure as important as it was and as talented as he was, wasn’t the most important thing in his life. He had a son who just graduated from college. Luke Russert had a national radio program and had shown some interest in working in journalism. You think Mr. Russert – who had written two books on the importance of the relationship of his own father – would have liked to have been around to offer similar guidance to his son?
But that’s OK. He had tomorrow to do it. So do you, right? You can’t die now, with all of these obligations and people to care about. Not you.
Bullshit. You know the answer.
You’ve got right now.
But maybe you’re not worried that you’re going to die of a heart attack because you’re younger. They will invent some pill that will allow you to eat chicken wings at 11 at night and you have nothing to worry about. That’s a great idea. And I can assure you, there are researchers looking at it even as we speak. In fact, let me give you a few names:
Fen-Phen
Ephedra
Hydroxycut
Redux
Those WERE the pills, people. Do you know what they did? They KILLED some people when they took them. Those people who were desperately trying to get skinny and not have a heart attack? Bad news. It happened anyway. And it happened faster than it needed to because when given the choice between working hard and taking pills, they thought the easy way wouldn’t kill them.
Now I’m not exempting myself from this level of stupidity. I’ve taken ephedra in the beginning and found it to be effective, but I could understand where it was not a good idea. I’ve taken Redline, drank a whole lot of black coffee, and done other things with my workout program that while they may have been legal, they may not always have been considered safe. I can assure you, though, that those were not the choices that allowed me to lose the weight in the first place.
What I had to learn early on, though, was that there would be days where I was not perfect, where I desperately wanted food that was awful for me, where I didn’t want to put my body through yet another workout, where life would intervene. And it was only when I acknowledged my humanity that I succeeded.
Too many people start that diet with one last blowout meal, sometimes even a few days of them, before they finally decide to get it started. This is like a NASCAR driver showing up to a race and deliberately letting the air out of his tires before beginning. Look, your goal is not to create any more negative past. You are merely sabotaging yourself when you do this. If you’ve decided that this is the direction you’re going, don’t start it off with one more empty “tomorrow for sure.”
You don’t know if you have tomorrow - you’ve got right now! So let me explain what I mean by “acknowledging your humanity.”
Too often our belief is that dieting has to be absolutely perfect or it isn’t going to work. That the only way that the weight is going to disappear is if we eat nothing but carrots and celery sticks and drink nothing with more calories than Crystal Light, to work out three times a day and swear off anything that may ever have been considered delicious.
Well, I have a serious issue with this. I’m a human being, and therefore I will make mistakes. I also love food and wine and laughter and fun. Many of my mistakes will revolve around these things. But if given the choice between being absolutely perfect and saying “no” to anything that isn’t in a very narrow range of my diet, all of the time – or every once in a while treating myself to something that’s not necessarily good for me but makes me smile, knowing that it might take one more day or another week to get where I want to go – I take the second option. Your life and mine is a series of choices just like this; how you manage them will determine your results.
Now I don’t take the second option every time. When you get on these sorts of missions to change yourself, and I’ve been on mine for nearly four and a half years, frequent exercise and watching your diet becomes a significant part your life. I have friends of mine who realize that, “Wow, you look GREAT!! How did you DO it?” and “Are you SURE you don’t want any onion rings?” are questions that answer each other.
And I also had people who liked asking, “When are you going to slow down?” “When is this going to stop?” and “When are you going to give this up?” They have moved on.
I – like them – have realized, you’ve got right now.
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