Tag Archives: weight loss

Lessons from a Grand Canyon Helicopter Ride

28 Friday Mar 2014

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Grand Canyon 2I’ve never wanted to get into a helicopter because there’s this thing about the helicopter people needing to know how much I weigh. Something about making sure the weight is distributed evenly in the helicopter. That, or just the plain joy they must get in humiliating people.

Oh, and there’s also that thing about helicopter crashes.

People don’t talk much about the helicopter crashes, but I know about them because on some Saturdays I might get sucked into some cable channel TV show about helicopter crashes in between binging on episodes of “Locked up Abroad,” which, to be honest, freaks me out just a little bit more than hearing about helicopter crashes.

But when husband, Steve, suggested we take a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon during our weekend stay in Las Vegas part of me thought it was cool and the other part of me was frightened to death—mostly about the being weighed thing. You see, I adore my husband and he can suggest pretty much anything and I’ll go for it. After nearly six years of marriage I’m still like the smitten gal he first met who wanted to impress the socks off of him.

Yet, there was no way I was going to discuss my weight with him or anyone else. I don’t care how official they were and how it impacted a helicopter ride.

Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.

All the way to the little helicopter airport, I went over in my head how I was going to address the weight issue. It’s not like my driver license where the weight listed there is a complete lie. You see, I wrote that down years ago and never really corrected it. But to tell someone at the little helicopter airport? Out loud? If I lied about my weight, I’m certain the airport person would survey me up and down with her eyes and I’d get that “oh, you’ve got to be kidding” look. I couldn’t face that.

I was wringing my hands in the airport in Boulder City, Nevada—which was smaller than my local DMV—and I was still trying to plot out this whole thing. If I just said it super speedy, maybe husband and others would never hear how much I weigh. Or I could write it down on a Post-it Note and give it to the gal behind the counter after I folded it up into a tiny piece the size of a dime. Yeah, that’s what I would do.

Astonishingly, I didn’t have to do any of that. I didn’t have to lean over the check-in counter at the little airport and whisper my weight into the ear of the lady. No, I just had to stand on the magic tile on the floor in front of the counter—a tile that looked like all the other tiles on the floor—and it weighed me and secretly put my weight number into her computer. Not on a big, flashing display for all to see, or shouted out to the whole airport, like I feared. My weight number just magically slipped through some tiny wire or cable into the lady’s computer. It’s like I didn’t weigh anything AT ALL. The number was imaginary. I could pretend I was 30 pounds lighter if I wished. And the lady didn’t look at me in a judgy way either.

It was our secret.

It’s actually possible to feel lighter than air

Riding in a helicopter

When it was our time to go, we loaded into the helicopter by assigned seats, which I’m told had something to do with our weight. I couldn’t figure out the rhyme or reason as to who sat where and the math of it. I was just happy they didn’t make me wear my weight number around my neck or on a shirt. After a brief instruction and snapping into the seat belts, the helicopter lifted straight up as if we were pulled by a string. No barreling forward at high speeds like a jet to race up to the sky. Some skilled (and giant) puppeteer had us by a string and was taking us for a ride on a beautiful day with cyan skies above the reddish-brown landscape. I felt light! I was up in the sky and apparently wasn’t so heavy that I kept the helicopter from rising.

I followed our helicopter’s shadow over the dusty desert of Nevada as we headed toward Arizona. This desolate area was free from the shiny, glittery loud Las Vegas we just left. In the headphones our pilot narrated where we were, but mostly I heard the whirring engine of the helicopter and felt like a baby who was comforted by the vibrations of a car. The only reason I wasn’t lulled to sleep was I couldn’t keep from looking out the window at the tiny rocks, mountains that looked more like hills, and itty bitty cars on what few roads there were.

Of course, I’d been in a gazaillion airplanes and have looked out the window at tiny Monopoly-sized homes and streets and baseball diamonds, but being in a helicopter provides a certain intimacy with the ground. Airplanes are so high maintenance and complicated to get up off the ground and back onto it. Helicopters, on the other hand could take off and land in a jiffy. No matter how much I weigh. (Actually, that’s not true. I’m sure there are limits.)

We hovered over the Hoover Dam and took a peak at the wall of concrete with its arms wrapped around it’s little section of the great Lake Mead reservoir. Having just stumbled upon birding over the last seven years, I wondered if this was what it was like to be a bird, soaring over the earth. I know being in a helicopter is not exactly soaring, but it’s not a jetliner either. To be above the earth and feeling weightless was startling to me. Startling that I ever cared about the weight thing.

The 30-minute highlight

picnic at Grand Canyon

After a 40-minute flight, we landed at a part of the Grand Canyon, not in the National Park area, but at an Indian Reservation. This was supposed to be the highlight of the trip, according the tour’s brochure. We had 30 minutes on the ground at the bottom of the canyon, so we snapped a few photos, had a picnic lunch of a sandwich, Lays potato chips and a little brownie bite in a plastic cup. Not the meal of a dieter and certainly no one was weighing us to get back on the helicopter, so I didn’t care.

Our time at the bottom of the canyon felt cut short. We couldn’t hike and explore. Being in the air was what took my breath away. Peering into the canyon from the South Rim a few years earlier was heart stopping. However, being on the floor of the Grand Canyon was more about looking up and around. There just wasn’t enough time to absorb it. No time to stoop on a rock and rest my chin on my fist and do some contemplating. None of that. Just time to gobble down the cute little picnic and look quickly at my surroundings.

Grand Canyon 1

 

Grand Canyon 4

Lessons learned from helicopters.

