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JerseySmarts.com

The Next Big Thing, Part 1 – What Should I Tackle After Student Loans?

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This entry is the beginning of a three part series discussing what the next big thing will be for me after my student loans are fully repaid. Today, I’ll discuss two areas that are worthy of my hyperfocus while on Wednesday I’ll let you know which direction I’ve opted to move in for this big decision. Then on Friday, I’ll wrap-up this three part series with some thoughts about how I might begin the next hyperfocus. I hope you enjoy reading this miniseries!

The full repayment of my student loan debt should be coming up in the next few weeks. And if it’s not in the next few weeks, then it will certainly occur at some point this summer – and hopefully sooner rather than later. Those of you who have been along for the ride via this blog, my twitter feed, and through our personal discussions know that I’ve spent the last few years hyperfocused on repaying my student loan debt. There is a lot of discipline and new skills that come along with successfully hyperfocusing on one aspect of your life. With my student loans, for example, I’ve crafted some exceptionally useful spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel to track my income and expenses. These aren’t your run of the mill spreadsheets that one can find for download off of any financial website. Instead, these are highly customized spreadsheets that I built from the ground up and that I’ve been using day in and day out for years to track my income and expenses, short and long-term financial goals, and debt repayment.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I would have been able to quickly and successfully decimate my student loan debt without the organizational help and long-term planning provided by using these spreadsheets on a daily basis.

The big decision - which direction do I go in next?

The big decision – which direction do I go in next?

When you set your mind to completing a long-term goal, your mind will use your innate abilities to adapt your environment to help you achieve that goal. For me that innate readjustment was spending more time doing long-term financial planning through the use of highly customized spreadsheets and highly customized budgeting. And I couldn’t be happier with the end result (no student loan debt!) of this hyperfocusing.

Now, when it comes to hyperfocusing I have a decision that I need to make. When I sit and think about what my next big hyperfocus might be there are two items that come zooming to the front of my mind. The first is improving my health and the second is completing a doctorate. I don’t list these as first and second because that is how I rank them; either of these two items could be the next big thing that I hyperfocus on. Below are some of my ideas on each of these items and since I listed health first and a doctorate second above, I’ll give my thoughts on the doctorate first and my health second.

First, completing a doctorate would allow me to accomplish my long-term academic goal. As a high school student, I thought that I would eventually go on to become a lawyer. During that process, I would have obviously needed to earn a juris doctorate and thus would have obtained a doctoral degree in that manner. As we already know, though, I ultimately didn’t go in the direction of being a lawyer. Instead, I earned a master’s degree and I’m in the process of completing a post-master’s certificate. Frankly, you can’t get many more education credentials than what I have right now… except for a doctorate.

And even with these various certificates and commendations, obtaining a doctorate is still a very real goal of mine and one that I think about somewhat frequently. Not only does a doctorate open up the possibility of becoming a full-time professor, but there is a unique air of certainty that comes from someone speaking as a doctor versus speaking as an “expert” in a field. And since most “experts” have doctorates anyway, enrolling in a program to obtain one wouldn’t be out of bounds for what I do in my work.

Second, I could hyperfocus on improving my health. Whether we like it or not, our health is that one thing that we can’t get away from in our lives. Of course when we do get away from it our lives typically aren’t as robust as they could be or they just downright don’t last as long as they should. For each of us, our health is that thing we see in the mirror each morning and that thing we are somewhat consumed with when engaging in and interacting with the outside world. Let’s be honest, folks. We live in a very superficial society where a person’s appearance matters. You can be a brilliant scientist on the verge of curing cancer, but if you’re fat or generally out of shape, the superficial American public doesn’t give a damn about you. That is, they don’t give a damn about you until you can do them some good by providing a cure for their sicknesses!

I am confident that once I am no longer hyperfocused on repaying my student loans, I’m absolutely going to focus on one of the two items above. It’s either going to be the full completion of a doctoral program or a sincere focus on improving my health. Stick around the blog for this Wednesday’s entry where I’ll let you know which of the two I’ve selected. See you then!

