Instant gratification

In our world of instant gratification we’re not very good at waiting for things.

You can go online and select a book, a film, or some music and be consuming it within a few seconds. We can go to the shops and select from an array of goods from all over the world. And because we’re so used to being able to get things straight away, even the 48-hour shipping of online orders can seem like an eternity.

Let me be honest. I’m not very good at waiting for things. When it comes to my Slimming World journey, I’m very impatient to see my progress. I know that losing weight takes time, but I still can’t resist feeling eager for the weeks to fly by, so that I can go along to the next weigh-in and hopefully see some more progress.

I’m a bit of statistics nerd. I love numbers and charts and graphs, and so it might not come of much surprise that I’ve got a spreadsheet to track my progress. I input my weekly weigh-in, and it tells me my progress to date. And because of my impatience to see my progress I end up filling in ‘projected’ weigh-ins for dates in the future, to see where I might be in 1 month, 2 months, 6 months time.

It’s like I want to hit fast-forward on the next 12 months of my life, and come out the other end a more healthy and slimmer version of myself. I don’t mind the healthy eating and exercise in the middle. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid the hard work. I just want time to pass more quickly, so that I can achieve my goals more quickly.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I’ve been all over Instagram over the last few weeks, and the app is full of people who are towards the end of their journey. There’s people who have lost 5 or even 10 stones, and their transformation has been amazing. They post comparison photos of their before and after selves, and the difference is often stunning.

What you don’t see in Instagram, however, is the 2-3 years of slog it took them to lose all their weight. I’m looking at people who are towards the end of their journey, whereas I’m very much at the start of mine, and that just fuels my impatience!

At the moment if I posted any comparison photos you’d struggle to see any difference in me from my 1½ stone loss over the last six week. I can feel the difference, but I can’t see it yet.

Hopefully, one day I’ll get to the point where I have some dramatic transformation photos to share, but for now that day can’t come fast enough!