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Day 3,117 – What the Scale Couldn’t Measure: A Perspective

Dear Sobriety,

Getting sober in 2017 initiated an unexpected health kick for me.

Within the first few months of simply not consuming alcohol followed by drunk binge eating calories, I’d lost 20 pounds. And by starting to build up new habits, like drinking more water and regularly walking outside, that number slowly grew as I watched the one on the scale in the bathroom shrink.

It took me 5+ years to lose 80+ pounds.

That’s a long time, huh? I think so too, but being on this side of it, I needed to take it slow.

Because evolving from a rampaging drunk who hoped to die to a hiking warrior deeply in love with life is not an overnight kinda process.

So when I finally got sick and tired of being sick and tired, I had to start putting that energy somewhere constructive.

My mentality was, and essentially still is:

I’m sober now, so… I guess I gotta figure this shit out.

I found a glimmer of hope in losing those first 20 lbs. I had made a huge lifestyle change by not drinking and positive results were starting to show.

My Reality Check

I’d spent the first half of my life drunk, high on pills and in unhealthy relationships, so sometimes I feel like I “suddenly woke up” in my late 30s realizing,

If I want a knight in shining armor to come save me, then I’m gonna have to put on chainmail.

Because I finally started learning that the only person who can really make a difference in changing me is… me.

That’s when I decided I wanted to start building a healthy life for myself.

So that’s what I’ve been working on the past few years: replacing all the time I used to spend drinking with… everything but that.

Non-Scale Victories

If you’ve ever tried losing or gaining weight, you know how difficult it can be to get that number moving in the direction you want. It can be so disappointing and demotivating when it doesn’t.

So after that first 20 lbs, I started hitting a plateau and realized I couldn’t ride the wave of just not drinking anymore. If you’ve heard of the “pink cloud,” that was starting to run out and reality was really starting to set in:

If I wanted to change, I had to commit to it.

Committing to Consistency

That’s when I started paying attention to consistency and I’m neurospicy, so when I say CONSISTENCY MATTERS to me, please know I mean that in my mentally unstable little soul.

Consistency helps create clean metrics and patterns to help you see results. And I can see the logic in consistency.

I’d been consistently sober for a couple months and already I was seeing benefits.

But the only place I thought to look then was at the scale. And it was giving me the same data, no matter how hard I felt I tried to keep it decreasing. I realized I had to start finding motivation elsewhere if I was going to keep losing weight.

I read an article somewhere that once mentioned “non-scale victories” and listed out a few suggestions.

With that thought kinda stuck in the back of my brain, these are some of the things that kept me motivated when the scale wasn’t budging:

  • Measurements: get a fabric measuring tape and start tracking. You’ll be surprised at how much change is going on in spite of the scale!
  • The way my clothes fit: snug things weren’t snug anymore, ya know, or the skinny jeans finally fit!
  • Taking the trash out and not being out of breath. This is actually a metric I still use because when I was drinking, I was also smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day. So taking the trash out to the dumpster used to take a toll on me. I live in a second floor apartment, so it’s a bit of a jaunt, and my trash is filled with cat litter, so it’s not light. But now? Now I smile each time I take the trash out because… it’s so freaking easy.
  • Not being out of breath doing housework. Same thing as the trash. Vacuuming used to kill my whole body and don’t expect me to dust anywhere that’s too high or too low. Now? My apartment sparkles from floor to ceiling. Because of that, the energy is much more peaceful.
  • Less inflammation overall and with adding supplements, my pain level most days is down to 0 – 2.

The Gym… from Foe to Friend

If the last time you went to the gym was a bad experience, you’re probably going to have some anxiety going back. That’s to be expected with (re)starting any habit. You’ve got to do it a few times to start building up a tolerance for it.

One thing that held me back from even going to the gym was feeling like people were going stare at me being awkward and new at something.

Which… putting it in writing like that makes me think: is that really so bad? It’s so cliche to say, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

How I changed my focus from all the thoughts that other people might be thinking about me (aka my projections) was to put mental blinders on myself.

I zeroed in on every little detail of myself:

  • how every rep or pedal stroke felt that day.
  • the ache and burn of my muscles doing exactly what they were intended to do, flex and stretch!
  • the feeling of sweat beading up on my skin and how it turns my tattoos into stained glass.
  • how deeply I’m able to breathe during cardio.

Once I started focusing fully on my body, I was able to begin seeing that all the people working out around me were literally there trying to do the same.

People make the gym out to be a place that’s scary, and, I mean… you’re going to a place where you’re literally putting your physical weaknesses on display while you work to get stronger. That is scary.

But once you get into a habit, you may start finding you begin to enjoy it.

Which leads me to my last bit for today…

What if you change your own mind in the process?

