Much is possible if we don't give up

At my weigh-in two weeks ago, I weighed 231 for the second week in a row.

Last week, I did Zumba on Saturday, hiked five miles on Sunday, and did Zumba again on Monday and then on Tuesday.

On top of that, I walked a mile on two separate mornings before getting ready for work.

I was liberal with my diet, but not so bad that I thought it would counteract all the aerobic exercise I had been doing.

When I weighed in last week, there it was again: 231. I thought my scale must be broken.

So this week, I really didn't do that much, but I did do Zumba once. I was expecting to gain some weight, but in a miracle of nature, I lost two pounds since last week and have now officially cracked below 230, at 229.

I have lost 16 pounds since I started this column two months ago, for an average of two pounds per week. If I stick with it and continue to lose weight at the same slow pace (which is highly unlikely but not impossible), in six months I will weigh a little more than 180 pounds. If I cut my results in half from this point onward, I will lose 24 more pounds in the next six months, and will weigh slightly more than 200 pounds.

Now, that is possible, as long as I stick with it.

As I have written before, I am a sucker for instant gratification, but most things in life worth having are worth waiting and working for.

One of my proudest achievements was graduating from the University of Tennessee. Not because it makes me seem smart; I know a lot of people smarter than me who never attended college.

I am proud of my degree because it was one thing I've done in life that required me to stick with it. I went to class day in and day out, studied, passed up on some good times, studied some more, took internships and plenty of exams, and through it all I never gave up.

That all happened, however, after a long period of mistrial and error.

I was never a great student. In elementary school, I liked to daydream, and recess was my favorite subject. In junior high, lunch took over as my top elective. By high school, I preferred skipping class altogether.

I don't blame anybody but myself. I just wasn't very ambitious. If I had a dollar for every teacher who said, "You have so much potential; if only you would apply yourself," I could buy us all a bunch of ice cream and pizza right now.

I'm the baby of the family, and my parents loved me and did the best they could with what they had in order to raise me. So did my older siblings.

But I never could understand why my mother kept pushing me to go to college. Neither of my parents had graduated from college, and neither had any of my brothers and sisters. College was a foreign idea to me. I saw my vocational options as working in restaurants or in construction, because that's what all my siblings did.

There's nothing wrong with those professions, and I've worked in both, but I was never able to achieve the level of success in those fields that others have.

So at my mother's behest, I went to college straight out of high school and failed out within a year. I worked in restaurants and partied away my tips for the next several years, and then something happened: My sister Mary got a bachelor's degree from UT, becoming the first of our family to do so.

She was the catalyst for an amazing transformation within our family. Almost en masse, we hung up our dish towels and boxed our hammers, and we all went back to school.

Within a few years, my brother Bob got a bachelor's in accounting, Laura got a bachelor's in marketing, and Mike and I each got bachelor's in communications. Laura went on to get her MBA, and many of my nieces and nephews now hold degrees. My eldest nephew, Rob Pack, has a doctorate and is now an associate dean at East Tennessee State University.

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Mary. She didn't simply encourage me to pursue my education; she got out there, stuck with it, and showed me it could be done.

Thanks, sis, for teaching me that some things don't happen overnight, and that with persistent effort, even the seemingly impossible is possible.

As long as we don't give up.

-- John Philleo is editor of the Times-Gazette. He can be reached at (931) 684-1200, ext. 218, or by e-mail at editor@t-g.com. This column is scheduled to print every Friday.