Not the year I expected - Operation Melt

This was week 130 of my Operation Melt journey that started with my goal to escape obesity and lose over 100 pounds in under a year. As you probably know I achieved that goal (in just 9 months) and then a whole lot more. I went from 325 pounds to completing my first half marathon in just 14 months with a total weight loss of over 130 pounds.

I accomplished this by applying concepts of project management and managing my transformation as a project just like I have helped businesses do for two decades.

After achieving my initial goal, and countless others, my journey of personal transformation has grown into a quest to turn myself and others into goal-crushing machines. My vision for Operation Melt is to build a world where goals don’t die of loneliness.

My weekly Operation Melt blog posts are about continuing to hold myself accountable while sharing my journey with you. My hope is that something that I am doing will inspire you to try to crush your own goal, will motivate you to keep going and will equip you with some additional tools that have helped me manage my journey.

2019 was not the year I expected…

We are coming up on the end of 2019 so I am starting to see and hear people posting their year in review and even their 2010s decade in review. So I started reflecting on my 2019 and all of the events that transpired through this year. It really was a packed year.

As I reflect on this year I think about a quote that I seem to hear some version of every day lately. “When you have high expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.” Some version of this quote, and there are countless versions said by everyone from Buddha to Steven Hawking, seems to be everywhere.

Disappointments…

Unfortunately this was a year full of disappointments in my journey driven by impossibly high expectations I had for myself. Two examples of my biggest areas of disappointment from this year include:

Maintenance mode failure. On new years day I switched from weight loss to maintaining my weight. But I still expected to lose a few more pounds and wanted to get from my low point of 194 to 189 because that I where my BMI technically becomes “normal” instead of “overweight”. I had this expectation despite my doctor saying that it wasn’t realistic and despite switching my plan to a weight loss rate of nearly zero. Instead of losing weight I increased both my weight (went up to 210 before I reversed my course) and my body fat percentage (went from 12% to 13.8%). I also experienced increased instability in my weight and can have big, 3-5 pound swings each day depending on my eating and drinking habits. All indications are that I will be ending this year with a weight around 205 pounds instead of 189 pounds.
Book sales very slow. I expected that I would sell tons of copies of my book this year. I thought it would be a phenomenal success. Weight is an issue that tons of people struggle with and I figured out a new approach that worked better that I ever expected and I thought this would be appealing to thousands of people who would buy my book. I thought I would be speaking to big audiences and telling my story. My current projection is that I will end this year with fewer than 100 books sold and a couple of interviews.

Perspectives…

The other notable item that sticks out when I review 2019 is all about perspective. It has become very clear to me that there are multiple perspectives that I can adopt when looking at the same set of facts. One of these perspectives is to allow the facts to become disappointment but the other perspective is not missing the forest for the trees.

You see, while I can look that the examples above as big disappointments, I would be missing the big picture. I would not be giving myself the credit that I deserve for the actual wins hidden in those disappointments.

The other way of looking at the “maintenance mode failure” I mentioned above is a lot more meaningful.

I gained lots of strength and muscle this year which came with some weight.
I have held myself around my low manageable weight as evidenced by my sensitivity to what I eat and drink and the repeated fluctuations.
I am still maintaining a body fat percentage under 14% which, depending on the chart, puts me into the “athlete” category.
I have maintained at least 125 pound weight loss for nearly 18 months when the average person who has a significant weight loss gains it back within two years. Plus I continue to maintain my weight loss without depriving myself of things or spending every waking hour in the gym. I am living it happily.
Adding to these alternate perspectives on my maintenance mode “failure” is the realization that my weight isn’t the only way to judge the success or failure of my 2019 fitness.
I am still living an incredibly fit life and still prioritizing fitness after 40 years of it being an afterthought.
I continue to improve my physical capabilities and performance and achieved my goal of being able to bench press over 100 pounds and have got up to 130 pounds as my max so far.
I ran 13 organized races which more than achieved my goal of running one race per month.
I ran 2 half marathons and was happy with my performance in both – no disappointments here.
I continued to see my time improve across all running and I consistently in the sub-9-minute pace time for a 5k run and achieved a 10:30 pace for my half marathon and could have gone faster if I really tried.

Turning my sights to my second big disappointment, my book sales, there is definitely another way of drawing a conclusion from these facts.

Let’s start with the fact that I wrote and published a book! I decided to be vulnerable and tell my story in a way to help other people. I wrote the book and my amazing wife edited it for me. I taught myself how to self-publish and did so in both eBook and print book format. And I launched a damn book!
I sold nearly 100 copies of my book with nearly no marketing outside of social media. Plus I can’t really do paid social posts because my title implies that I am selling a miracle weight loss program which violates the advertising standards on most popular social media platforms. The irony of this is that the content is exactly the opposite of this!
My book sales haven’t been limited just to friends and family and there are many people who I don’t know that have bought copies.
I have been asked to autograph books, I have been recognized by people as the author (in rural Ohio of all places) and I have appeared on a few podcasts to tell my story.
Most importantly I have heard success stories. I know of at least one person who is experiencing her own big weight loss who was inspired by reading my book. Her quote just this past week was “wait, I am a project manager and I have a plan for everything. Why didn’t I think about applying this to my weight that I am struggled with for years?!” I may not have sold as many copies of my book as I had hoped but the ones I have sold are making an impact, could I really have asked for better?

I guess 2019, my first full year living as a fit person, went really well. If I could just stay out of my own way I would be incredibly proud of my accomplishments and would be excited about what 2020 holds. Maybe I should stop creating impossible expectations for myself and start focusing on just being happy living my life. A life that, by all objective evaluations, is totally amazing and I am blessed beyond belief!

How was your 2019? Follow me on social media at @OperationMelt and let me know what your biggest successes were for this year.

Thanks so much for reading. I hope that my experiences and my tips can help you achieve your own big goals. If we work together we can build a world where goals never die of loneliness!