Our pilot called for us to get back to the helicopter and the propellers began to spin and we were lifted up in the air again. We didn’t take the same route back over the Hoover Dam, but headed straight toward Boulder City. I peered down at the ground, looking for Mule Deer or Mountain Sheep, but they were out of site. Unlike dramatic Saturday television shows, we didn’t crash our helicopter and, really, no one cares how much I weigh except for me. It made me think of how many other things I’ve avoided because of what I feared and that maybe I cared too much about what people might think of me or how I look or how much I might weigh. I mean, really—no one cares.

None of that matters, of course. None of it, except this:

Grand Canyon 3

 

How to set New Year’s resolutions that stick. (Or how I finally found my husband.)

04 Wednesday Jan 2012

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It was the holiday season six years ago and I found myself 39 and single. I actually didn’t find it a problem being single, but for the first time I felt an acute sense of loneliness. I had spent that Christmas alone and it was as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over my head to wake me up. And just like that I suddenly had the immense desire to be married.

Yes, me. The same person who had a great network of single girlfriends, who had been successful in her career, who traveled a great deal, and to be quite honest, liked having yellow walls in her home and a tiffany-blue colored guest room–all without having to manage complaints from a man who might find the walls a little too girlie for his tastes.

So essentially, that year I embarked on a very strange New Year’s resolution: To get married. Coincidentally at the same time I had the opportunity to hear a lecture by Bob Greene–Oprah’s trainer. My own trainer gave me a free ticket to the lecture and I was looking forward to hearing from Greene all about how I could lose weight, be healthier and make my workouts better.

When I arrived at the lecture I, along with all the other attendees, was handed a pad of paper and a little golf pencil. Greene came out to lots of cheers from the mostly-women audience (I’m not going to lie–he’s quite handsome) and he explained that his lecture was going to be a little different than what we probably expected.

Fearing that he was going to make a pitch for some health supplement I was surprised when he asked us to draw a circle on the piece of paper and make it into a pie with eight sections like this :

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Next, he asked us to write into each section things that are important to us:

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For each of the areas he then asked us to reflect on them and rate them a plus (+) or a minus (-). For instance, if you wanted to lose weight or get into better shape, your health category would probably get a minus. If you are comfortable with your financial situation perhaps it would get a plus. This is what mine looked like:

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Then he asked us to circle the one or even two with a minus that we wanted to work on. Again, this is what mine looked like:

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Greene went on to explain that he does this exercise with all his clients before training with them. Of course, he would get puzzled looks (as he likely did from many in the audience that evening), but he said that this process was always life changing for his clients. The way this works is, once you’ve picked the area you want to focus on and have your goal identified, every day you must do something to help reach that goal. So let’s say it’s weight loss. Maybe tomorrow my one thing that I do is read an article on weight loss. And the next day maybe it’s deciding not to have dessert with dinner when eating out. He promised us that if we changed one thing in our life everyday to help reach that goal that we would indeed reach it. In fact, he said that he had clients who worked on two sections of the pie and in a year they didn’t even recognize their lives.

I so wanted to not recognize my life.

To say that I left the lecture inspired is an understatement. I had already come to the realization that I didn’t want to be alone any more and I was just handed a gift by Bob Greene—I now had the tools to help me achieve my goal.

I first had to change my attitude. I wasn’t against marriage at all, but I had spent that last 10 years or so being okay without marriage. In fact, I probably spent the previous 10 years just trying to not get hurt or disappointed that it was just easier not to want marriage at all.

Books about marriage—positive books—replaced my copies of The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly on my nightstand. I also started talking to my married friends more about their marriages and what made it work for them. Let’s face it, there’s a lot out there—most of it entertaining—that focus on when things go awry in a marriage. Arguing mates on sitcoms stir up laughter, and we become obsessed with actors’ marriages falling to pieces before our eyes. Like a dieter throwing out sugary foods from my pantry I had to rid my life of destructive narratives on marriage.

I also let everyone know about my change in course regarding marriage. Each of my single girlfriends, ranging from mid-30s to early 50s were always hopeful about marriage and were thrilled that I finally was on board with the idea. I even joined a matchmaking service. It was a bit of a bust, except for the 3-hour interview where I was forced to look at my list of wants and needs in a companion. The company (now defunct) was a bit of a joke—they were never able to really find anyone who was close to being compatible with me, but the lengthy interview process forced me to break away from a lot of my thinking that was holding me back, and enable me to carve down my list to what I needed.

One day, as part of my do-something-different-every-day strategy I finally registered for an online dating service—It was only a month after the Bob Greene lecture and I figured this would be an easy way to keep up the do-something-every-day ritual required on the Bob Greene plan. It’s simple: log on every night and answer emails from guys.

Five days after I registered, Stephen found me online and sent me a message.

Six weeks later I flew over to Scotland to meet him.

For the next two years we were in a long-distance dating relationship and all the preparation I started when I began the pie exercise was paying off.

Then two years from the date we met—two years and four months after I started my resolution—we were married.

A New Year’s Resolution led to this.

There is no doubt in my mind that Bob Greene’s pie exercise changed my life. The whole process changed my thinking so I was actually ready to achieve my goal. Sure, finding the right companion requires some chance, some serendipity, and the free will of the other person, but it’s not so much about controlling the situation to design it how you want it–for me it was preparing myself to allow something to happen, so I could be ready for it.

I’ve used the pie exercise several times in my life and have actually used it with people who have worked for me for career development. It’s an excellent tool for guidance in one’s life. My pie section titles change from time to time and the pluses sometimes turn into minuses and the minuses sometimes become pluses.

So, if you’re really serious about changing your life and working on your New Year’s Resolutions, give the pie method a shot. You just might change your life so much you won’t recognize it in a year.