Like… what if you start to enjoy it?!

Maybe you could go from thinking:

I don’t want to.

To…

Ok. I’m making life changes. I see progress. What if I keep showing up for myself?

To…

I can cycle for 60 minutes in 125° sauna and when Lil Jon’s Turn Down for What pops on, I say, ”Yes sir! I’ll turn down for another song while cycling, of course!”

Maybe that’s the thing nobody tells you.

You start out hating it.

Then you keep going because you see progress.

Then one day you realize you’ve become someone who actually enjoys the thing you once dreaded.

Somewhere between the first miserable workout and singing along to Lil Jon in a 125° sauna, I stopped trying to survive my life and started participating in it.

And that’s probably the biggest non-scale victory of them all.

Posted on by monicatbd · 2 Comments

Day 3,111 – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: The Parts That Hit Me the Hardest – A Book Report

Dear Sobriety,

I recently finished reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson and honestly… beneath the sarcasm and f-bombs, there’s a lot of solid psychological insight in it.

I’d definitely recommend it if you feel like you need a perspective shift or a reminder that discomfort is part of being human, not proof that life is broken.

Also, IMHO, the book proves to me once again that most self-help books can be summed up at their most basic concept by AA page 417, IYKYK. And if not, here’s the Cliffs Notes version:

Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.

It’s kind of wild how many different ways humans keep relearning the same lesson. 😅

What’s stood out to me the most are the sections about entitlement and the difference between blame and responsibility.

Because ooof. Those hit home. 😬 So let’s dig in!

One of the points the book makes is that modern culture can quietly encourage a kind of emotional entitlement where people begin to believe:

  • their feelings should always dictate reality.
  • discomfort automatically means something unfair is happening.
  • emotional pain means someone else must be at fault.
  • being offended means they are correct.

And to be clear, I do not think feelings are fake or unimportant. Quite the opposite. Feelings are incredibly real. I have them all the time! Ask my partner. 🤭 I’m his little tornado of emotion! 🌪️

But I do think I’ve spent periods of my life unconsciously expecting external things to fix internal discomfort.

If I felt hurt, angry, rejected, triggered or misunderstood, I often wanted relief to come from outside of me first and pictured it like:

  • Someone apologizing.
  • Someone validating me.
  • Someone changing.
  • Someone finally understanding where I was coming from.
  • Someone behaving differently.

And sometimes those things mattered.

But sometimes… I was also unknowingly handing other people responsibility for emotional work that ultimately belonged to me.

That’s where the book’s distinction between blame and responsibility really landed for me.

One of the biggest ideas in the book is:

Something can happen to you that is not your fault while still being your responsibility to deal with.

That’s such an uncomfortable concept at first because our brains naturally want fairness. We want the person who caused the pain to also resolve the pain.

But life does not always work that way.

I didn’t ask for degenerative cervical discs. 🩻 Trust me, if there were an unsubscribe button for that experience, I would have smashed it immediately.

But whether I like it or not, it’s still my responsibility to learn how to manage it, adapt to it and take care of myself through it.

I can resent reality all day long and my spine will still be my spine.

That realization applies emotionally too.

Trauma may not be your fault.
Triggers may not be your fault.
Loss may not be your fault.
Other people’s behavior may not be your fault.

But eventually, healing still becomes your responsibility.

And honestly? I think accepting that has changed me more than almost anything else in the past few years.

Because the more I worked on my own emotional regulation, the less energy I spent trying to control other people. And that’s turned into:

  • Less reacting.
  • Less spiraling. 🌪️
  • Less needing the outside world to rearrange itself before I could feel okay again.

Meditation has helped with that a lot too. It created space between trigger and reaction. Space to notice my emotions without immediately becoming them.

And weirdly enough, some of the most freeing realizations I’ve had lately are:

  • Not every feeling requires an action. 
  • Not every discomfort requires correction.
  • Not every emotional reaction is someone else’s responsibility to fix.

Sometimes feelings are signals.
Sometimes they’re old wounds echoing.
Sometimes they’re projections.
Sometimes they’re important.
Sometimes they’re fear.

Learning the difference has probably been one of the hardest and healthiest parts of growing up for me.

I still have opinions. Loud ones sometimes. 🥹👉👈

But I’m getting better at pausing long enough to ask:

Is this actually about the present moment?

Or is this an emotional reflex looking for somewhere to land?

That pause has changed a lot.

I still have a very loud internal monologue sometimes. 🧠 The difference now is that I don’t automatically treat every emotional reaction like an emergency anymore. And honestly? That’s been freeing as hell.

Want to learn more? Watch Mark Manson summarize the entire book on YouTube 👉 here 👈 or go old school like me and check out the book at your local library! 📚