Thank you for reading this Operation Melt blog update.
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Amuse Bouche
My amuse bouche for you today is a light “dad joke” to entertain your mind before we get down to business. Like any other amuse bouche, you may hate it, but it is worth every penny that you paid for it, right?
A friend of mine recently told me that my analogies don’t make any sense. I can’t believe she said that! It totally made me feel like a biscuit in an elevator.
Celebrating The Most Exciting Moments in My Journey (Part 1)
The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.
Dan Sullivan
It has been a while since I shared an update dedicated to my transformation journey, but now is the perfect time to do so. Why? Because I am just two weeks away from celebrating the fifth anniversary of the decision that changed my life.
As I approach my anniversary, I thought I would pause and reflect on my journey. Throughout this process, I have had ups and downs, wins and losses, disappointments and proud moments. After succeeding with my original goal, I went even further and am still focused on my ongoing journey five years later. I have also shared over four hundred blog posts along the way.
Over the next two weeks, I will share my top ten most exciting moments from my five-year journey. I will share numbers six through ten this week and my top five moments next week. It was hard to choose only ten posts to highlight, but some moments stand out from the others.
Without further ado, here is the first half of my top ten most exciting moments from my journey.
#10 – A New Chapter Begins
The first highlight I want to share is very apropos as it is why you are reading this post today. In my post, A New Chapter Begins (December 14, 2017), I announced the launch of the Operation Melt blog. This new blog helped me celebrate my first six months of a journey that I thought was just about weight loss but turned out to be able so much more.
As I explain in this post, “[throughout] my journey, lots of people have asked me how I am doing this and have asked me for advice. I learned that my story and my approach can be inspirational and energizing for people. In short, I learned that I have a story to tell. So, I have decided to launch this website, OperationMelt.com, as a tool to share my story and help others achieve their own successes.”
Five years and four hundred posts later, the blog has changed shape and focus a little bit, but I still use it to help other people achieve success with their goals.
#9 – Week 1: my plan is working
Once I made the decision that I was going to change my life, I started moving. I sketched out a high-level approach for how I would progress and jumped right in. I didn’t know if it was the right plan or would really work. I also didn’t know if I would stick to it for more than a couple of days.
But, there I was, just one week into my journey, and I was already able to celebrate some wins. As I explained in Week 1: my plan is working (June 2017), “After one week, I am happy to say that I have stuck to my plan and it is working for me. For seven straight days, I have tracked my food and drink intake and have exercised through walking…. I am weighing myself every morning before going out or consuming any food or drink. At the end of week 1, my weight is down to 316.4.”
While nine pounds per week wasn’t the norm or sustainable, it was just the reinforcement I needed to keep going.
8 – Week 11: OMG, I ran!
When I started my weight loss process, I prioritized two things above all others:
- Tracking and correcting my food and drink consumption
- Increasing my exercise
Because I was in pretty bad health and was doing no exercise, I needed to start slow. I adopted a strategy that I literally called “one step at a time.” I explain this strategy in my book, Operation Melt: How I Used Life-Changing Project Management to Lose Over 100 Pounds in Under a Year:
“In order to increase exercise and bump up my daily step count, I started walking around the neighborhood park every morning before work. The walk to the park, one lap around and back home was about one and a quarter total miles. So I committed to walk at least one lap but wanted to target two total miles of walking before work every morning. Having an extra hour available to make this happen after changing my work schedule was going to be a big boost.”
Once my “one step at a time” strategy started working, my health improved. My weight started decreasing (I was melting, get it?), my heart and lungs were getting healthier, and my endurance increased.
I hadn’t anticipated that my improving health meant that walking, while still good exercise, wasn’t the big aerobic calorie burn that it once was. As I explained in a blog post from that time, “[for three weeks], my weight has been stuck. Essentially, my body has become accustomed to my diet and exercise routine. My metabolism has adjusted and it isn’t having the impact.”
If I wanted to keep getting my heart rate up and the sweat flowing, I needed something a little more vigorous. I decided it was time to experiment, and I had a strategy – “I am going to try eating some food before my workout to get my metabolism going. Plus, I am going to try to ramp up the intensity a bit.”