Things I Might Have Done Differently If I Had a Magic Time Machine or Something

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Unlike most people out there, I’m generally a very happy guy with no regrets in life. There are things I would have done differently here or there along the way, but I don’t regret any of the big (or small) decisions that I’ve made – and I think that’s something unique in today’s society which is plagued with moral relativism. When it comes to decisions, moral relativism tells people, “Go ahead – take a chance and do something crazy! You only live once, right?!” That mentality has some merit for inconsequential decisions like considering whether or not you want to try a new food, go on an adventurous trip/vacation, or take your hand at making a new friend or business connection. But all too often our society encourages people to apply that “you only live once” mentality to decisions that shouldn’t be defined by the moment, but rather by something deeper. This “something deeper” might be the wisdom of your family, the beliefs of your faith, or certain philosophical teachings that you deeply believe in and profess regularly.

Don’t think that you need to be an academic or an ultra emotive person to discover these particular guides in your life. You can find this guiding wisdom all over the place – if you look. You can find deep philosophical guidance in the words that a coach speaks to a player, in the intangible lessons on character that a teacher gives to a student, or even in the advice your doctor gives you about general health.

Guidance that is typically not warped by moral relativism is widely available – if you just look for it.

For me, I’m guided by lessons from my family and my faith and, in many ways, by my educational experiences. Being guided by those lessons allows me to make decisions in my life that I’m very comfortable with and that ultimately lead me to a life of no regrets – without the stupid “you only live once” attitude that the moral relativists encourage.

Yet, sometimes I consider whether I might have made different decisions in life and thus the creation of this blog entry. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, then these considerations certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise to you since they focus on my student loans, my health, my entrepreneurial exploits, and my education. You might consider the writing below the “lessons learned” from my experiences on these issues. I’m not sure if you’ll find this interesting, but here we go. Below are some of my personal thoughts about what I might have done differently if I had a magic time machine… or something!

Paying Back My Student Loans
My biggest financial accomplishment in the last 3 and a half years was repaying some $104 thousand of my $121 thousand in student loan debt. Today, I have enough money to repay the remaining $17 thousand, but since I’ll very likely be buying a home in the next few months I’ve opted not to give those funds to the government just yet. And that would be the first lesson learned in my ultra aggressive student loan repayment from the last 3 and a half years. Namely, I could have relaxed just a little bit with the repayment of my United States Department of Education Direct Loan to afford me a larger down payment for the home I’ll be purchasing. Along with maybe not being so aggressive in repaying my loans in the last year, if I could jump in a time machine I’d tell the 18, 19, 20, and 21 year old versions of myself to start repaying the loans while I was still in school. I was making decent money while I was in college. It would not have been a problem to make $300 – $500 payments each month while I was in school. That would have lowered the debt boom that I felt after I graduated from graduate school in 2006. Second lesson learned – begin repaying your student loans while you’re still a student, if you can… and you probably can.

Taking Out Student Loan Debt
This one goes hand-in-hand with the lesson learned above and is probably pretty obvious, but if I could jump into that time machine and go back to 1999 – 2003, I’d tell my younger self to not take out as much in student loan debt. Specifically, I would have dramatically reduced the amount of nonacademic student loan debt that I took out while I was both an undergraduate and graduate student. The job that I held the longest while I was a student was working for the landlord of the apartments that I lived in. When he initially offered me the job, he wanted to work a deal where I got paid a little bit less each week, but my rent would be free. I didn’t like the idea of losing money in my hand today but still working for it, so I took out additional student loan debt to make bulk rent payments twice each year. On average, I was paying about $600 per month in rent (it was a little bit less when I first started working there and a little bit more when I left). If you do the math, that’s $600 in rent each month multiplied by 12 months in the year equals $7,200 in rent each year… multiplied by the 3 or 4 years that I worked for the landlord equals… a lot of money that I didn’t have to take out in student loans. The lessons learned here is to take advantage of legitimate cost saving deals if they’re offered to you and try not to take out too much in living costs when you take out student loans.

