The next two weeks wrap up year two of my Operation Melt project. What started as a goal to lose weight evolved into so much more and really turned into a life-transforming experience.
To be sure, I changed myself physically and transformed from obesity to an amateur athlete. But it was bigger than that. I changed how I look at my own health & fitness but also how I look at my contribution to the world. Through all of this I know that I am having an impact that is bigger than me.
At the end of the day isn’t that what we are all looking to do?
Two Years Ago
It was two years ago today that I made a series of choices that lit the fuse that started my Operation Melt project.
It was a Friday and I had just finished a horrible week at work. Several projects that my team was managing took terrible turns. I had relationship struggles with some peers that were causing drama. There were some performance issues in my team that I was not doing well with addressing. It had been weeks since I felt like I had a win. All of this leading me to the conclusion that my time to depart was drawing near.
After work on that Friday night I met my wife and some others out for drinks. This became an extended happy hour and I made poor decisions. Those poor decisions led to me feeling terrible the next day which turned into multiple days. This all drove me to make my first doctors appointment in much more than a decade.
As I describe in Operation Melt: How I Used Life-Changing Project Management to Lose Over 100 Pounds in Under a Year, this doctors appointment was my “moment.”
Your decision to make a change and to commit to getting fit is your moment. It is that moment in time when everything changes. It is pivotal and can literally become the decision between life and death. Your moment can be the decision between happiness or status quo.
Over the next two weeks I expect that I am going to be very reflective about this whole journey. There will be thoughts where I mentally kick myself for taking so long. There will be reflections about the exciting events that happened along the way. The negative parts of the past two years will reappear in my thinking – yes there were negative events over the past two years.
All of this reflection will lead up to the big day, June 15th. The day that I made the decision to change my life. That is the day I had that doctors appointment and decided that I needed to make a change…. and then did!
I will celebrate my Operation Melt anniversary day this year just like I did with the first year anniversary. I will be hosting a small 5k run with some of my friends (click here to join us!) in honor of my journey and the journeys every one of us are on every day to make our dreams come true.
Other Notable Events
This was a really big week in my life and in my Operation Melt journey. Unfortunately I am not ready to share the biggest developments just yet. I will be sharing over the coming weeks but just not yet. I only bring it up as a way of saying that this was a really big week for me.
Unfortunately the week started and ended with big weight fluctuations driven by high sodium. Through the long Memorial Day weekend my weight spiked 6 pounds – I was well over my 200-pound maximum desired weight. Then it came back down through the week to where it started. Then I had high sodium days on Friday and Saturday and it went right back up. It is so frustrating how sensitive my body is to sodium!
Another odd setback came this week: I learned that I was under-estimating my portion size on one of my daily foods. I assumed that I was eating 2 teaspoons of peanut butter each morning and I discovered that my portion size is actually 2 tablespoons! Yikes, that is a big difference!
It is hard to say where else I may be under-estimating portion sizes. Pair that with having less cushion in my daily calorie target because I am in maintenance mode and I think I am going to start developing an issue. Being the project manager that I am I decided to implement a strategy to mitigate this risk and I reduced my daily calorie target by a couple of hundred calories. That should help provide some contingency for any other areas of under-estimation.
This calorie mismatch issue was a good reminder that this is an ongoing journey and that I need to be ever-diligent and prevent autopilot from ever taking over again!
My deadline for my bench press goal is rapidly approaching: I want to bench press 100+ pounds by 6/15 after starting at just 55 pounds in September. Well, as I shared last week, I have hit the 100 pounds goal already but now I am pushing myself further. I don’t just want to struggle through lifting 100 pounds in a crappy manner, I want to make it good. So I am continuing on this journey and pushed it up to 105 pounds this week!
I spent most of this week trying not to run. After Monday’s long run I had some pain and discomfort from overdoing it and needed to give myself some rest. This tends to be a struggle for me to do but I did ok with it. Then Saturday rolled around and it was time to run! I did a solo quarter marathon through foggy downtown Columbus at a pretty slow pace but it felt great!
Thanks for reading… check back next week for more.
