Pain avoidance machines (Ricky Weekly #94)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
There’s this house on McAllister that puts up a hanging artwork every month. I heard the person is getting pretty old and may not be able to do this much longer so I began taking pictures and videos every time I see a new one. I plan to put them all together at some point because they make me happy!
A thing on my mind:
I’ve been trying to lose weight for more than a decade. Here’s a graph of my weight since 2010.
The quick background is that I gained 80 lbs, from 140 to 220, over the course of my four years in high school that basically ruined my health, and I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to bring my weight under control ever since.
In the last 12 months, I’ve lost 42 lbs (170) and I’m on track to hit my target of 50 lbs (162). This is the lowest I’ve weighed since I was 16 so I thought I’d share the secret to my success.
Here’s the secret: “People don’t change unless they have to,” and I’ve finally had to because of OLD AGE. 😂
I’m in my mid 30s now, which is old enough to feel all the aches and pains. I like to joke that the most disappointing part about aging is waking up in the morning with pain in the part of your body you never knew existed. I’ve had to really manage my pain with daily stretches and strengthening exercises, but even with that, I’ve suffered more injuries on the basketball court that seriously jeopardized my ability to keep playing. That turned out to be a very credible threat to my happiness and made me realize how I really needed to slim down in order to stay physically active for as long as I can.
Beyond muscular and skeletal aches and pains, old age is also amplifying general discomfort enough to change my cost-benefit analysis on all sorts of things. The classic example is how quickly you recover from alcohol. I felt that in my mid-twenties. In my mid-thirties, they’re things like eating greasy or salty foods or consuming too much sugar. I’d feel uncomfortable or sluggish immediately after, enough to erase the pleasure I used to associate with delicious foods. On the flip side, if I eat healthy and clean, I’m able to notice how much better I feel. That wasn’t the case when I was younger.
Through this experience, I’ve learned how motivation is closely related to pain. My motivation to lose weight has always been vaguely about improving my overall health and energy so I can pursue what I love, which comes from having experienced the pain associated with poor health that held me back from doing what I want. That is as opposed to, say, wanting to lose weight so I can look good. In fact, even though people have called me fat, that never much bothered me because my mom always told me she liked chubby men. So, this is making me think that we’re all just pain avoidance machines and we may not have as much free will as we think we do over our motivation or why we do what we do.
To take advantage of this insight, I’m using weight loss as a way to avoid another type of pain — the pain of feeling worthless. Feeling worthless is a deep seated fear I have and why I’m motivated to achieve. Making progress on the scale is an easy reinforcement of my ability to achieve, especially compared to the high variance game of startups. Thinking this way has actually made me more resilient. Instead of getting discouraged by every weight loss plateau or whenever I blew up my diet, now I simply put the work in to bring myself back, and I always am able to, which is very confidence inspiring!
A piece of content I recommend:
Harry Mack & Lamorne Morris (New Girl meets 8 Mile) on TYSO with Rick Glassman - #243
Couple things about this podcast. It’s fun and irreverent. It’s the only podcast that I’d watch because of the great visual editing. But mostly Harry Mack, Lamorne Morris and Rick Glassman are a perfect trio because they all freestyle rap and have incredible chemistry. Since it’s a long video, I’ve linked to the part you should watch if you’re only going to watch some of it.
Bonus: Harry Mack (Freestyle Rapper. He's incredible!!) on TYSO with Rick Glassman - #195
I got so interested I went to watch this other interview Rick Glassman did with Harry Mack. There was still a ton of goofing around and freestyle rap but also really interesting discussions about the craft of freestyling and comedy.
Bonus Bonus: Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream by Casey Neistat
If you liked reading about my weight loss journey, you’ll probably like this video from Casey Neistat.
🤗
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My primary focus (and where I focus) is on Flow Club.