Slowly Building Usable Web Solutions, LLC Instead of Attacking the Market
Switching of student loans and on to one of my entrepreneurial efforts – when I started Usable Web Solutions, LLC over 7 years ago, I took an aggressive approach to the local web development market in the northern shore area of Monmouth County. That aggressive approach paid off in the short-run with UWS generating nearly 50 clients in its first 2 years of operation. Let’s be honest – to generate nearly 50 clients in a company that I was really running part-time on the side without much effort is pretty damn impressive. One of my mistakes in building up those clients, though, was focusing on undercutting the existing web development and maintenance market. If a competitor was charging $3,000 to design a website, I’d charge $1,500. If they were charging $50 per month for maintenance and hosting, then I’d charge $30. Undercutting the market brought me clients, but it didn’t bring the tremendous amount of revenue that you would think comes along with that number of clients signing up in a short period of time. Also, I gave my nonprofit clients a discount, but I never actually marked that discount down in my official paperwork. That cost me quite a bit of money that I could have saved come tax season each year. The lessons learned here are to very carefully select the methods by which you attack a local market when starting a company and to be selective in the clients that you choose to work with in a start-up. Another lesson I learned was to do a little bit more research into the tax implications of discounts before offering them to your clients!

You Should Be Calling Me “Doctor” Right Now
The student loan and website stuff above and the other items you’ll read below are annoying. But the thing that really bites my ass is that I didn’t stay in school after I graduated from graduate school in 2006. Without question, I should have stayed in school and gotten my doctorate. Just to show you how close I was to getting one, the graduate program that I was in required 45 credits for a masters degree and 72 credits for a doctorate. You probably did the simple math and saw that I might have been 27 credits away from a doctorate – not correct. I graduated from the masters degree program with 54 credits, putting me 18 credits away from a doctorate. EIGHTEEN CREDITS. Want to know what’s worse? Since I graduated with masters degree, I’ve successfully completed a 15 credit graduate certificate program and I’m just about 6 credits into a post-masters certificate program. That’s 21 more credits on my academic resume… with no doctorate at the end because they were at a different academic institution than where I received the masters degree! You might think that the lesson learned here is to go back to my original graduate institution and finish the job and you’d be correct in a way. I’m not entirely sure that a doctorate in the same discipline that my masters degree is in is what I want to accomplish academically. Silly, right? The lesson learned here is that if you’re incredibly close to achieving an incredible goal, then focus your energy on achieving it!

And Then There Was The Weight Loss… And Gain
Ahhh… one of the reasons that I started writing this blog way back when was because I wanted to chronicle – in some form or another – the weight loss journey I was going on back in the early 2000s. After I graduated from college in May 2003, I was a big guy; probably logging in around 385 pounds. I don’t know exactly how my weight got to that point, but it did and I have horrible pictures to prove it. Then during the spring of 2004, my Father had some health trouble including a heart attack and stroke (neither of which impaired him at the time, thankfully) and a good friend of mine got married. In the wedding pictures, my big body takes up huge portions of each picture that I’m in. It was embarrassing. At the time, I knew that my Father’s health was deteriorating and that I wasn’t doing myself any favors socially by being that big of a guy so I resolved that my Father would see a healthier me before he died – and if there was a little bit more fun in my social life because of it, then that wasn’t a bad side effect. And then I ate less, worked out more, and lost a bunch of weight. To be exact, I lost 125 pounds in a year and reached 260 pounds – a weight that I hadn’t achieved since I was a wrestler in high school (and when I weighed that much while wrestling heavyweight in high school, I was pretty damn dominant). But the honeymoon didn’t last and I remember the exact day that the pendulum started swinging back in the other direction.

I was standing in my kitchen trying to figure out what to have for dinner. And some random flashes went through my mind of when I weighed 385 pounds and I would make a whole box of pasta, eat it with almost an entire jar of sauce, and drench it in different cheeses. During that flash, my taste buds went bonkers in my mouth because when I was 385 pounds, I thought that tasted good. And then something horrible reawakened in me and I made a whole box of pasta for dinner that night (with the sauce and the cheese and so on). As you might imagine, it made me sick. And getting sick allowed me to avoid the gym for a few days… which allowed me to continue eating some of the foods that I hadn’t had in over a year (candy, for example). And eating that stuff also got me sick… which, of course, led to missing more gym sessions. And the cycle back to gaining weight had begun. At some point when I crossed back over to 300 pounds, I sort of got that mental block in my head again that I couldn’t be healthy because it took too much time and effort (starting graduate school while working full-time didn’t help). Then I graduated from graduate school, got a new full-time job, my Father’s health deteriorated and I spent more time traveling to see him at the hospital, I spent more time building the website company on the side, I spent more time volunteering, etc, etc. And I gained back over 100 pounds. A few summers ago, my roommates and I had a weight loss contest that I should have won with no questions. I started the contest at 363.6 pounds and ended it weighing 314.6 pounds. Losing nearly 50 pounds didn’t win me the contest and over the course of the following months I gained most of that weight back. The lesson learned here? Well, there’s probably too many to list out and I’m sure each person has their own takeaway from this brief story, but the lesson that I learned is to not give up your successes so easily. Fight, damn it. And when you can’t stop the bleeding (metaphorically speaking), seek help. I didn’t have to regain those 125 pounds nearly a decade ago. There were people who would have helped me turn the tide back around in my favor, but I didn’t reach out and I regained much of that weight.

