The week after the hypnotists’ convention, I began my annual “Back to School Tour” where I travel around the country performing stage hypnotism for colleges as they begin their new school year. This is always a fun time of year for me, as I get to travel around, meet a lot of nice people, and be in the role of entertainer. While it’s a really busy time, it’s not something that I think of as stressful. There’s a definite feeling of relief as I’m at the point in the year where I really just focus on this one thing, and so my stress has definitely reduced. I’m still on the steroid taper, and I feel pretty good. Sometimes the steroids affect my sleep, so there’s a little bit of a negative factor there, but overall I seem to be doing pretty well, and it was reflected on the scale. I’m under 300 pounds!
Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but there’s something about not seeing that “3” at the beginning of the scale read-out that has really lifted my spirits. I realized, as I was reflecting on it, that it has been nearly three months since I started this project, and while I have lost weight much slower than I hoped, I have also gone nearly three months without ever gaining more than a half pound in a week, and that’s a pretty significant change in my old pattern. For years, the pattern was to keep going slowly and steadily upward, and now I’m going slowly and steadily downward, and that’s a great feeling. And again, to have done it without dieting, without aggressive workout plans–just by shifting my thoughts and awareness a bit–is pretty cool.
But there’s still a lot of weight to lose.
So now I find myself debating internally; do I keep going the way I’m going, or do I make a shift that somehow accelerates things, so that I don’t get too comfortable with the way things are? One of the things I’ve learned about myself is that when I get comfortable, it never leads to anything good. Shaking things up gets me to create new things, achieve new things, and keep growing.
I mean, at my current rate of progress, it’s going to take me three years to lose the weight I want to lose. Not cool. Clearly I have to adapt to some new strategies and practices, and create better results.