Fighting The Fight

A documentary on the making of the Rocky movies sucked me in Sunday afternoon and, I must admit, turned me into a temporary couch potato. It was interesting to see how the making of the movies and Stallone's own life paralleled the Rocky story, one that has always been one of my favorites.   I guess it's the classic underdog story that rallies me, but I love Rocky and his ability to take a punch but always get back up and fight back.

Shortly into the beginnings of my training with my trainer Jeff, he had the idea of taking me over to the heavy bag in our gym and teaching me how to throw a punch.   With that first hit of my fist into that bag something inside me began to stir.   At that point I was feeling my first successes of losing weight, but I was still unsure of myself and lacking in confidence.  At the time, I was just learning how to break myself out of the place in my life that I had dwelled in for far too long; a place where I sat by and let things happen, let the dissatisfaction with myself bring on destructive emotions, and then let those bad emotions lead me to the behaviors that kept me in that overweight and unhealthy state.  I was reactive rather than proactive.

The day that I threw those first punches, the fighter in me began to wake up.  Hitting that bag felt good and soon I had purchased my first pair of pink Everlasts.  I found myself wailing on that bag more and more often; I would find the angriest music on my Ipod and fight that bag until the sweat ran down my back and my knuckles were sore.  Once I took the skin off of them (even with gloves on). When life presented problems that bothered me, as happens to all of us, I took them out in the gym and that bag, rather than on myself with bad food choices.

Learning to fight back, whether it be against the mitts my trainer held or against my baser tendencies, flipped the script on my weight loss efforts.  Suddenly I was in full-on attack mode with my workouts, my pace even outside of the gym became faster, and I became proactive rather than reactive.  After years of starting and stopping this battle and walking around with the knowledge that a lot of folks had counted me out, I finally knew in my heart that I was a contender.

Weight loss is for some of us the fight of our lives and for our lives made all more difficult by the constant opposition of the greatest antagonist we all will face: ourselves. Who else knows all the chinks in my armor but me?  Who knows my greatest temptations? Who is the most persuasive voice I know?  Me.

For me, I must keep the knowledge of this and the fight fresh in my mind everyday.  I have to tell myself at the start of every day that this is the fight of my life, that I have everything I need in order to win it, and if I go down, I'm going down swinging.