The Backyard of Life: Finding the Motivation to Lose Weight

Posted on Aug 13th 2010 3:00PM by Lee Hodo

Filed Under: Motivation, Tipping the Scales

Lee Hodo

Don't get me wrong; I love my dog. She's a 3-year-old chocolate Lab who thinks she's still a puppy. Her name is Molly (after the American Girl doll, naturally). She's been a fun addition to our family.

However, when I go out to mow the backyard, I usually have to do a "preflight inspection" of the yard. This means moving her doghouse, picking up trash and moving her bones and toys to the patio area. It's always a challenge finding the things that she has hidden for me to discover.

After getting all of the obstacles out of the way, I can begin mowing the yard. When I'm not looking, however, my dog will inevitably go and get one of the toys or bones that I so helpfully rediscovered for her and move it back out to the yard. Or she may leave me some other little "gift" right where I'm about to step. So while I thought I had my yard cleaned up, prepared and ready to go, suddenly there is something in my path.

Now here is the choice: Do I just plow through the object? Use brute force to overcome the obstacle? Depending on what it is, I could shred it and scatter it all over the yard, making the yard a bigger mess than when I started. Or I could shoot it off into another part of the yard, where I will have to deal with it again on another pass.

I usually start out with good intentions. I'll start mowing along the edges, moving obstacles out of the way so that I don't run into them again. It's not long before I'm pretty tired and nasty, and I may just kick the object out of the way or mow on through it. It doesn't really matter in the long run. Next time I'll do better. I'm tired of always stopping and having to start again.

The last time I mowed, the grass was pretty high, and it was difficult because I kept blowing my clippings back into the area I hadn't mowed yet. I couldn't mow over the wet, clumpy grass clippings; it would be too much for my lawn mower to handle.

So I decided to change how I mowed my yard. I took a different path. This was difficult at first because it didn't feel natural -- it went against the way I normally do things. But by the end of the mowing time, I had an easier experience. I still had to watch out for -- and deal with -- the obstacles, but at least I wasn't sabotaging myself by dumping my clippings on the part I hadn't come to yet.

You may be wondering what mowing the yard has to do with a healthy lifestyle... so here's the meaning to my parable: What I've been doing lately isn't working. I'm sabotaging my previous successes by overeating or skipping workouts. I start out the day with good intentions, but by the end of the day I'm in the same old rut, kicking around the same old obstacles.

So, I need to start over -- look at my back yard in a different way. This reboot will be difficult at first (because old habits are hard to break), and the obstacles will be big and nasty. But if I can build back those healthy habits, "mowing the yard" will become a much easier and rewarding experience. I hope to have to some good results to report to you next time.

Accountability is big. Having to write all these down and come clean with you will help. I've had the most success when I journal my food and calorie intake. So I'm going to get back into that, even though it is a huge hassle. What are some other tricks you use to keep motivated? I need all the help I can get! And if you like yard work, have I got a job for you!

After decades of dieting only to gain it back, two That's Fit readers have decided to finally rethink their relationship with food and exercise over the next year to move toward a lifetime of fulfilling, healthy living. Come by every week as Ashley and Lee share their successes and challenges as they tip the scale.

Find out how Ashley is facing the challenges of moving to a new town while trying to lose weight.

3 Comment

Tags: losing weight, tipping-the-scales, weight loss

Around the Web

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

u262f 8-13-2010 @ 6:31PM

The biggest thing that helped me to lose weight was to not lose weight. Losing weight is usually a symptom of illness and disease. People who aim to lose weight have the disease of being too caught up in their physical image and what others think about it. Words do have a subconscious power, and when people think of it as "losing" weight, it becomes a losing proposition.

Instead of "losing" anything, I decided that I'm going to feel great, have fun, and pamper myself. Eating right and getting the right amount of physical activity requires spending extra time and money to pamper my body, and it has longer lasting feel-good effects than taking a luxuriant bubble bath or going to the spa for a day. I decided that I'm worth it. I'm worth the time it takes to engage in fun physical play. I'm worth the money it takes to buy the more expensive fresh, organic produce that tastes wonderful by itself with minimal preparation.

I haven't "lost" anything by dropping my BMI from 30 to 23. I didn't "lose" my soft drinks, potato chips, pizza, salt shaker, etc. I didn't "lose" the sugar, salt, and fat from my diet. Instead, I've gained nutrition. I've won delicious exotic fruits, vitamin-packed organic vegetables, satisfying lean proteins, and a variety of spectacular herbs and spices. I've won great health and a clean check-up from my doctor. In fact, I think all of the nutrition mistakes we've made in the past (low-fat, low-carb, low-cal) were exactly because we were thinking about "losing weight" instead of "gaining nutrients". If we had remembered that the goal is health, not weight loss, then we wouldn't have been fooled by trans fats or substitute sugars. We would've looked at it and wondered what nutrients we get from the trans fats and substitute sugars and realized that all these substitutes are just as unhealthy as the original evil we're trying to avoid. Likewise with "brown" grains. Whole wheat and brown rice have fat, while white bread and white rice can be made non-fat. If we were taking a weight loss approach, then we should be eating the white stuff. However, whole wheat and brown rice also have nutrients that were stripped out of the white versions. (On the other hand, white bread is usually enriched, so there are nutrients in white bread too. But it has been removed and added back in. I don't know about you, but regurgitated nutrients don't sound all that exciting to me.)

When I was trying to "lose weight", things that helped me "lose weight" took a very low priority when life got busy or wasn't going well. After all, when life is tough already, why would I want to make more work for myself just to lose weight when I can barely stay afloat without the added effort? I'm not so vain that I need to be slim when I have so many other things to get done.

However, once I started thinking of it as getting healthy and having instead of losing weight, it took a priority. Now, when life gets busy, I know I can't afford to skimp on keeping myself healthy. After all, if I'm busy, I'd never be able to keep up with everything if I get sick. Reaching for that quick bag of potato chips to tie me over until the next meal is only going to make me less productive. And, when I've worked hard enough to earn a breather, fun physical activities are a great reward.

I like the point you make about thinking of things differently, and it's exactly how I finally reached a healthy size for my body. I decided to "get healthy", not "lose weight".

pab69 8-20-2010 @ 5:50PM

I have never been overweight but I encountered your post via That's Fit and while I understand you may not find my feedback as credible as that from other like-sized readers I wanted to say hello and hopefully offer you some encouragement.

First of all, congratulations on deciding to change, now you just need to get motivated. This is the introspective part, where you challenge yourself with tough questions - how did you become overweight, was there a trigger event, etc etc? Is that something you're going through?

Personally, (forgive me) I don't understand how anyone who lugs around 100 pounds of excess weight can NOT be motivated to change. If I'm being frank and blunt, a part of me reads this as behavior that is driven by laziness and low self-esteem (again, forgive me). But I've never been overweight and addicted to a lifestyle without exercise so I don't know what you're going through. Doesn't the prospect of a premature death motivate you, I wonder, or is that just too intangible? What is exactly about the change that you're struggling with? Surely not changing high fat mayo for low fat mayo? Or walking a mile or two a day? Or drinking water instead of soda? These are easy, right? Is it that you just don't want it enough? Why would that be?

Please don't take offense by my remarks - I sincerely wish you well and that your weight loss is a function of a lifestyle change and not a desire (as mentioned by an earlier comment) to just 'lose weight'.

Good luck!