Writing More Often and More Thoroughly
This one is interesting because every few months/several times each year I hop onto this blog and write something like, “I’ve got a bunch of half-written entries that I’m working on for you, so stay tuned!” Meanwhile, if you are staying tuned, then you’re tuning into nothing. I mean how many entries have I even posted so far in 2013? This one makes 5, right? Pitiful. And yet, I find writing to be a very cathartic experience. It clears my mind of the craziness and hectic nature of my day-to-day working life and entrepreneurial efforts. Plus, I enjoy writing. I enjoy putting my fingers to work on this laptop and having something very tangible that is, I hope, of some higher level quality at the end of those efforts. In other words, writing allows the creative aspect of my personality to come out and take form. Although, when I write these blog entries I am keenly aware of trying to keep them short and sweet (not this one, obviously). Sure, sometimes you’ll read something that goes on and on (like this entry), but I would really enjoy writing more of these longer, extended entries so I can tell fuller, more thorough stories about my life, experiences, and thoughts on different issues. The lesson learned here is to make time for those things that soothe your mind and put your body at ease. For me, writing these entries accomplishes that goal and I should find more time to write fuller entries.

And there you go, folks. Those are some of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way and some of the things that I might have done differently. Thankfully, each of the setbacks or concerns that I’ve noted above were (and still are) easy to address in a head-on manner; or it is easy to overcome the unintended consequences of each of these items. There’s more to write about, of course, but if you read everything above, then you’ve just read the equivalent of an 8 page academic paper and sometimes you need to know when to call it quits and save some more for next time!

Most of the Blogs Out There Are Not Written for Those With Crushing Debt Burdens

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Even though this is probably no surprise to anyone out there – I read a lot. From books to magazines to newspapers to websites to blogs to academic reports to you name it. I find myself reading a great deal of varied content on a weekly basis. Right now, for example, I’m reading a book about post-World War II educational curriculum development in America as well as the ninth book in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I’m also halfway through a book about how approaches to best educating students has changed in the last 20+ years.

But aside from all of these books and reports I really like to read blogs written by everyday people who accomplish extraordinary feats. I have a small cadre of such blogs fed into my RSS feeder. Some of these blogs are written by people who have lost tremendous amounts of weight, others are written by people who have gone from a skinny physique or a chubby physique to winning bodybuilding competitions. Some of the blogs are written by guys who were introverted and wound up changing their lives to become social butterflies. Other blogs are written by people who have managed to travel around the world for an incredibly small amount of money before they were a certain age.

I don’t necessarily identify with any of these blogs or their writers because none of them really speak to my direct experience. In other words, at one point I lost 125 pounds so I already know how to accomplish that goal, I’ve never been an introverted person so I don’t need tips or pointers on how to get out there and meet people, and I’m not the biggest traveler so those lessons really don’t apply to my life. What I do enjoy about these blogs is reading the sense of accomplishment that these people achieve when they meet their goals. As someone who has met (and continues to meet) certain goals in my life, I understand how great that sense of accomplishment feels.

It’s awesome.

However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in many of these blogs. All of these amateur writers are missing commentary that speaks to a growing number of individuals in our country. Let me be more direct: not one of these bloggers, these self-professed self-help gurus, these accomplished weight loss success stories, these people who have overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, etc. have accomplished their major goals and retired a tremendous amount of debt.

