An Insignificant Event Caused a Significant Change in My Life

Have you ever noticed how significant changes can be taking place in your life, with lots of obvious signs, and they can be ignored?

In 2005, after completing a tour as U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, I was assigned to the University of Houston (TX) as a diplomat-in-residence. In that job, I taught a few classes, spoke to civic groups and schools throughout south Texas, and attended college job fairs from Texas to California, recruiting people into the U.S. Foreign Service.

You can fool most of the people some of the time, but you can fool yourself most of the time

If I noticed that my wardrobe seemed to be shrinking, I put it down to too many meals in hotels or on airplanes, and, with the exception of a four mile walk through the neighborhoods around UH two or three times a week and taking my dog for a one-mile morning constitutional each morning, not enough exercise. With my schedule, though, there was just not enough time. The fact that I was usually winded after the walks, and my dog was far less tired than me after the morning outing, was conveniently filed in the 'think about it later' category. So what if I had to buy several new pair of pants because the old ones were pinching too much at the waist? And, the fact that I could no longer sit with my jacket buttoned was, well, just a minor annoyance.

You can keep fooling yourself for a long time, obviously. I went through the school year, blissfully ignoring the warning signs. After moving from Houston to Washington, DC, to take up a position as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Prisoners of War and Missing Personnel Affairs, my life became even more hectic. I had to lead a group of officials to different U.S. cities eight times a year to brief the families of military personnel missing from our past wars, attend the major veterans' service organization events all over the U.S., visit with the troops in the field conducting the searches for the missing, and make at least five international trips a year to negotiate with countries to allow access to their territory to conduct the searches. More airline food, hotel food, lunches, dinners, and receptions; in the back of my mind, I knew I was putting on weight, but again, I allowed the press of work to intervene, and ignored it.

Why does that darn scale keep winking at me?

Then, a totally insignificant thing happened. I found myself in 2007, in a hotel in Bangkok; tired after a long day of meetings, I decided to just eat a snack from the mini-bar in the room, drink a couple of beers, and hit the sack. The bathroom had one of those digital scales, and since I'd never used one before, just out of curiosity, I disrobed and stepped on it. Now, my normal weight is around 200 pounds, but I figured I'd put on ten or twenty extra, so imagine my surprise when the numbers hit 250, and kept blinking. Turns out, that was the maximum that the scale was set to register, and if something heavier was placed upon it, the numbers wouldn't settle down. Talk about a shocker! I was more than thirty pounds over my normal overweight status, and a whopping fifty pounds above where I should be. Jiminy Crickets, I thought, this cannot be allowed to go on.

Take it off, take it all off!

I resolved that night to change my eating habits, carve out regular time for vigorous exercise, and trim away at least forty-five pounds of that ugly fat. So, I bagged the mini-bar and went downstairs to the hotel restaurant and had a healthy salad. From that day on, I made a lot of other changes; I cut back on red meat, started skipping every other meal on long flights, reduced beer intake from two a day to about three a week, and try to start each day with some kind of exercise.

Am I healthier as a result? According to my doctor, I definitely am. Four years later, my weight is 198 and holding steady, so I exceeded my goal; and my cholesterol is back down to normal levels. Now, when I walk my dog, she gets tired before I do. More importantly, I can now wear every suit in my closet, and I can even sit down with the jackets buttoned. All because of a digital scale that kept blinking at me.

References:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2130791_lose-weight-fast-keep-off.html

http://www.uh.edu

http://www.careers.state.gov

http://www.dtic.mil.dpmo