Support is Important; Athletic and Otherwise…

On a fateful day in April, 2008 I drove back to work from a pretty upsetting meeting with a Flight Surgeon. She’d just informed me that my fasting glucose level (FGL) was pre-diabetic, and my cholesterol levels were near 300. That’s AFTER 12 hours of fasting.

I’d been informed that, due to my family’s long and horrible history with diabetes (it’s pretty much killed my mother’s entire side, including her), it was imperative that these numbers be dropped, and soon. I had thirty days. One month. One month to pull off what I was realizing was a complete lifestyle change. Failure on my part meant a loss of flight status in the Navy, loss of flight pay, loss of job specialty (after 15 years at the job), and possible early retirement or separation from the service as “Not Physically Qualified” (the dreaded NPQ’d, as we say.). My life (and by extension, those of my wife and children) had come to a serious fork in the road.

I’m now thoroughly convinced, after the past year’s work, that people who can’t (or won’t) change their lifestyles, habits, diets, or exercise patterns to achieve fitness and health are lacking two critical elements: proper motivation and proper support.
Proper motivation isn’t “I want a nice body”. Proper motivation isn’t “I think I should work out a bit more…” PROPER, real motivation is when failure is absolutely not an option. It’s when the results of that failure are unthinkable. It’s when the results of failure are not abstract; they are real, in the “right-now” immediate world, with real-world consequences. Even people who face real health issues sometimes cannot bring themselves to effect actual change in their lives, because the consequences do not seem, well, real. That wasn’t me. Financial ruin, loss of my job and pension and benefits, and a completely uncertain-at-best future for my family stared me in the face. Oh, along with the real possibility of early death or long, debilitating disease and illness. That’s the brutal, in-your-face, ice-cold right-NOW motivation I’m talking about.

There’s also support. I can say without any hesitation whatsoever that it would have been damned near impossible to make all the necessary changes in my lifestyle that I did without the unbelievable efforts my wife, Lauren, put in on my behalf. She researched the foods needed, she kept spreadsheets of calories and glucose, she bought and read cookbooks, she scoured websites, and she shopped for and bought the foods. Cooked them damned good, too. Most importantly, she SUPPORTED me mentally and morally. She didn’t “enable” me, like many well-meaning but misguided friends will (“aww, you can have just ONE piece of cake, Dude…”), she really kept at me to both eat right and record what I was eating. She made sure I made food for the next day and packed it every night. And, probably most importantly for “motivating” me, she looked at me one day, about two months into the process, with an open-mouthed, pleasantly surprised look of, well, something great when I walked into the room shirtless for the first time in months (at 40 years old, I’d successfully recovered my abs).

That was worth a million bucks of coaching right there.