Giving Yourself Credit

I like credit.  Not the kind that involves money but the kind you get when you do something good.  That could explain why I am addicted to my fitbit.  I like getting credit for every step I walk.  I wear the thing to bed not so it can track how well I’m sleeping, but so it can count the 32 steps I take when I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.

I hate when I get an e-mail from my fitbit that tells me the battery is low in the middle of the day because it worries me to death that it is going to stop working before I have a chance to recharge and I will take a bunch of steps and get no credit for them.  I don’t know why it matters.  Only a couple of friends are part of my fitbit community and they don’t give two shakes if I get 140,000 steps in a week or 40,000.  Whatever this addiction is it is working for me.  Counting, credit, accountability I’m addicted to them all as long as they are created, and counted by me!

I was talking to a friend today who told me about someone who married a much older and much richer man who put a clause in her pre-nup agreement that said if she gained ten pounds he was allowed to divorce her.  Now that kind of accountability would work the total opposite on me.  I don’t like when someone else tells me what to do or sets the parameters for how I am supposed to live.  If I were married to that man I probably would gain the weight on purpose just to see what he would do.  I can’t imagine living under that kind of dictatorship.

I am sure that wife did not get credit for keeping to her weight range.  It was demanded so then it’s like a punishment and not a reward.  I wonder what other stipulations were in that pre-nup?  I’m sure that husband demanded his own kind of regular rewards.  That’s not a marriage; I think it’s called something else you pay for.

So many times people ask me how I’ve lost weight and then ask me if I could talk to one of their loved ones they wish would lose weight.  That is where I stop them.  No one can talk someone into wanting to lose weight.  Each person has to come to that decision on their own and only then will it be possible to happen.  It can’t be a clause in their life.

I take credit for what I have done, but I am thankful for the help my loved ones have given me.  I am mostly thankful that I have been loved at every weight up and down the scale.  I give my loved ones credit for their support.