“Whatever you do, don't end up like
Ken Parsell.” “After he got married, he totally let himself go.”
“He's like huge now—seriously—doesn't even look like himself.”
“We use to play soccer with him, he probably can't even run
anymore.” “...” etc., etc.
Such things were probably said about me
during the years following my marriage, and rightly so. To say the
least, I bulked up a bit. To be blunt, I got fat. Not that I was
terribly self-conscious about it. For the most part it was just
annoying. When I was younger I would scoff at people who said things
like “I can't button my pants anymore!” “What do you mean you
can't button your pants?!”
I would think to myself. “How does that even happen?”
Well, how exactly, I'm not entirely sure of. At first I
thought that my wife was shrinking my clothes. “What kind of
laundry detergent are we using?” I would ask her. “I think it's
shrinking my clothes.” “Are you doing something different? These
shirts are getting tighter on me.” “You're gaining weight” she
would say. “What?! Like those people who couldn't button their
pants that I would laugh at when I was younger? Pfft! No—this is
different—my clothes are definitely shrinking.”
Fortunately the self-deception ended,
and I realized the problem didn't involve things like the way the
laundry was being done. The problem was me. When I got married I
weighed somewhere around 175 to 180. During the highpoint of my
“bulking” endeavors I reached upwards of 220 to 225. I would
fiddle with diets, or exercise, or both, but never really took it
seriously. The following pictures illustrate my change of appearance
quite nicely:
The picture on the left was taken in
May 2007 (8 months before I got married), when I probably weighed
about 160 or 165. The picture on the right was taken in December 2010
(36 months after I got married), when I weighted 1,000 lbs. Just
kidding. Actually I have no idea how much I weighed when that picture
was taken, but I remember screaming “Madre de Dios!” when I saw
it. The picture was taken by my aunt during Christmas, and at the time I was sure
that she must have had some funky-weird camera lens that created the
optical illusion that I was bigger than I was. To my horror, my wife assured me
that I actually did look like that, and it was at that time that I
realized my clothes weren't shrinking after all.
But again, for some reason I wasn't
that concerned. So I
continued halfheartedly flirting with random diet and exercise
regimens. If I lost some weight, great. If I didn't, I wasn't
seriously hurt by it. This continued until the spring of 2012 (last
spring). I happened to be organizing my notes and getting ready to
start writing Discipline,
when I got the idea that I should take my “research process” a
step further. Since I was going to be writing about the subject of
self-discipline, why not apply my “discipline process” to my own
weight loss? I had been slowly growing more concerned about the
prospect of potentially becoming a diabetic, I was still annoyed with
my tight fitting clothes, and I knew that I wanted to lose weight
eventually. So I decided to take the plunge.
After a period of trial and error, I settled on combining elements from Doug Varrieur's Fat To Skinny
diet, and Tim Ferriss' Slow-Carb
diet, mixed in with two to three 15 minute kettle bell workouts per
week, and committed myself to it exactly as I advise a person to do
in my book Discipline.
When I began on May 14th,
I weighted just under 210. By July 20th,
I weighed 180, was down to 170 before the end of the year, and have
since been maintaining that weight. The picture below was taken in
October 2012. Thankfully, I no longer weigh 1,000 lbs.
My point in discussing this is simply to illustrate that discipline directly affects our ability to do things. Yes, the regimen I followed was effective, but it doesn't matter how effective it happened to be if I failed to actually do it. Discipline helps us do things, regardless of what it is that we are trying to do. If I had failed to adhere to my commitment, I wouldn't have succeeded as I did. It's as simple as that. A lack of discipline undermines our ability to do things. Whereas, the more disciplined we are, the better able we are to do the things we set out to do.
My recently released book, Discipline,
discusses the subject and how to develop it in detail.