As I explained in Week 11: OMG, I ran! (September 2017), this is when I tried something that I had never expected to do in my life; I had my first run. It was only a short distance, but it was a run just three months after weighing 325 pounds.
What I didn’t know at the time was that I had lit a fuse. Running would become much more than just something I experimented with to boost my calorie burn. That was the day that running became part of my life and part of my DNA. This is why you will see running appear in several more of my top ten moments.
#7 – Week 91: Crossing Finish Lines
In early 2018, a few events happened within a few months that led to kicking off new chapters of both my journey and my life.
First, as I originally shared in Week 33: Changes Come and recounted in detail in Stories Are Powerful, What Happens When Don’t Love Yours?, I lost my job of ten years. I had the opportunity to take a sabbatical between jobs for several months, which I used to achieve closure with the old me and to celebrate the arrival of the new me.
The “new me” is another event that happened around the same time. I achieved my weight loss goal… more about that in next week’s post.
These two significant events, combined with my experience with the blog that I had been publishing for months, led me to start thinking about a big question. What next?
It was time to take my journey to the next level on several fronts. A bigger weight loss goal. New performance goals, including engaging a personal trainer. And a new venue for telling my story.
I was going to write a book!
During my sabbatical, I wrote the first draft of my book in just a few weeks. Then the editing and revision process kicked off and continued for quite some time. Then, nearly a year later, the next big highlight of my journey occurred. As I discussed in Week 91: Crossing Finish Lines (March 2019), I published my first book in eBook format in March 2019. The paperback followed just a few short weeks after that.
At a time of my life when I experienced an extreme amount of change, I was now a published author. My story was going to be read by more people, and it was going to help them achieve their goals. All of this unlocked my confidence and passion. Here’s how I explained it in the book:
“I have talked a lot through this book about my weight loss, but this journey turned out not to just be about what I lost, it is also about what I gained.
I gained more knowledge about who I am and what is important to me. I love using my knowledge, skills and talents to help people achieve their goals. I have a passion for turning wishes into goals, goals into plans, and plans into reality — either my own or other people’s goals.
I gained more self-confidence than I have had in years. I am not only passionate about helping to make goals come true for others, I also know that I can do it. No matter the goal, my project management based approach can help make it come to life.
I am completely unstoppable, and you can be too!”
6 – Don’t Follow In My Footsteps
As I just said, my journey helped me unlock a passion for helping people achieve their goals. I always knew that this was an interest, but I assumed it was something I could only experience through other mechanisms. For example, as a manager, I could help people and be a mentor, but I didn’t think I could turn this passion into a job.
I was wrong!
As I further engaged in my newfound hobby of listening to self-improvement podcasts, I learned about life, health and career coaching. These are people who get to spend their days helping people set and achieve goals… and they get paid for it. I had to know more. So I did some research and learned about the many ways to become a coach. It was interesting, though I didn’t take it very seriously. I thought this was something I could possibly explore in the future.
Suddenly, the world was flipped upside down by COVID. Like many others, I converted to working from home instead of spending a couple of hours each day getting ready for work and commuting. I had lots of free time on my hands. So, I decided to act on my “someday, maybe” idea of becoming a coach.
As I shared in Don’t Follow In My Footsteps (October 2020), I completed my first coach training and was certified as a Goal Success Life Coach in 2020. I continued to become certified as a Health & Nutrition Coach and as a Professional Life Coach soon thereafter.
With these certifications and my years of experience helping people achieve their goals, I was ready to launch my own coaching business. That’s when Operation Melt Coaching was born, and I signed my first client. And, in case you don’t know, I love it!
So What?
There you have it. Those are the first five of the ten most exciting moments I experienced during my transformational journey. So much has changed over the past five years, and I am a new person in many ways.
I look forward to the next five years and sharing my next five most exciting moments.
Are you thinking about kicking off your own transformational journey? Do you need a little help with setting and crushing your goals? I am ready and have lots of tools to help you.
Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
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