Month: October 2012

I was listening to a book written and read by Charles Kuralt, Charles Kuralt’s America. (He has such a wonderful speaking voice.) And one of his essays was talking about the daffodil variety that was named for him. But before he got to that portion of the essay, he talked about the monarch butterfly.

The monarch butterfly spends winters in the forests of southern California and Mexico. They are the only insect to migrate 2500 miles every year. (Much more fascinating information is here.) In spring, they migrate en masse 2500 miles north, flying as far as Canada. They mate. And then they die.

But the remarkable thing is their offspring hatch and become caterpillars. The caterpillars eat milkweed and eventually form a chrysalis. Later, they emerge as a monarch butterfly and then migrate the thousands of miles south, to the same forest, and the same trees that hosted the parents.

How do the new generation of butterflies know where to fly? Which forest is “theirs”? I mean, salmon in the Pacific northwest at least are hatched in the streams and rivers before they swim out the to ocean to grow into adulthood before swimming back to the same stream. The salmon are returning to their place of origin.

Monarchs don’t return to anyplace. They fly to a new place for the first time. And I’m pretty sure they don’t have access to an iPhone5. How do they get to some place they have never been? How do they know when their journey is finished?

Many of us are on a similar journey. We are migrating to a place that we might possibly have seen only once, on our way up to greater weights. As we got older, we also got larger, but like the adult monarch we finally noticed a need, an urge, a mandate to go back.

How do we get there? The monarch flies in a flock of millions of butterflies, all moving towards the same destination. We can copy that idea, by finding fellow travelers. Myself, I have many friends on LoseIt that are supportive of me and each other as we all find our eventual resting place. Others may use Weight Watchers, or Jenny Craig, or Nutrisystem. You might find another online service such as MyFitnessPal. Maybe you will find a coach at a gym. Maybe you attend Overeaters Anonymous. (If that is you, you don’t have to identify yourself here.) Regardless of the actual vehicle you choose, the path is the same. You find people with a similar goal and you fly together.

The butterflies don’t fly thousands of miles without stopping. We won’t lose weight without pauses. That is normal. But just as the butterfly will continue flying after a brief rest, we need to continue on our journey without excessive lingering. Our destination will not come to us. We need to go to it.

How do we know when we arrive? Probably we have all set a “final number” as our goal. When we achieve it, we have arrived, right? Well, yes. But it is important not to assume that “arrival” is the same as “finished.” (This is where my butterfly analogy breaks down.) Butterflies are able to simply hang out for a few months in a tree before flying back. We can’t just hang out for a while. We need to keep on doing what we did to get to our goal. If we exercised our way to a new weight, then continued exercise will be needed (at least at some level) to prevent regression. Calorie counting will require continued counting (or at least monitoring at some level) to ensure the bathroom scale does not start to show bigger numbers.

Alternatively, we could continue to set new goals. Upon reaching a weight goal, maybe we could set a physical strength goal or a speed goal (running or swimming.) Maybe work on body fat percentage, or running/biking endurance. After I reached my goal, I set a new goal of running a 10K race. Bad knees prevented me from running it, but my wife and I walked it instead.

Become a butterfly. (Oh, I guess the butterfly metaphor isn’t finished.) Do what you need to do to transform into your new shape. 

Note: One of the other blogs that I follow is running a contest for a Keurig Mini-Plus brewing system. Since I love a) coffee and b) free things, I entered it on Danica’s Daily blog. She also has good information on her blog. It is worth reading (after reading mine, first!) 

Just a quick note here.

Last night, Ozzy was not acting normally. (And if you have a pet, or your child is a toddler, you know how it is when they are “not right.”) It was almost midnight. Our options were to wait it out, or to take him to the Pet ER.

Then Tammy suggested that I Google his symptoms. I didn’t find much. But then I found a website service that connected you to professionals in real time. It was www.JustAnswer.com and I was connected to a small animal vet from Hawaii.

Awesome! After a couple emails back and forth, he suggested that we treat Ozzy with Pepcid or Tagamet and see what happens. And by the morning he seemed to be better, and when I got home from work this afternoon he was back to his normal self. It was EXCELLENT service!

Yes, there was a fee, but seriously, the $18.00 that it cost was probably 5% of what the ER would have charged. And working with Dr. Michael Salkin allowed us to feel better and sleep better. Sure, ideally we would have taken him to his regular vet, but that isn’t possible at midnight. This was a great service!

As the request of several Lose It friends (particularly Natalie!) here is a look at what I ate on Thursday, September 27. This was a busy day. I gave Ozzy a two mile walk in the early morning. Then I had office hours on campus in the morning and a three hour lecture in the afternoon. Then I drove home, quickly walked Ozzy for a mile, picked up Tammy at school and went to watch Ethan and the soccer team play out of town.

All that activity means that my only meal eaten at a calm pace was my “first” breakfast. Like Hobbits, I like approximately seven meals a day: breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. Except I call mine: first breakfast, driving breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, evening meal, evening snack. It works for me.

I didn’t get all seven meals in on Thursday, but I did pretty good, and I ate almost all my calories.

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