Stage four fat

I just finished reading the Care Page for my previous manager. He was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer last week (he's 50 and never smoked). The cancer has spread to his hip and his brain. If you're not familiar with Care Pages it's a web site that's sort of a blog for cancer patients, and friends can post messages. It's a lot like our weight loss blogs. The cancer patient posts about their treatment, how they're feeling, how scared they are or how much pain they're in, and then friends post encouraging messages.

When I was reading Rick's Care Page I realized that in the big picture, my weight loss problems are really trivial. To me they're huge, but when I read about Rick getting radiation shot into his brain, his hip, and his lungs, every day for 14 days straight plus all the chemo (and this is just phase one), it made me think, what the hell am I whining about? I just have to control what I put in my mouth and I have to exercise, I'm not dying of cancer.

My original post today was going to be about how tired I am of all of this, how bored I am with exercising and counting my Points in everything I eat. Then I read Rick's post. Talk about a reality check. I'm thrilled that losing weight is my only battle. It's not that hard, beating cancer is hard, that's a real challenge. Not the crap that I complain about all the time.

The moral of this story is to be thankful that you only have to worry about counting Points and getting your butt moving. It could be so much worse. I can't even imagine the pain and the fear that Rick is going through right now. He only has a 2% chance of surviving five years. Not very good odds. About the same odds as me maintaining my weight loss (some statistics say 95% of us will gain back all the weight we lose). But if I gain my weight back I won't be dead, just very unhappy with myself.

Strangely, I feel inspired by Rick's post today. He's very upbeat and determined to beat his cancer, even though if you read anything about stage four, that's almost impossible. He's ignoring the statistics and fighting it as hard as he can fight. I'm going to do the same with my weight loss. If Rick can beat cancer or at least give it his best shot, I can do the same with my fight against fat.