Okay, this post gets way more personal reflection-y than I wanted, but there’s a point to it I swear.  What I want to focus on is three themes:

1. Time
2. Honesty
3. Forgiveness

Like I said in my introductory post, the thing that got all this kickstarted was the health problems, but even before that I was finding myself increasingly dissatisfied with some parts of myself.  Just little things here and there that I know I could be doing better.  Perhaps after a while, my dissatisfaction with those things might have led me to make some of the changes I am talking about here, but my guess is not.

See I’m pretty good at kidding myself or settling or doing the small amount to partially fix a problem and not really solving the root cause.  You know, that whole thing about treating the symptoms and not the disease.

I say that not to beat myself up, but rather to say this whole reimagining thing didn’t just happen.  I didn’t decide that I wanted to change my ways and then launch the website, first I had to figure out what I wanted to change.  Even though I had been feeling sort of psychically “off” for a while, I still needed a period of reflection and criticial analysis of myself then and myself how I want to be.

It was a tough process which ranged from stepping back at times when I was angry and asking myself “Why am I losing my composure?  Why is something so small making me so mad?” to thinking on several occassions “I liked myself better in high school.  Is that because I was naive or was I truly a better person?”

Basically, overtime, I had to be honest with myself.  Unflinchingly honest.  I had to look at myself in the mirror and not look away.  Not gloss over the imperfections and the things I didn’t like.  (In case you’re wondering, that was both literally and figuratively part of the process.  One of the ways of dealing with being overweight for me was never looking below my neck in the mirror.  Makes it easier to pretend you’re not as heavy.)

At the end though, I had to be honest.  I had to know the things that were bothering me about me and I had to know how much they bothered me so I knew in what order to tackle them.  By now, you can probably tell the thing that was bothering me most was my weight.  It’s why I am tackling it first.  Even if nothing else falls in line, I will at least feel better about myself because of it.

Lastly, after I had picked myself apart, clear down to the bone, I had to do one more thing or else I wouldn’t be able to do this.  I had to forgive myself or at least accept myself.  I had to remind myself that yes, I have issues, but I’m not a horrible person.  I’m not even a bad person I don’t think, just a person who would do well to change his ways.

And I can accept that.  I can accept that I would prefer to be skinny, but my wife and child still love me even though I’m fat.  I’m not going to hell because I dress shabby.  I still have a good career even if my hair is a bit shagified.

I thnk that, ultimately saved me.  I am pretty sure psychologically I would reject this whole thing if I had to wake up every morning and recite every reason I had F—ed up my life.  I’d fall off the horse and go about my merry way, never the better.  Instead, I have resolved to say that I got here through a series of actions or inactions I would prefer I hadn’t made, but I did and I can live with it.

And that honestly, is something I can live with.  It’s how I can have a huge list of things about myself that I want to change and not delve into piles of self abuse.  I don’t know about you, but accepting my nature as one who has made mistakes and working past them feels a lot better telling myself what a loser I am.  I think if you try it, you would find it works better, too.  Just guessing!

With that said, I think a quick recap’s in order.  So I could start my reimagining, I first had to figure out what I wanted to change.  Even though I had some ideas, I still spent a goodly amount of time figuring out exactly what I want to change.  During that time, I had to be completely no-holds-barred honest.  Any fault, any problem, any issue had to be noted and I had to keep my eyes open.  Once I had that list though, I then had to sit back and say that, at the end of the day, I wasn’t a bad person because of all the stuff I wanted to change.  Merely a person in a state of flux.  And that was okay.

Well, it’s begun.

Under my belt: my first workout and my first meals.  I’ve had breakfast, lunch, and a snack. Sadly, it feels like all I’ve had was two snacks and an amuse bouche, but I’m hanging in there.

Sigh.

Well, I knew what I was getting myself into.

As for the workout, well, yesterday I said I wasn’t scared.  I said I wasn’t worried about the work it was going to take. 

Today, well, I think I can draw a parallel to soldiers in battle.  See, there’s the captain who starts yelling it’s time to go take this hill that has bad guys on top.

And while I am all nice and safe in my foxhole, I start thinking “Hey, that sounds like a pretty cool idea.  Let’s go!  It’ll be fun.  Sure they’ll be some running and some danger, but yeah, I’m pro-hill taking.”

(That was me yesterday.)

See, then the soldier jumps out of his fox hole and suddenly there’s machine gun fire and mortars and explosions.  Suddenly, the whole hill thing starts to sound like a bad idea.

(That’s me today.)

Oh well, there’s not a lot of quit in me.  And despite my griping, I’m looking forward to working out again tomorrow!  Talk to you then!

Okay, and now we get to the big one.