While these bloggers build their own ego and create their own hype because they lost [insert large number here] pounds or because they traveled to [insert large number here] countries, you can’t find someone who has managed accomplish a major goal while saddled with a tremendous non-mortgage debt burden. And it’s like this all over the blogosphere. For example, I read a lot of guy blogs (those blogs focused on items of interest to guys in my age group). These blogs range in variety and type from guys who spend a lot of their time working out and talking about the best techniques for working out to guys who claim to have a lot of social success to guys who manage to weave the fundamentals of their faith throughout their daily lives.

All of the writers that I read on guy blogs eventually wind up writing an entry about how their readers can become better at [insert whatever here]. Well, the impetus for writing this entry was a piece of “advice” that I’ve seen pop up over and over again on these guy blogs. And that same piece of advice pops up on all of the blogs that I read – not just guy blogs. That piece of advice is that if you want to be the absolute best at [insert whatever here], then you absolutely cannot have any debt.

That’s right. I’ve read bloggers saying that if you want to lose weight, you can’t have any debt because you need the freedom to be able to spend as much time as possible working out instead of being stuck working one, two, or more jobs. I’ve read bloggers saying that if you want to increase the size of your social circle, you can’t have any debt because if you don’t have excess funds to do new and exciting things, how can you expand the number and type of people that you’ll interact with? I’ve even read bloggers who say that if you want to meet the type of girl that you think you’re most compatible with, then you can’t have debt because that debt weighs on you mentally and restricts your ability to see yourself with a successful girlfriend, fiancée, or wife.

But here’s the question that prompted me to write this entry…

Who doesn’t have some type of debt? I don’t mean that as a matter-of-fact type of question with the expectation that your response would be, “I guess everyone has some type of debt.” That’s not what I’m going for here. Think of the real answer to that question – who doesn’t have some type of debt? Well, you have independently wealthy people or those who come from tremendous wealth and don’t need to pay their own way through life. Okay. You also have those people who have worked their butts off and earned enough money such that they don’t have to carry any debt. Okay. And you know what? You might even find that people who are the exact opposite of these wealthy people also don’t have any debt. That is to say that those people who never took on college debt yet still didn’t graduate with a degree or those people who just graduated from high school (or not) and wound up living in their parents’ basement; the habitual underachievers out there.

Is there any other type of person who doesn’t have some type of debt? I really can’t think of any, but I would suggest that there should be a fourth category – those people who choose to write a blog focusing in depth about their success at achieving a goal other than retiring debt! After spending a few years reading some of these blogs I’ve come to the conclusion that people out there who accomplish what they believe are great things are not saddled with a tremendous amount of non-mortgage debt. They don’t have a significant amount of consumer debt and they don’t have a significant amount of student loan debt. They have that freedom that I referenced above – the freedom to not be tied down to one, two, or more jobs. And with that freedom comes the ability and flexibility to spend more of their time losing weight or working out or hanging out at local clubs or spending their time learning new hobbies or traveling around the world, etc.

They don’t know what it’s like to work an 8am to 6pm job with an hour commute wrapped on either side of that workday plus spending an hour each morning before you leave for the office working on freelance projects and several hours at night when you get home at night working a second or third job. And I specifically wrote that last sentence to begin with “they don’t know what it’s like” because that’s the problem that I’ve been having with a lot of the blogs that I read: the writers just don’t understand how self-righteous and, frankly, alienating they sound when they write their entries.

And here’s the prime example that I know so many of you out there have probably seen before… How many of you have ever read a weight loss blog or a weight training blog that condemns those who say they don’t have the free time to work out? Usually, the writer says that this is just an excuse and that you can make time to lose weight or work out if you really want to…

If you really want to? Really?

Are you fucking kidding me?

The only person who would write such an ignorant comment is someone who don’t wake up at 5am (exhausted) and then fall into bed at midnight after working the entire day to earn money in an effort to retire debt. Who would tell someone who keeps this schedule 5, 6, or 7 days each week that they are lazy or that they are the cause of their own lament because they don’t make time for working out? I know who would tell someone that – a blogger who has never had to try to tackle both [insert a personal goal here] and retire a significant amount of debt at the same time.

