Attainable Goals

This my friends is a Silver Salmon, also known as the Coho. This beauty is about 20 pounds, if you go by fisherperson exaggeration standards of course. There might be some naysayers out there who want to dispute such a claim, but since I am the one holding the fish I get to aggrandize it’s weight. Kind of funny that in general I like skewing the numbers in the other direction when it comes to my scale.
There is a point to this I assure you, I am not just using this to brag about my superlative fishing skills. If I was being honest…which seems to by my goal in this blog…I’d have to firstly admit my Dad caught this monster and I am merely a poser. But that is neither here nor there when I bring you around to my point. Which is that there are FIVE of these babies plastered all over my body that don’t belong! Five slimy silver salmons evenly distributed onto a frame that was never intended to pack them around. I hope I didn’t ruin your appetite for these delectable creatures with that mental image, not my intention.

I think about all the times my mom has drug me up and down various mountains, I know that feeling of dread all to well when you’re standing at the bottom looking at the menacing peak overhead. There have been so many times I focused on that and it absolutely defeated me, ruined the hike and most often I didn’t even make it to the top. Had I set smaller goals I likely wouldn’t have been distracted by the immensity of the task at hand. This is true to weight loss as well. Instead of fixating on the 130 pound goal at the top of this particular mountain I am going to set smaller, attainable goals and slowly make my way. Granted I have tried this method before, and quit while I was ahead…insert face palm here. Back when I only had 60 pounds (or rather three slimy salmons) to lose. I realized my son weighed 60ish pounds, so I set out to lose an Aiden. As you can see I was unsuccessful. Maybe my goals were a bit lofty…time to drop the bar down a little…attainability is the name of this game I am finding.

Instead of going after all FIVE fish that I have stashed, I will tackle ONE. That’s right, I’m going to lose a single silver salmon…or in non-fisherperson terms 20 pounds. I have a wonderful clean eating plan that a dietician set up for me one of the many times I went to battle on the bulge, it worked great and I even enjoyed the foods I was allowed to eat. Again, color me surprised that something that was tasty and fairly easy to follow was tossed out the window the second life threw a few curveballs and I decided to derail my diet for a little Thai Town chicken pad Thai and some cheesecake!

One of the things along the years that I haven’t wanted to give up, or even attempted to give up is my love for diet soda. I am sure some of you probably just gasped, I get that reaction a lot, people contort their faces like you just ate a garlic clove and puffed your dragon breath into their nostrils. Seriously, when you admit you drink diet pop, people immediately go into full soapbox mode and start listing off a myriad of diseases that you will most certainly get from drinking such poison. So aside from the obvious health benefits I will receive, I am going to stop drinking pop to avoid the discrimination…weight loss from it will just be icing on the cake. ;)

——————– GONE FISHING ——————–