At least for now, of all my reimagining goals, this one is the most important by far.  Whether that’s psychological (I once took a test that said I was ready to put my life on hold because of my weight) or not, I really feel like the reimagining cannot happen unless I master my look and my weight goals.

Let’s tackle each of these in turn.  First:

Weight Reimagining

This is the biggie (pun intended.)  Getting healthy is what prompted this whole reimagining thing and it has become the thing I have thought about most. 

I’ve always been heavy for whatever reason, but in the past five years or so things have gotten worse.  Whether that is because I’ve gotten older or lazier or what have you, it’s gotten worse.  And really, the only thing I have to blame is myself. 

But I’m going to change that. 

As of right now, I vow that I will lose 165 pounds or I will die trying. 

Do I think I can do that in one year?  No.  Do I think I can knock out a significant chunk of that in one year?  Yes.  It’s a huge step.  I am basically going to do everything in my power to lose the equivalent of average adult male and let’s face it, weight loss is not easy.  If it were, everyone would be doing it.  So, not only am I going to be doing something hard, I am going to be doing a lot of it and I’m going to be doing it for a long time.  But, if it’s worth biting, it’s worth biting off more than I can chew, right?

How to Get There From Here?

Well, I didn’t call it a reimagining for nothing.  I basically have to go back and alter myself totally because no diet is going to get me to -165.  I need to change my life and I need to have a healthy relationship with food, not the codependent relationship I have now.

So what are my concrete steps?

1. Realistically, I want to go to the gym 4 times a week.  I would like to eventually get that up to 6 times per week, but while I am trying to reimagine myself, I figure I should take some baby steps.
2. In order to meet this goal, I have two things working in my favor.  Once, I have committed myself to waking up and going to the gym at 6:30.   I am the consummate night owl and find the prospect of going to the gym at 6:30 to be terrifying.  But there’s no other way.
3. The other thing I have are my Turbo Jam workouts.  They’re DVD workouts I can do at home and supplant with basic strength training exercises using the variable weight dumbells I have.  During the summer, I’ll run.
4. Portion control.  One plate.  Mostly vegetables for each meal.  Plus I’ll do healthy snacks to keep my appetite in check.
5. Eating the right foods.  I am giving myself one bad meal per week.  Other than that, no fried foods.  Limited red meat.  Foods will not cooked in butter.  Actually, I am going to limit the amount of “cooking” because raw produce is healthier and better for me.
6. Water.  Lots of water.  At least 200 ounces of water per day.  Plus, when I go to lunch, all I am going to do is drink water.  No more drinking my calories.  In fact, I am drinking my last soda until January 2nd, 2011.
7. Consult with my nutritionist.  Darya at Summer Tomato is there to help me find the right meal plan.  I’m already working on my food journal, which I am using Google Wave to complete.
8. Blogging.  I am pretty sure I’m an emotional eater.  Now, I’ll blog.
9. I’ll also try to channel the negative energy which draws me to food towards spending time with my family.  Since I am an emotional eater, I hope the joy I feel being with them will take the place of food.  (Yes, this is easy to talk about.  So much harder to do, but I can’t quit emotional eating without something to replace the food.)

Issues with Weight Loss

It’s not going to be easy.  I know that.  Here are the ones I can think of:

1. I love to eat.  I like cooking and I like eating.  I hope to overcome this by watching my portion size and by avoiding bad-for-me foods and empty calories.  Plus, I’ve watched shows like Iron Chef and Chopped.  The judges in those shows never clean their plates.  When I am treated to fine meal, I plan to not clean mine either.
2. I’m a food blogger.  That means I have to cook and try new things and I can’t flood my readers with recipes on healthy eating all the time.  Sometimes they like junk food.
3. unResolution Month.  During the month of January, I run 31 straight days of bad-for-you-food.  It’s fun and I don’t want to stop it.  But it does mean I have to cook it, see it, smell it, and taste it.
4. Habits.  Right now I don’t have good exercise or workout habits and old habits, they die hard.
5. I’m writing a cookbook.  About chicken wings.
6. I have to eat which means every meal is an opportunity to overeat.

The Rules

Here are the rules I’ve set for myself.

1. I get one bad meal per week.  Other than that, I am going to be good.
2. All food prepared for the blog that is not healthful can be tasted and then will be taken to work and given to coworkers or given to neighbors.  Everyone wins that way!
3. If I am interacting with a chef or at an eating event because of my blog or an article, I am to observe portion control, but will not insult the chef or event planner by not eating.
4. I cannot, however, ask my chef pals to stuff me silly under the guise of it being “food writing related.”  Similiarly, I cannot just cook a bunch of food and pig out and call it “food writing research.”
5. No soda.  Tea is limited to crack tea drank and that is limited to 1 bag per day.
6. No fried foods except for my 1 bad meal per week.
7. Red meat consumption is limited to twice per week.  (That’s not too tough for me.  I don’t eat a lot of red meat anyway.)
8. At least one plant-based meal per week or more if my wife is okay with it.  Eggs and cheese will be limited during these meals.
9. Exercise 4 times per week.  Period.  No excuses.

