Where was I? Oh! New fear unlocked, possible grandchildren… yes, I started thinking: will I be happy, will I be able to be of help, will I be an able body or just a distant only-visit grandparent, will I even be around?
Worry started… weight gained.
You would have thought with my co-worker’s weight loss success I would have made that call right away. I did not… it took me several months before I finally realized I needed help to stay focused and get the weight off.
I needed to remember the saying:
“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes” ~ Maggie Kuhn
This can mean so many things: ask questions (even if you think they are dumb—the chances are someone else has those same questions too and is afraid to ask), do the hard thing, you don’t know what you don’t know, you will never know until you try/ask, we are all learning, and when you first start something, you are not going to be necessarily good at it until you learn it.
What is the worst they can say? “No,” or tell you what you already know.
I needed answers. Sometimes you need that mirror.
I Had to Address My Fears
1) Afraid it would not work for me.
Sometimes just asking a question can be the one thing that holds you back. I had to just meet with the (Get Trim) doctor to see if this was right for me, ask all the questions, get answers, get peace of mind, feel supported (by the team), let them support me.
2) Afraid my family and friends would think I took the “easy way out.”
There are several things here… there is no easy way out of being overweight, trust me. Every type of weight loss comes with work you must put in/do. There is no magic wand that makes you instantly lighter forever. This is just one option to give you a leg up.
There are so many things I can say here that I will add later, but I think most of you know what that fear is like.
3) Afraid to know where I really was on the weight scale.
Well… it is a reality that I needed to know, and my fear did not change where I was, where I was heading, or how to undo it. It just kept me in the dark and masked the fact that I needed to do something about it.
4) Afraid that I would not have the money to try it.
A real fear. Then I started thinking: when I wanted something of expense, I did what I needed to do to acquire it—cutting back on other things, or selling something that I no longer used, working some extra hours or picking up a second job, some sort of side hustle. I made it happen.
I thought how awful I was being to myself, that I would do this for materialistic items, but I wasn’t thinking I could do this for my health.
“Fear, he is a liar” ~ Zack Williams
Coming Up Next…
Naming these fears was the beginning of something big. I wasn’t ready before—but something had shifted. The thought of missing out on life finally outweighed the fear of trying.
Read my next blog to find out what happened when I decided to stop hesitating and start taking action.