Juice-ly 9th: Permission.

Day Nine: my week of veggie juice only continues. The point has been to wean myself off of sugar entirely and maximize weight loss, but I’m guessing that by the end of the week I will find that my body needs more calories than I can get from a few veggie juices to continue to flush out the toxins that have built up over years of poor eating habits. It has not been easy, and I’m actually contemplating adding some beets into my next grocery run for some natural sugar. 

Today I gave myself permission to reach my weight loss goals. It was harder to do than I thought it would be. Driving in to school, I took a deep breath and breathed out the words,  

“I give you permission to reach your goals.”  

I felt a physiological response just to the words. My stomach tightened up, and I had to breathe the words through clenched teeth. Why? I think it’s largely because of the way I respond to failure. Basically, it’s the end of the world when things don’t go perfectly according to my ill-informed, untested, pie-in-the-sky, conflict-free plans. As a result, my life has been subconsciously guided by some warped aphorisms. For example:

Fall one time, get up none.

If I fell of the horse, well. That one fall means I was clearly not meant to ride horses, ever. 

Once bitten, the rest of my life shy. 

I don’t think I’ve failed any more than anyone else, and I’d bet that I’ve probably failed significantly less than the average person. Not that I’ve succeeded more than anyone else, though. Because of the way I respond to failure, I’ve ended up trying far fewer times than my God-given talents should have allowed me to try. In His sovereignty, God has blessed me beyond measure with a wonderful wife and kids, loving family, and long-suffering friends. But part of me can’t help thinking that these good things have come my way despite my own efforts to wreck it all, or lack of effort when the times demanded maximum effort, which leads to passivity and missed opportunity. 

For example, the large majority of my positive efforts towards overall health have ended whenever well-meaning people began to pay me compliments on my appearance. Instead of taking their kind and positive words as a sign to continue doing whatever I was doing to get healthy, I took them as a signal that I looked good enough to resume my previously poor eating and exercise habits. I’ve read that last sentence three times over, and I still don’t see why this course of action made sense to me through my twenties and most of my thirties. In effect, I was saying to myself: “Now that I’m juuuust barely over the line between morbid obesity and social overweight, I might as well go back to eating whole pizzas and sitting on the couch for eight hours a day again!” Just one of the reasons why I’ve tended to hang on to my “fat” clothes – which is one of my most tried and true methods of self-sabotage – instead of just throwing them away and basically slamming the door on ever going back to those old ways again.

Posing behind a pair of my old "fat" pants. By God's grace, I'll never be able to fit in these again.

My food addiction has resulted from a complex web of interacting causes and effects over my four decades on this earth, but a significant strand in that matrix has been this underlying fear that I would give weight loss my best shot and fall short of my goals. The prospect of ultimate failure has kept me from reaching for so many good things, and as I sit here at the beginning of another extended fast, I feel excited and a bit afraid of where I could be physically and emotionally at the end of this time. All I have to do is continue to juice for the full 45 days, and I could be well below any of my previous weight loss goals.

The possibility exists, however, that I will still try to contrive ways to sabotage my best efforts, even within the confines of the fast, as I near the lowest weight of my adult life, which is only about 15 pounds away as I type these words. (Don't worry - I'll update my weight loss in at the quarter point of the fast, in a couple of days.) Never mind the fact that I view that weight as a mere stepping stone to my Ultimate Goal Weight. The one I've been trying to reach since I was a teenager. I need to get out of my own way and simply give myself permission to be the person God intends me to be: physically, emotionally, and spiritually.