  That doesn’t sound too bad, doesn’t it?  Right?

I’m Afraid

There it is in black and white.  I’m scared.  Terrified.

This thing I’m doing scares me to my very core.  Not the scarficing.  Not the headaches that will come as my body readjusts or the hunger or the fact that there are foods I just won’t let myself eat.  I’m not afraid of the hard work.

I’m afraid I’ll fail.  I’m afraid that in 2 weeks I’ll be back to my old habits.   I’m afraid that I’ll keep getting heavier and heavier.

I’m afraid that food is in control me and that I can’t control food.

And I don’t have an answer.  I have nothing to reassure me that it won’t happen except for my friends whose job it is to keep me honest and you, my reader, who has carte blanche to keep me on the straight and narrow.

But still, I’ve never done anything like this before.  I’ve tried.  And I’ve failed.  Others have tried.  And they have failed.  I am afraid this time won’t be any different.

Stayed tuned I guess.  Let’s see if it will.

Style Reimagining

The other thing I want to do is improve how I look.  Right now, I’m pretty casual.  I’m kind of unkempt and just not very fashionable, but that will change.

Not in a vain way, but in a professional way.  I want to project the confidence I have in my professional abilities and I think my shaggy hair and old polos don’t do that.

The problem is, being stylish is expensive.  That’s where Charissa comes in.  She’s going to give me advice and hopefully some tips on where to look good for less. 

 She doesn’t know what she’s in for.

Not to harp on the whole weight thing, but buying clothes for a man as heavy as I am is hard (few stores carry my size) and when they do, they cost more than other clothes.  So, goal one has to be to shrink myself down to 2X size.  Then Charissa’s job gets a lot easier.

Next, I want to talk more about how I think the reimagining process will go.

So the first thing that I need to tackle is my professional reimagining.

I break Professional Goals into two distinct groups:

Day Job

My day job is great.  It has its days and the occassional weeks when I am thankful that we have strong windows lest I’d jump from them or maybe just toss my laptop out of them.  But all in all, I like what I do.  I find it intellectually challenging and I feel like I am rewarded for what I do.  Plus, I think I can have a career and advance without having to switch jobs.

Still, I think that I can do better and achieve more in my day job.  Whether rightly or wrongly, I believe that to be everything I want to be there are some things I need to change.  Loosely, these things fall into two categories:

1. Image
2. Organization

I want to be thought of as a go-to person, someone you put in front of clients and who can deliver.  To do that, I feel like I need to look the part.  Because I am overweight, I keenly understand how big people are perceived, I understand the stereotypes, and I know how untrue they can be.  So, step one is to changing the image I project which involves improving my look and losing my weight.

How I do that will be discussed in my next post.

Organization.

Now that’s another story.  See, certain parts of my life are meticulously organized.  My day.  My schedule.  The steps it takes to achieve the projects I am working on.  But other things…not so much.  This includes my work area and documentation.  What I have found is that the mess of my workspace reflects (negatively) on me sort of like the impressions of my weight.  And if I want to be the go-to guy, I have to remove negative reflections.

So step #1: clean work area.

Concrete step to achieve this goal: After work, I am going to get in the habit of cleaning up before I go home.  I think the change will be noticeable.

Step #2: In general, I need to be more organized about documentation,too.  I’m pretty good at this, but I have a feeling I need to be better.

Concrete step: I have green hanging folders and manilla folders.  I am going to organize all the hardcopy I have and do a better job of keeping notes with their assigned folders.

Concrete step: Do a better job of organizing my electronic media.  I mean that’s what folders are for, right?  Plus, I do want to be environmentally friendly, too!

Fortunately, in this area I have a great mentor who can help me out.

Food Writing

So it’s no secret that I do food writing/blogging.  BlogWellDone.com is one of my passions as is writing about food in general.  I would like 2010 to be the year I look back and say my blog went gonzo.  In the past 12 months, I’ve hit so many major milestones of blogging, but there are so many more I want to hit.  We’ll discuss those in the coming months.

I would also love to add more magazine credits to my name and maybe, finally, get a cookbook written.  We’ll see.

Sadly, I don’t have concrete steps here yet, but that’s because my focus has been elsewhere, but one thing I do know that I need to do is network and guess what…that means style and physical changes.  Even if no one else cares, it will make me feel better.

With that said, next are my physical and image goals since that seems to be a repeating theme, no?

Welcome to the beginning of something new.

And I don’t just mean the blog.  Yes, this is the inaugural post of my new blogging adventure, but I hope it’s the start of something better than that.  Something bigger that will you come back to and take this ride with me because, frankly, I think we can help each other.  But more on that in a minute.

