I’m sitting in the Las Vegas airport a proud man.  I was able to find supper that was healthy and within my calorie range!  Sounds like a little thing, but airports have been my place of struggle for many years.  I had a salad from Baja Fresh.  I asked them to hold the fried tortilla strips and cheese and had salsa instead of dressing.  I ate it and am typing this blog completely satisfied.  They didn’t even look at me like I was a creature from another planet when I asked them to make my salad a little different.

Next stop was to get something to drink.  I’m off the pop now and thought maybe a bottle of tea would be good to drink.  Guess what the second ingredient was on the “anti-oxidant rich” green tea was.  High fructose corn syrup.  On the diet it was crystallized fructose and phenylalanine or whatever.  I got my water bottle out and filled it up at the fountain.  I have worked to hard to start taking shortcuts.

Speaking of shortcuts, today I decided that rather than going on a regular hike that I was going to climb the mountain across from the resort.  It really is a mountain.  It was a 1 mile hike straight up the side.  I found the trailhead and took off.  Even though it was steep, the trail was well marked.  For a while.  As I climbed higher and the terrain got tougher I began to question my common sense.

About 3/4 of the way up I saw an opening that looked like a good way to go, a shortcut.  From where I was standing it looked like it would definitely be easier going once I got up a short wall.  I scaled the wall and was in a deep crack in the mountain.  I continued about 20 feet before I came to a dead end.

I was left with two options.  Sit there and wait for someone to get me or turn around and go back the way I came and try and find a different way.  Well I wasn’t about to wait around for someone to figure out that I had been an idiot and come looking for me.  I went back down scaled the face I had climbed up, which was much more intimidating standing on top looking down.  I made it down and continued up the way I should have the first time.

When I got to the top of the mountain I thought about what had happened and how that relates to my own life and quite possibly yours.  When things got a little difficult I started looking for a shortcut.  I knew that if I stayed on the path I was on that I would eventually get to the top.  When the good idea buzzer went off in my brain to look for the easier way, it sounded like a good plan.  It wasn’t.

How many times in life are we on the right path when an easier route seems to appear.  We all want to get where we want to go quickly.  The problem is that often times our “shortcuts” are anything but that.  We start out on the shortcut with best intentions only to find out it was the wrong decision.  It is those moments that we have to get real with ourselves.  We can sit there and cry and wait to be rescued or we can turn around, go back the way we came and get back on the path that we know is going to take us to our ultimate destination.

Often times when I take a shortcut I will stand there and think “Why did I do this again?’  I may stand there paralyzed by the thought of having made a bad call; almost as if doing nothing is somehow better than acknowledging I screwed up and head back to where I went off track.

I couldn’t have asked for a better lesson to learn on my last day at The Biggest Loser Resort.  Today I know where I want to go and that taking shortcuts isn’t going to get me there any quicker.  For me it’s time to stop taking shortcuts and stay on the path that I know is going to take me where I want to go.  How about you?

No More Shortcuts!

In my next blog I will be giving a recap of my entire stay at Fitness Ridge as well as sharing my numbers from my 2 weeks there. (I am not disappointed!)

See you tomorrow!

Biggest Loser, Biggest Loser Fitness Ridge, life lessons, Matt Hoover

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 26th, 2010, 6:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.