The Two Phases Of Renovation

Have you ever renovated a house?  There are really two main phases: destruction and construction (and no, I don’t have a new show on HGTV; when we lived in Massachusetts we lived in a 2 unit house, and we helped our condo-neighbors with destruction and renovation of their place.  This was of course before we realized that they were psychotic, anti-Semitic bullies who we eventually spoke to only through lawyers.  Good times). 

The deconstruction phase is actually kind of fun.  You get to swing sledge hammers, kick walls in, and take your aggressions out by destroying your own home (that aggression part was the neighbors.  In hindsight we should have known what we were going to be in for just by watching them demolish their own property with such gusto).

Once everything is torn down and swept up, you start with the reconstruction.  Reconstructing involves more work in that it needs to be pretty precise or you have to live with shoddy results.  But if you put the work in, satisfaction in a job well done is a fantastic reward.

So, was I tearing my house down last week?  Nope.  So what’s with the deconstruction/reconstruction analogy?  Well, two weeks ago I went to Memphis for 4 days’ worth of work meetings.  Going on any business trip is tough.  You have hours of long meetings where you barely get to walk around, the days are very long and you’re sleeping in a hotel bed that you’re not used to.  And then there’s food.  At most conferences, there's tons of food, usually buffet style.  This meeting was no exception.  The food was abundant and was ever present.  Besides meals, there were snacks, sodas, and sweet tea (and by the way, in Memphis sweet tea is served with your meal instead of water unless you request it.  That was new for me).  Oh, and did I mention the desserts?  Key Lime pie (in my opinion, the only non-chocolate dessert worth eating), pecan pie (a very close second non-chocolate dessert worth eating), peach cobbler, ice cream.  And those are only the desserts I can remember.

Needless to say, my week in Memphis was deconstructive in terms of my own weight and fitness goals.  I ran a little, but, umm, have you ever tried to run outside in Memphis in August?  Talk about hot!  Regarding food, I tried the Weight Watchers trick where if you can’t pick your own food, make the best choice you can given what’s available.  But when the best choice available is fried chicken, you know it’s going to be a tough meal. By night 3 I was enjoying an extremely large margarita/strawberry daiquiri combo from Wet Willie’s on Beale Street (hey, by then I figured that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  And if I was going down, it might as well be in a giant frozen margarita/daiquiri).

When I got home I weighed myself.  I was up two pounds, and that was with bypassing the cookies, deep fried okra, sweet tea, and even the Key Lime pie (sigh).  But here’s the important part.  I remembered the construction part of remodeling.  I knew where I wanted to be in terms of weight and fitness, so I just worked towards that.  All last week I ate like the Weight Watchers poster child.  I counted my points, tracked everything. I ran, biked, even got through two boot camp classes without swearing (out loud).  And when I stepped on the scale this past Friday, I had lost 1.8 of that 2 pounds of Memphis that I brought home with me.

There are always destructive times in our lives.  Things happen that we can’t control, or that we’re just not strong enough to deal with.  Everything falls apart, and when the dust settles we see that there’s a lot that needs to be fixed.   But there are two ways to look at the end of a destruction phase.  You can be so overwhelmed by all the work that you do that you leave everything in shambles and let it all continue to fall apart, or you look at all the empty canvas you have to build yourself up any way that you want.

70 pounds ago, 2008

When I lived as Fat Girl, I’d try to lose weight or be active.  I would do OK until some random thing got in my way (family illnesses, car accidents, a McDonald’s drive thru), and the deconstruction would start.  And once I was able to look up again all I saw were all the walls I had just knocked down (or kicked in if, you’re my old anti-Semitic, psychotic neighbor), and then I would decide to just stay on that course.  Rebuilding was too difficult. 

But the truth is that it doesn’t have to be.  Remember what it is that you want to build and what you want to get to.  Just that thought can get you back on track and help you to rebuild.  It may take a while, but isn’t the finished product of a remodeling job always so much better than what you started with?

Renovation complete, :-)