The reason why I wrote this entry is because I know I have a lot of random readers on this blog and I can track where some of you come from out there on the internet. Some of you are coming from some of these self-help, conquer the world type of blogs and that’s great. Believe me, I want to conquer the world and improve my health, wealth, and well-being just as much as those other writers. However, I live my life in the real reality – a reality much closer to where you probably exist, too. I understand that it’s hard to train to climb Mount Everest when you have a six-figure student loan debt crushing you and dictating nearly every move you make. I understand that it’s really hard and really difficult to lose weight when you’re working 16 – 18 hour days (or longer). I understand that it’s difficult to put the proper amount of time and effort into increasing your social circle or even finding someone worthwhile to date when you’re so focused and, unfortunately, controlled by crushing levels of consumer or student debt. I understand where you’re coming from – I get it.

And I don’t think that you’re lazy. I don’t think that you’re anti-social. I don’t think that you’re making excuses. Not at all.

What I do think is that you’re stuck in the same rut that the majority of population is stuck in – you’re forced to do things to retire debt (or generally improve your financial position) that prevent you from fully engaging in the other activities that you want to engage in. You’re not going to find this understanding on those self-help blogs or the guys’ blogs or in many other places out there because the truth is that those writers simply don’t understand. In about 6 years I’ve paid off nearly $100,000 in student loan debt and I have another $21,000+ left to repay. I repaid that amount while losing a tremendous amount of weight, gaining most of it back, losing much of it again, and gaining some of it back again. Professionally, I work around the clock; not just a 9-to-5 type of job. Believe me, I understand the burden of debt and how it really does dictate what you can and cannot do with your life.

And, like many of you, I’ve sat there and listened to people in my personal and professional life ask me why I don’t [insert whatever here] while I’m young? These people also have no idea what it’s like to be suffocating under crushing consumer or student loan debt. Folks constantly ask me why I don’t go away on vacation (my last real vacation was back in 6th grade). Well, I don’t go away on vacation because I can’t imagine spending a thousand or two bucks on vacating reality while I still owe money on my student loan. That would be financially foolish. People ask me why I don’t go out and find a “nice” girl to date (usually, their definition of “nice” is different than mine, but that’s another entry). They don’t understand that when you work around the clock, you don’t have much time for socialization outside of your standard circle. And, to mix a little bit of a guys’ blog mindset here, they don’t understand that the girls you meet while you are burdened with immense debt, while you are out of shape, or while you are working around the clock are typically not the girls that you want to marry! I assume it’s the same for the ladies out there looking for a man.

To sum it up, I just warn you all to read these self-help, self-improvement blogs for purposes other than examples to follow. Chances are very strong that the writer you’re reading doesn’t have the same life experiences as you do. And chances are even stronger that they never had to tackle an immense amount of undischargeable consumer or student debt before, during, or after they accomplished whatever it is that made them an amateur expert.

Be rational, believe in yourself, and tackle your debt first. Once you remove that crushing yoke, then focus on your health (losing weight, gaining muscle, etc.), and after that you can focus on your social life. There’s no way around doing what makes sense and this is the path that I really believe makes the most sense for the most people out there.

Now… back to the grind!

Another Difference Between Reading Weight Loss Entries Here Versus Other Blogs

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The other day I mentioned that one of the differences between reading a weight loss-related entry here versus other blogs is that I understand reality. In other words, some days you just can’t work out because you’re out of the house from 7am until 9pm and when you get home you’re truly exhausted so you fall down onto the couch or bed and go to sleep. I get it. That’s life sometimes. Well, after reading another well-known blogger who writes about how he lost over 140 pounds, I’ve realized another difference between JerseySmarts.com and the rest of the blogs:

I don’t think you are a bad person.

Too often I read these weight loss blogs and the writers suggest that their former, fat selves are people that they don’t even remember. They refer to their fat selves as existing in a previous or past life. They do everything they can to distance who they’ve become from who they were for, sometimes, decades.

It’s disgusting.

How lonely and pathetic must a person’s life be for them to want to distance themselves from… themselves!? And how much internal self-hate must these people harbor for them to despise who they “used to be?” Talk about people who seriously need to see a psychiatrist! For these folks, it’s not about losing pounds – it’s about getting over their own self-loathing and self-hate masked in the rhetoric of weight loss.

Don’t be fooled, people.

