Tamaz Mchedlidze is 51 years old, seven years ago he decided to put his weight and lifestyle in order. Without diets and operations, he lost weight from 160 to 94 kg for a year and wrote a book about it, Return to Yourself*. He still retains his beliefs and form to this day.
“Today, many people ask me how I managed to lose weight so much. And only one person asked: “How did you finish yourself – how did you gain such weight?” And this is the right question. Weight is the result of our habits: I seized all my troubles. Many do this. I have such a character, I want to do everything better than anyone. But something did not work out, someone was unhappy, and the food became the positive experience that I needed. From time to time I thought to myself: I should lose weight. I love to experiment, including on myself. So I have tried many diets. Didn’t help. And then – as the fruit ripens and finally falls, so I ripened for this thought: I could no longer afford to be the same as before. It no longer corresponded to my idea of myself and, most importantly, of the business I was doing. Because just then, together with my colleagues, I began to think about health medicine.
By education, I am a dentist. When people smile, it’s beautiful. But here the teeth were cured, and now the wrinkles interfere. So we’ll clean up. This is how I got interested in aesthetic medicine. Further – more: they put things in order on the outside, but diseases come out from the inside … Now, if not only to correct what is spoiled, but also to tune the body, like a musical instrument: to make healthy ideally healthy.
What an amazing feeling it is to feel your health and look your best! .. And then I looked back at myself. I looked and thought: “How am I going to convince people when I myself look like the personification of the whole society that I want to help: unhealthy, not thinking, violating all the rules of common sense …” The only thing I did not do bad was not smoke . And everything else is to work until you drop, then eat until you drop, expose yourself to stress – after all, I did it all myself! If I was fond of something else, not medicine, I don’t know what would have happened. I am a workaholic by nature: when I think about business, I forget about myself. And if I had thought about something else, I would probably have died a hostage of my habits. Realizing that I myself (in the form in which I was) am a complete contradiction of my ideology, I found support in myself. This became the basis of my motivation: by all means, you need to put yourself in order. It is said: “Doctor, heal yourself!” After that, I could no longer remain the same, because this would be the defeat of my entire system of values.
But it was important for me not just to lose weight, but to make sure that in a year I would not return to the previous one. Like many others, I easily fooled myself with self-justifications: “I’m a little chubby, but I’m so comfortable.” Then I thought – what is this “convenient”, why do we cling to it so much? It is determined by our habits, and among them there are both useful and harmful. But our habits are not how we are naturally conceived. We gradually acquire them, and then we begin to depend on them and justify them. I asked myself: where do they come from? After all, we often cannot even remember how it happened that we love one thing and not the other. Let’s imagine the following picture: the baby is at the mother’s breast, he is well, calmly, he opens his eyes: the mother has a blue dress. Therefore, he begins to like the color blue. Then, for example, he sees two vases: one blue round and the other square green. Of course, he will like the first one better. He already likes blue, now he likes round shapes. One accident stuck to another, and the result was a preference. Will it be useful? Maybe yes, maybe not. Relatively speaking, “blue and round” may at some point be poisonous. Although what it all started with – feeding, satiety, mother – it was all very useful and pleasant. But over time, “useful” and “pleasant” begin to diverge. Sometimes they diverge very far. Here smoking, there is no physiological justification for it, it is absolutely harmful, but many people like it. Our behavior depends on habits, which are largely formed by accident. When you understand this, you begin to treat yourself differently: after all, the doctor does not take offense at the patient for coughing. We behave this way because we cannot do otherwise. It seems to us that it is “convenient” when our desires are satisfied. But these are often not the desires of our nature, nothing of the sort; and convenient for our habits, and not for ourselves, our essence, our destiny.
And how to distinguish one from the other? The criterion is very simple: physical health. After all, a XNUMX% me is such a me, for whom everything works, who lives XNUMX%. You can fool your mind, convincing yourself that everything is in order, but you can’t fool your joints: they start to hurt. If my physical health deteriorates due to habits, then these are bad habits. But my habits are still not me. Realizing this, I understood how to rebuild myself. How to replace, already consciously, some habits with others.
“When I started to change, some people thought that I was suffering. And they tried to help me, feed me – do for me what they considered good … ”
To live in a new way, you need to think in a new way. I changed my lifestyle, began to choose food differently for myself, created my own style of eating – one that is right for me, for my image of myself. Seven years have passed since then. I remain in my weight, and this is not surprising: this weight is mine. Although not all habits I managed to change. For example, I trained to eat with chopsticks – not Japanese, but canapé chopsticks, so that I could eat more slowly and less. And so I never learned it. Although I think it’s important. But before, I could dip khachapuri in the fat left over from roast lamb. Now I never do that. I choose other products for myself. Of course, I can eat a piece of cake. But I don’t want that.
Achieving what you set out to do is the foundation of success. But at the same time, I understand that I am not a robot, but a person with my own weaknesses. In addition, we live in a society, and I reckon with it. I’m not going to become a hermit – I want to be part of society and help it, I want to meet friends, sit down at the table with them … When I began to change, some thought that I was suffering, and so they treated it. This is understandable: comfort is considered by many to be the main value. When my friends and relatives saw that I was limiting myself in some way, it seemed to them that I was torturing myself. And they tried to help, to do what they thought was good for me. They gave me some tasty pieces: try it. And it’s not out of malice, on the contrary! They took care of me, wanted me to be pleased. And that’s how I understood it. Therefore, when I was persistently persuaded to eat something, I did not refuse, but said: “No, I don’t want this, but if it’s so important for you for some reason, I can do it. You see, I eat it, but I don’t like it, it’s unpleasant for me, I feel sick afterwards. ” And when my friends were convinced that this was true and I was honest about it, they agreed with me.
My experience led me to philosophical thoughts. We all have our own life, our own purpose. Therefore, there is no universal way here – not everyone needs to lose weight. If someone wants to become a sumo wrestler, maybe, on the contrary, he needs to get fat. To understand how to act, it is important to realize: what do we want from our lives? For example, for this I imagine myself in extreme old age and look at my life from there. So everything is clear, and you can put marks in order to go through life … “
* T. Mchedlidze “Return to yourself” (MEDI Publishing House, 2006).