If you really want to get a chuckle, look at my resume from when I first started working.  I have done just about everything under the sun from delivering newspapers to designing balloon catheters and stints for angioplasty surgery.  I went to school for mechanical engineering and biology and graduated with the expectation of going into the biomechanical engineering field but that never happened.  Instead I took my first job as a chemical engineer—don’t ask how I made that leap—and had an eclectic career path in engineering that ended with me working for the state as a civil engineer (Dear God in Heaven will this madness stop?—again…don’t ask how I made that leap).  The only common thread during all of those years was I was an athletic junky.  I wasn’t a gym rat, yet, just an athletic junky and I taught group fitness classes after work every night.  I did this until 2001 when I took another leap, only this one was a leap of faith and dropped the engineering altogether to see if I could make it as a full time trainer (I did this to be a SAHM.  I still love engineering.)  Years later, here I am as a janitor of Starbucks.  Oops, that’s coming soon…not there yet.

It’s important for you to know my background because it speaks directly to how I think, train clients and determine what a failure is and what is not.  In the world of engineering, there is no such thing as a failure per se (unless a client dies as a result of your design and then that’s not just a failure, that’s a tragedy and a lawsuit.), it is more like ‘that was good information’ and now you know better.  Obviously, good engineers get closer to the mark, fail faster and fail cheaper but failure in some way, shape or form is expected (preferably in the design stage, though, so as to avoid lawsuits).  The process is best described as iteration and is what I live my life by in terms of how I do things.  I really couldn’t care less if I mess something up and many times I get excited when I do because it means I making progress.  The question is, am I going to hang out crying over my failure or am I going to say, “Crap.  Now why did that happen?” and do something with it.  At that moment, the choice is mine to do with it as I may and glean from it as many golden nuggets of info as possible.

Over the next few days I want to walk you through a diet like I did before, only this time I will walk you through with you seeing through the eyes of the dieter and the dieter going through a few 12 week cycles instead of just one.  We can all learn a lot from this, including myself, because we all have a certain amount of perfectionism that we bring to the table that inevitably holds us back from forward progress.  However, the main thing that I want to show you is that almost all of us have survived dieting by iterating to some extent and if we just fully embraced it instead of poo-pooing it, we’d fail forward faster.   The fact that we look at it as a failure as opposed to good info is a primary reason as to why so many of us become discouraged and head into the land of moping.  I also want us to see how we regroup while dieting.  Some of us have become very adept at looking at our pasts and seeing where we made mistakes, but in the land of engineering that takes way too long and wastes way too much time and money.  We need to be more efficient in our failing.  We need real time data and real time “fixing”.

Meet me here tomorrow, dressed for the gym with your cooler packed as we start our 12 week diet.  I look forward to losing a few pounds with friends.   Hit me up below if you want me to mention anything in particular.   Woop woop!

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