Let me talk from experience. After I lost 125 pounds I distinctly remember looking at pictures of my 380+ pound self and thinking, “That’s a fat guy in that picture, but that’s a very, very good guy, too.” I also distinctly remember a feeling of sadness when I looked at those pictures because I remembered all of the times when that 380+ pound guy would get snide looks or overhear exaggerated sighs in the airport and movie theater or have to deal with people look at him from afar. In fact, I remember walking in the store one day and seeing a really big person and thinking, “That poor woman. I bet she’s a saint, but that people judge her without hearing the first word out of her mouth.”

After I lost all of that weight people would ask me about what it’s like to live a new life and shed away my past. I’d immediately think, “New life? What the hell are these people talking about?!” I wasn’t a different person after I lost all of that weight. Not at all! The difference was that the portion of society that wasn’t overweight tried to bring me in to their cabal of divisive comments and unspoken disgust of fat people. It was almost as though they wanted me to say, “Yeah – I couldn’t believe what a worthless piece of trash I used to be!”

That type of drivel will never come out of my mouth because I’m fully aware of my self-worth.

Aside from the religious reasons why I don’t believe that any life is a worthless piece of a trash (least of all my own!), I don’t believe that a person’s weight should determine how society acts towards them. And yet I read people writing on these weight loss blogs about how they’re excited to have a new body and how they hated life before they lost the weight.

That’s not a weight problem, that’s a psychological problem.

The point of this entry is to tell all of you who might be in the midst of battling the bulge that you’re fighting the good fight. And, more importantly, don’t believe the voices of the self-hating people out there who already lost a bunch of weight and are now condemning their former selves. These are people who have a mental issue and are trying to compensate for their long lasting, deep-rooted, self-hatred. Love yourself. God gave you the beautiful body that you have. Treat it as the temple it is expected to be.

Don’t hate yourself – today or tomorrow.

Yesterday’s Update Annoyed Me, So I Did a Little Something About It

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After I posted yesterday’s update which showed just how sedentary my lifestyle is mostly forced to be, I got a little annoyed. Well, I was actually annoyed while I wrote it and then a good friend of mine called and he and I bitched to each other about the various pains in the neck that we have to deal with every day. During our bitch session, I cited the fact that I have this ultra sedentary lifestyle and it creates a much less in shape and physically powerful “me” than should exist.

The combination of writing yesterday’s entry and bitching with my buddy pushed me to a point where I had to do something about the week’s worth of results that I posted yesterday. And I did. Here’s the graphic from FitBit showing the statistics that I achieved yesterday:

Yesterday’s results from my FitBit Ultra.

This is what happens when someone gets annoyed at being forced into the proverbial corner. And this proves that I have the physical ability to generate these types of statistics (which I don’t think was ever in question anyway).

I’d like to suggest that I’ll keep this high level of activity going throughout the week, but I’m more realistic and understand that making such claims will ultimately lead to failure. For example, looking at my schedule for Monday I already know that I’ll be spending 13.5 of my 16 waking hours that day either driving, sitting in meetings, or crunching numbers behind a desk. Could I squeeze in a walk or two around the block while I’m at the office? Of course. Could I take the stairs instead of the elevator? Well, I normally do that already. Could I reasonably get the type of statistics that you see in the image above with the planned schedule that I have to navigate on Monday?

No.

And that’s the difference between reading weight loss and health-related stories on this blog versus reading them on other blogs. I’m realistic. If I was to buy-in to the bullshit that we sell elementary, high school, and college athletes, then I’d be panicking and going crazy right now. You know that line of bullshit that we sell those athletes. It takes different forms, but it mostly sounds like: “The only one stopping you is YOU!” or “If you WANT to do it, then you WILL do it.” or “Do or do not. There is no try.”

Alright, that last quote was from Yoda in Star Wars, but you get the picture.

Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons for you not to be able to get to the gym or walk the suggested 10,000 steps in a day. If you believe the bullshit hype (and, unfortunately, I think that most people do), then you’re going to drive yourself nuts trying to find out how you can fit in those 10,000 with almost no free time in your day and without compromising your professional efficiency.

It’s about balance, folks. It’s not about hysteria and it’s not about believing the motivational crud that we sell to people who don’t have any expansive, real world responsibilities. If you use your free time effectively – when you have it – then you might be able to get a day’s worth of work like what’s noted in the graphic above. Much more importantly, though, is realizing that you may not be able to achieve this goal on a daily basis because of other personal and professional commitments… and that’s okay.