Thank you for reading this week’s Operation Melt update.
Operation Melt started as a blog to share my personal transformation and weight loss story. After achieving success with that goal, Operation Melt has evolved into a platform to help inspire, motivate and equip people to achieve their own personal and professional goals so they can live their best lives.
I am trying to build a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness.
Throughout my journey, I have learned that many life lessons can be learned by getting fit. This week I am sharing another installment of Fitness Lessons are Life Lessons.
Feedback Is A Gift
I enjoy hearing feedback about other people’s perspectives on my weight loss journey and other transformations that I have recently completed or am just starting. This week I got some feedback that reminded me of another big life lesson that can be learned from getting fit.
I was having lunch with a friend this week and he gave me some feedback about my weight loss journey. He reads my blog every week and has followed my whole journey. He also recently went through his own journey and used the same app as I did. So he is very aware of the mechanics of how my weight loss worked.
My friend’s feedback was that the most surprising part of my weight loss was that I was able to do it without giving up alcohol. He was really surprised that I was able to be so successful with such a calorie bomb of a habit like drinking.
My Charter
When I started my weight loss journey I had a goal to lose over 100 pounds in under a year. But the story doesn’t stop there, I was going to do it my way. This means that I had some constraints. There were things that I was not willing to consider. I wasn’t going to follow somebody else’s diet plan or consider surgery. But, most importantly, I had decided that I wasn’t going to give up any of the things that I enjoyed.
I wasn’t going to give up going out with friends and having a drink. I wasn’t going to give up dinners out with my wife and a shared bottle of wine. I wasn’t going to give up beer and pizza nights. If my weight loss journey was going to work it was going to work with these things.
Did I make the weight loss journey harder than it needed to be? Quite possibly. It would have certainly been easier, mathematically, without maintaining these high-calorie habits. But that is just the math.
I firmly believe that people significantly increase their risk of failure with any goal (or any project) by approaching it with some grand plan that only works on paper. If your plan isn’t realistic for the true circumstances of your life, it simply won’t work.
If I had tried to give up dining out, drinking alcohol, eating pizza, tacos, dessert or other things, I would never have lost the weight.
The Alternative Solution
Knowing that I had these constraints going into my weight loss journey meant that I needed to get creative with an alternate solution. I was starting at a disadvantage of sorts and it needed something to balance it. A compensating control if you will, to borrow a term from the audit world.
To make “my way” work so I could continue to partake in the things that I enjoyed, I needed to work harder. I needed to manage quantity and frequency of the high-calorie food for sure. But I also needed to ramp up the other side of the equation – the calorie burn.
I significantly increased my exercise in order to make my weight loss, my way work for me. It took a lot of hard work and a lot of extra sweat but I made it work. And, I couldn’t be happier that I did!
This habit of using extra exercise to help offset consumption of, almost, anything I want continues today. I try to get at least 1000 calories of “tracked” exercise every day. This includes running, walking and gym workouts. Some days I significantly exceed the 1000 calories of focused exercise including this Saturday when I got over 1600 calories of exercise – and had pizza for lunch and Mexican for dinner.
As an example of how much I offset lifestyle with hard work, my average daily calorie burn is over 3700 calories. This is is almost double my base metabolic rate – the number of calories my body burns at rest. By comparison, my average consumption is just over 2500 calories.
I work really hard to achieve my goals and have done so, weight wise, for over 1200 days and am not planning to stop.
It Can Work if You Do
The life lesson here is that you can have anything you want if you work hard for it. With very few exceptions, any goal is in reach with the right amount of work and dedication.
The bigger and more complicated the goal, the harder you will have to work.
The more your goal is unique to you versus cookie-cutter, the more creative you will have to be and harder you may have to work.
If your goal is worth achieving, it is worth putting in the sweat equity to get there.
What goal do you want to achieve? Are you out there working on it? Are you sweating every day to get there?
I Need Your Help
Before you go I would like to ask you for a favor. I can’t build a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness on my own. Please consider helping your friends find today’s post by following me on Facebook, on LinkedIn or via Instagram and share today’s post to your feed.
While you are at it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s post, your goals or anything else on your mind. Send me a note via my Contact Me form,
Thanks again for reading today’s post and here’s to achieving your most important goals!
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