Boom! Abracadabra! Shazam!

Do you watch that show Extreme Makeover Home Edition? We watch it. My favorite part is the reveal at the end; hubby likes the demolition best. I enjoy the show, but I also think that, sometimes, those beautiful, expensive, made-over homes get completely trashed within a year after the family takes possession of them. There are two main categories of people who get chosen for this show, from my perspective. One type is the hard-working responsible family who takes care of their possessions, works hard, but just has a blow (or a series of blows) of bad luck that puts them into a position where they need help. Cancer, a sudden death, a fire, etc. Then you have the other kind: people who are already takers; used to living off of the government, or off other people, people who cry bad luck but actually are in their circumstances because of poor choices, laziness, ignorance, or even stupidity.

Sidenote: ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge or education, and sometimes people just don’t know how to change. Stupidity on the otherhand, is willful ignorance.

Sometimes you can tell by looking at the family home before the demo which type they are. (I don’t care how poor you are, you don’t have to have piles of laundry in every corner or dirty dishes on every surface. And don’t tell me these people get surprised, either. There is no way the families don’t know they have been chosen. Permits have to be acquired, vacation time needs to be requested, kids are sometimes taken out of school; they know they were picked!)

Anyhow, call me a skeptic, but I think some of the people who get these $500,000 homes end up living just the way they were living before the show, and I’ll bet if you visited some of them, you would see piles of dirty laundry in front of the Stainless Steel commercial refrigerator, and find that many of the shiny new possessions have been pawned.

Change is hard. Getting a new house and having your debts paid doesn’t necessarily fix everything. As Sir Richard Francis Burton said, “Broke is a temporary condition, poor is a state of mind.” To completely change how you live takes time, and a lot of effort, and sacrifice. That’s why the majority of lottery winners squander all of their winnings within a few years. Google it, it's true.

I submit that the same is true for weight loss.

I knew on the day that I started this blog that there would come a day (or more than one) when I would have to say “I blew it, I messed up, I fell off the wagon.” Because I know about the 5 Secrets; I know about Permission to Fail (Secret #5); I know that it is unrealistic to think I can completely change my lifestyle, habits, etc. instantly and without error. Still, I absolutely hate that I am struggling right now, I hate that I gained back some of my weight. I finally got the scale moving in the right direction again, but it’s been difficult. I WANT it all to be easy, for my mindset to stay indefinitely in the place it was back when I was “going and blowing.” (Where does that phrase come from, anyway – it doesn’t make any sense!) I want the weight loss, the diet control, the exercise, to be effortless; and I just get miffed sometimes that it can’t be.

I remember I read in a book years ago (It might have been Run, Baby, Run) about a drug addict who prayed that he would be freed from drug addiction, and - boom! – just like that, he was not addicted anymore. That’s the way I always wanted it to be for me, you know, with the whole weight/food/exercise thing:
Boom! Abracadabra! Shazam!
One day I am drooling for chocolate, and the next day celery is my favorite snack. On a Monday I am trimming the fat off of my steak so that I can eat it first!, and on Tuesday I am "oh so very full" after a just a small salad with vinaigrette. Wouldn’t that be nice?

~~~ pause for daydreaming about how nice that would be ~~~

It would be nice, but the thing is – unfortunately - for 99% of us – it just ain’t gonna happen that way. Change is hard. It takes time. You gotta climb back on that wagon over and over. You may think that what you want is that radical “demo” or the cool “reveal,” but what you really want, if you think about it, is for the house to still be standing one, five, ten years down the line. So forget about the Abracadabra, and put on your running shoes!