Losing Pounds and Pounding Loss

My friend Gary created this sign for me, and left it by
my favorite elliptical in the gym at work one day.

June 13, 2014
          Day 44/365

Erma Bombeck wrote, "In two decades, I've lost a total of 789 pounds.  I should be hanging from a charm bracelet."

We do this.  We lose and we lose, and we lose some more.  We count up our lost pounds with glee all the time, refusing to recognize how often we keep gaining them back again.  Well, maybe not refusing, but certainly trying very hard to look in the other direction.

Weightloss is hard!  Those whose metabolism is friendly to them, the ones who are perpetually fit despite their bacon cheeseburgers and extra scoops of cookie dough ice cream, are the lucky ones.  But they're not, I don't think, the average ones.  Most of us struggle.  Like, a lot.  We work at our bodies constantly, trying to stay in shape, or at least maintain whatever weight feels comfortable.

The more we lose, the more we celebrate.  It's pretty much the only kind of loss we do ever celebrate in life.  You don't see anyone posting on Facebook or Instagram that they've just lost their dog, and are throwing a party.  Loss is usually not good. 

And yet it's our losses that we add up when we lose pounds.  It's our losses that we celebrate, that we share, that we reward ourselves for and publicize. 

Losing weight is dropping pounds of carnal sin that we put on over time.  It's saying goodbye to the weekly bacon cheeseburgers we ate five years earlier, and bidding farewell to the extra scoops of cookie dough ice cream we binged on after a bad breakup eight years ago. 

Losing pounds is almost always a good thing, and certainly is if you're unhealthily overweight, as so many Americans are.  But pounding loss is just as important.  We pound and compound loss when we add up our successfully lost pounds, and appreciate what they stand for.  We pound loss when we don't just lose the pounds, but analyze the success at hand.  And we pound loss when we don't just celebrate our weightloss on social media, but celebrate it emotionally and intellectually too, by really taking a good long look at how far we've come.

My friend Gary created a sign for me after I told him I'd recently lost 41 pounds.  He works with me in the same company, so he made the sign and placed it by my favorite elliptical in the gym.  The sign was a celebration of achievement, but long after the celebration was done, it remains a reminder of success.  Other colleagues, people I don't even know, saw that sign and recognized my achievement.  But for them, it wasn't just a recognition of pounds lost.  It was a promise of possibility for them as well. 

When we lose pounds, we celebrate, and rightfully so.  But when we pound loss, we tell it to stay away, and to keep on walking down that road in the other direction.  Celebration is important, as is sharing our victories with others.  But so too is the next step, and the step after that, and the step that follows that one.  Losing pounds is the first step, but pounding loss is like the support meetings that follow for years afterward.  It's the constant reminder not only of the realized success, but of the constant need to succeed, and the possibility to do even better.