My Story
The part nobody posts
I spent about 30 years in sales, most of it in mortgages. Desk, phone, long hours, and every meal built around whatever was fast.
And I restarted for two decades. Twenty years of Mondays. I want to be clear that I was not sitting there confused. I could have told you what to eat.
What I was actually doing that whole time was negotiating. How much ice cream could stay. Whether the steaks counted. How little cardio I could do and still call it cardio. How few days in the gym would be enough. Whether one brutal week could cover for the three lazy ones behind it. Every single restart, I was asking the same question. How little can I change and still get everything I want?
I had a loop for the bad days too. Something hurts, so I drink. Then I eat. Then I feel worse. Then I do it again. That loop was very good at turning every Monday into a fresh start instead of the same start.
Then I heard somebody talk about marrying discipline. Making it a thing you are instead of a thing you borrow when you feel like it. That landed on me hard. I stopped treating discipline like a mood and decided it was going to be who I am, and I said it out loud. I AM DISCIPLINE.
Saying it did nothing. What did something was the next year and a half of backing it up. Cardio. Lifting. Stairs, over and over, until I stopped saying I have to do the stairs and started saying I GET to do the stairs. And on the days I blew it, I came back the next morning, because one day is a mistake and two days is a new habit. A couple of days becomes a couple of decades. I know that firsthand. I had already given away twenty years to it.
Ninety pounds came off in about 18 months. Then it stayed off through a divorce, through losing a cat I had for 17 years, through walking away from the career I spent 30 years building, through packing up and moving across the country. I did not handle any of that perfectly. I just stopped treating a hard season as permission to quit on my own body.
That is what I coach now. How you stop negotiating with the work and start believing your own word again.
