Mind Games

My weigh-in yesterday showed that I weighed 281.2 pounds. That’s a loss of 48.8 pounds since March 20. I’d love to be able to tell you it was easy, but if I did, I would be lying. The greatest obstacle to losing weight has been…me. I play a lot of mind games with myself.

The truth is, I had developed some bad habits over the years. I was addicted to sugar, food, sloth, and gluttony. I was eating bad things, doing stupid things, and over the years, I got fatter and fatter. I was addicted because I allowed myself to be addicted. All by using mind games.

When I got up in the morning, I needed coffee to get myself going. Putting sugar into my coffee removed any bitterness. In the U.S. Army, we called it “go juice“. Caffeine plus sugar, what a combo! Nowadays, grunts use energy drinks like Rip-Its, Monster, etc. to get them amped, increase focus, and so on. When you’re young, you do young things. I’ve not been a grunt since 1993. That’s 28 years of lying to myself. I needed that go juice in the morning. I got up to two large cups a day. Heavens only know what that much sugar did to my blood glucose levels throughout the day. All I knew was, my mind wanted what my body wanted.

I stopped, every now and then. I would stop using the sugar, and I would lose weight. Odd that I would go back to using sugar, knowing how it was affecting my health. While clearly not as bad for my health as my parents’ alcoholism, I did gain some insights into their addiction through my own.

Addiction of any kind is insidious. It grows tentacles throughout our bodies and our psyches. People don’t always get swamped by a tsunami of addictive thoughts or feelings. It’s done in whispers. To use a Game of Thrones analogy, your castle isn’t always burned down by a rampaging dragon breathing dragon fire. Your castle is often lost to Lord Varys and Lord “Littlefinger” Baelish. The lies and deceptions we tell ourselves are far more damaging than our actual urges.

Often at the end of the day, I would have an urge to snack. I’m sure my blood sugar would dip before bed, but my body would really crave something sweet before bed. I would crawl through the cabinets, looking for anything sweet. Cookies, candy, or my go-to, cereal. I would get a big bowl, fill it with cereal, and dump enough sugar into it to choke a Shetland Pony. I once had a Shetland pony named Tony. I wanted him to speak, but he couldn’t, because he was a little horse (Ba-dum-bum-tsss). Bad jokes aside, imagine the damage I was doing to my body by dumping a massive amount of sugar into my body right before bed. Actually, you don’t need to imagine, you’ve either seen me or my pictures.

Oh, the mind games! “I’ll fix myself a little something before bed.” “I’m feeling a bit peckish, I’ll just grab myself a candy bar and a Mountain Dew.” I wasn’t satisfying my cravings; I was drowning them. Years and years of this turned me into a fat tub of lard. I’ve got Crohn’s Disease, a major gastrointestinal disorder. What’s one of the prime symptoms? Weight loss. Your body can’t absorb nutrients from the food, so you lose weight, but not Steve! Talk about over-achieving…

When I left the Army in 1993, I weighed around 180 pounds. I was going through a series of steroid treatments at the time. Steroids can sometimes cause weight gain, primarily through fluid retention, and may also increase appetite. I gained weight. I had a series of abdominal surgeries, and they removed a significant amount of small and large intestines. Multiple surgeries created a lot of stress, and I ate to comfort myself. Fast forward to March 20, 2025, when Jabba the Hutt went in for open-heart surgery.

The easiest way to combat these mind games is to learn the power of the word “no”. I had Coach Bob Knight for a class at Indiana University. One of the lessons I learned from him in that class was that the most powerful word in the English language is the word “no“. He advised that the first answer to most questions should be “no”. That can give you time to consider the question more fully. A “no” is easier to change to a “yes” than vice versa, and can be more favorably viewed than changing a yes to a no.

Fortunately, the Mayo Clinic Diet is teaching Robin and me how to say no to ourselves. The diet coaches us to put ourselves in positions to make healthier decisions. Late at night, if I feel the urge for a snack, I might grab some baby carrots or an apple. What I have found myself doing more and more is just saying no. I will feel the urge and catch myself going through the pantry. I’ll shut the door and say, “No.” Then I go to bed. It was challenging at first, but as a skill, it improves with practice.

With a diet, you have to teach yourself to look at the big picture. It is easy to succumb to temptations in the moment, but when I keep the big picture in mind, it is easier to say no. My big picture is that I don’t want to be big in my pictures. I’d rather look like Han Solo than Jabba the Hutt. The Mayo Clinic Diet has given me the weapons to win my mind games, so my weight can continue to drop. We’ll see.

Oh, and Greedo shot first.