First, let me lay it all out on the line.

What is ChrisReimagined.com?

In November, something happened to me.  I started to have some health issues.  Without really getting into a lot of deatils, some bad things started to happen that were fairly good indications that I might have cancer at 31 years of age.  The indications were persistent, painful, and after talking with the doctor, getting poked, prodded, injected with dye, and scanned in a nice whirling tube, the results were… kidney stones.

Better Than Cancer

In other words, I’m going to live.  However, for a couple of weeks I had to come face-to-face with the idea that I might not or if I did live, it would only be after rounds of chemo or surgery.  Unbidden, I started to wonder what it would be like if my son might have to live without his father.  I also started to think about how I might never see him graduate, get married, hold my grandchild, etc.

In just about every way, having stones was better than cancer in terms of the chance of fatality, the severity of the process to get rid of them (my stone was bad enought that it did require surgery, incidentally, since I never do things half way), and the fact that while cancer has a lot of environmental sources beyond my control, kidney stones are something I pretty much caused myself due to awful dietary practices.

So, there I was.  Relieved that it hadn’t been cancer, but pretty upset for not taking better care of myself. 

The Snowball Effect

Because let’s face it.  I’ve been failing on the whole “body is a temple” thing.  If you’ve seen pictures of me, you may notice that I’m more than a little overweight.  While I know how to cook healthy, I have chosen not to.  I have a gym membership that I don’t use and every day I wake up, I can pretty much say I’m in the worst shape I’ve been in.

And if I was all concerned about my son living without his father because of cancer, should I give myself a pass and ignore what all of that weight is doing to my joints, my heart, my brain, and my liver?  And frankly, if I am that worried about my time on this earth running out, what am I happy with what I am doing with my life?  Should I wait to be a better employee, food writer, friend, father, podcaster, marketing, author, etc.?  I’ve got goals, but am I doing anything to achieve them?

The Answer is “No”

No, I can’t ignore my weight.  No, I am not happy with a lot of things in my life.  In fact, I’m kind of lazy.  I’m kind of a slob.  I don’t care about my appareance and I fear that I’m a bit of an egotistical jerk.

What to Do About It?

Well, that’s where this site comes in.

See, I’m a big Battlestar Galactica fan, both the first and second series.  While the original was good and I enjoyed it on its own merits, the Sci Fi channel came along and remade it into a wholly separate show.  The names stayed the same (mostly), but the structure changed.  It was deeper, more dramatic, more thoughtful, better.

It was a reimagining.  And that is what I am going to do.  Reimagine myself.  And that’s where you come in.

I am going to make a promise to myself and everyone who reads this blog that in the next year, from January 2nd, 2010 to January 2nd, 2011 I am going to make a concerted effort to improve myself in six key areas:

1. Physically
2. Stylistically
3. Spiritually
4. Financially
5. Environmentally
6. Professionally

How I plan to address each challenge will be laid out in the following blog posts as will progress reports on both my successes and failures.  But the important thing is that I have made this promise to myself, my family, and each person who reads this blog post.  More importantly, I want your help keeping it.  All I need you to do is come back and read.

If I know someone is reading, then I know I have someone to whom I must keep my promise because it’s a sure thing I’ll break a promise to myself.  I might even break it to my family, but I’ve made promises to the world before via my blog and I kept them.  I want to keep this one, too.

How I Can Help You

If you’ve found this post, then you’re either a friend or you found it because maybe you’re going through the same problems I am.  Maybe you’re not happy with how you look or how you treat others.  If so, it’s okay.  When you decide that you want to change, these posts will be here.  I can’t promise that I have all the answers.  In fact, I know I don’t.  That’s why I brought in a team of experts. 

If you click on the My Support link above you’ll see all of the people who I had to help from.  This team includes my nutrionist Darya, style consultants Charissa and Anna, and accountability execs Kelly and Blogomomma.  See, I know that it takes a village to raise a child.  I think it also takes a village to reimagine a man.  In all honestly, I do not believe I can do this without them.

Maybe you’re happy with that way you are, that’s great.  Then this will be awfully one-sided.  I need your help, but you don’t need mine.

On the other hand, maybe there is a change you want to make.  Maybe it’s one of the six I listed or maybe you want to go back to college, maybe you are having trouble with a relationship, or something else.  If so, know that you don’t have to make the change alone.  There’s no shame in asking for help when it comes to something as monumental as changing yourself, even if it’s just one thing.

You’re not alone.  In these posts, I hope you find inspiration and I you avoid the mistakes I know I am going to make.  Also know you can contact me and we can figure out how to make your change together.

Sound good?

If so, read on.  I’ll start talking about each change and I foresee making it.