Discipline Makes the Difference

Sticking to the Plan Works!

I lost 70 pounds in four months back in 2008.

Diet and exercise. No pills. No surgery. No fancy fitness programs.

I had a list of things I could and could not eat, and I didn’t deviate from the list at all. I ran/walked on a treadmill 5 days a week, resting on days when I felt tired. I didn’t keep a schedule or a journal. The only record that this even happened is that I logged my weight in iCal every Wednesday morning.

But yes, sometimes the most difficult things are really simple. You just have to stop overthinking them.

Almost six years have passed since then, and while I’m attempting to lose weight again— the source of these daily blog entries— I’ve never once slacked off of working out and trying to eat right. Maybe I’ve eaten too much junk food or indulged in too many sweets, but rarely do I miss the gym or a hefty dose of vegetables.

I’ve met so many people over the years who tell me they want to lose weight and get in shape, but can’t. They say they don’t like running or that they can’t eat the same things every day or come up with any number of excuses. It’s not sad or anything. I’m not judging them. Some people can get it done, some people can’t.

Discipline makes all the difference.

It’s something inside yourself that tells you that you need to follow a regimen to the letter and not slack off. When you get results, it encourages you to continue and you do. When you don’t get results, you don’t want to keep going. Why bother, right?

Now, some people are born with the innate ability to focus on things. They can just block things out, like horses with blinders on. When I was young, I wasn’t one of these people. Perhaps my entire life would have been different if I was, but in reality I was just average on the discipline scale. That’s probably why I was fat.

Dieting and fitness really changed me, though. I started to see almost everything like a diet. I wrote yesterday about the hard work that happens between starting on a goal and completing it (“Microwaves Are Killing Us”). And I think dieting is like that. You have to buckle down and stay committed, even if it’s hard to see the payoff at first.

You can apply fitness discipline to anything. You don’t just one day hop up and run a marathon. There’s a ton of preparation that goes into that. Anything else in life is going to be similar. Completing a large project is going to involve a bunch of baby steps that cumulatively add up to an end result. There’s a reason why you can’t earn a college degree in one day.

How do you attain some higher level of discipline? To be quite honest, I’m not that sure. Again, I barely kept any record of my weight loss. I was 254 pounds and had a goal in my head of 185. I didn’t feel like I wanted to stop until I saw 185 on the scale. I think there are tools to help, but it’s mostly mental.

Sometimes I would get tempted to cheat on the diet, or stop working out, especially in the first few weeks. But I would tell myself that I was just a poor kid from Staten Island who somehow worked his way into the music business without having any discernible music talent. If I could do that, how could I manage to not control my own hand from putting something into my mouth? This was a 26-year-old’s logic.

And that’s how I find it within myself to still go to the gym every day, to eat well and even pull myself back and say, hey, maybe you’ve put on a few pounds and you have to refocus. How silly is it that we subject ourselves to so many things that are out of our control on a daily basis, and one of the few things we can control— like what we eat— we let fall to the wayside.

You gotta stick to the plan. It works!