Focus on the Solution – Not the Problem!

The main thing that I’ve learned this time around is that, although the need to lose weight is the reason that I applied to 2017 RBL, the most important reason now is in fact to get healthy. For most of my life, I viewed exercise and eating right as the “necessary evils” to improve my appearance and achieve certain goals. Later on in adult life, I became motivated to lose weight due to a decrease in mobility and an increase in joint and back pain. During the last two years of my weight loss journey, I have learned that weight loss is an added benefit, but not the ultimate goal. The key for me was to understand my real problem.

Defining the problem is the first step in the problem solving process. Next you have to get to the root cause. Without a detailed understanding of the problem you can’t solve it. However, just focusing on the problem doesn’t lead to a long term solution either. The only way to solve a problem is to take your focus off the problem and fix your focus on the solution. I have learned, through both success and failure, that the solution to my weight problem is a healthy balanced life (physically, spiritually and emotionally). It’s actually counter-productive to long term success when I focus all of my energy on improving negative symptoms like weight, pain and mobility. The longer term approach is to focus on building the foundation of a healthy life style; to make it a part of who I really am at the core of my person.

I make my living in the automotive manufacturing sector. In manufacturing you don’t focus valuable resources to create a high quality product on the final product after the value is already built into it; rather you focus on controlling all of the key factors that could potentially result in defects. In other words, you focus on controlling the process and when you do this well the result is a quality product. In the same way, I am learning that eating right, being active, getting the right amount of sleep and, last but not least, keeping my eyes on Jesus are some of the more critical factors that I need to keep my focus on in order to produce a healthy life style and oh yeah, by the way, to lose weight!