Never Goin' Back: Winning the Weight Loss Battle For Good - Softcover

Roker, Al

 
9780451414946: Never Goin' Back: Winning the Weight Loss Battle For Good
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0451414942 ISBN 13: 9780451414946
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

What’s holding you back? What excuses are you making up that are stopping you from living your best life? I used them all, and look where that got me! Are you ready to stop living insane and get real with yourself?

Al Roker’s aha! moment came a decade ago. Closing in on 350 pounds, he promised his dying father that he wasn’t going to keep living as he was. That led to his decision for a stomach bypass—and his life-changing drop to 190. But fifty of those pounds crept back until he finally devised a plan and stuck to it.

Never Goin’ Back is Roker’s inspiring, candid, and often hilarious story of self-discovery, revealing a (slimmer) side of his life that no one knows. With illuminating and sometimes painfully honest stories about his childhood, his struggle against the odds to make something of himself, and his family life today, Roker reveals the effects that a lifelong battle with weight issues can have on a person—and how, regardless of the frustration and setbacks, you must never lose faith in yourself (just inches).

Most important, he knows that losing weight is as much—if not more—a state of mind as of body. That’s why he’s here: to recharge your willpower and see you through it like a friend—with warmth, humor, and a healthy new outlook on life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Al Roker is known to over thirty million viewers for his work on NBC's Today show, a role that has earned him ten Emmy awards. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Don't Make Me Stop This Car!: Adventures in Fatherhood. An accomplished cook, Roker also has two bestselling cookbooks to his credit. Al Roker lives in Manhattan with his wife, ABC News and 20/20 correspondent Deborah Roberts, and has two daughters and a son.

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July 2001


My father had been at Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York City for about a
week, battling his final stages of lung cancer. Although he had been a smoker early in his
life, he had given up cigarettes cold turkey some thirty-five years prior to his cancer
diagnosis. So when he was told that he had stage four lung cancer, I wasn’t emotionally
prepared. Our entire family was shaken up and took his diagnosis very hard.


Al Roker Sr. was the rock of our family. Even though he was a talented artist, in the
mid-1950s, it was difficult for a young African-American male to get a job in the
commercial art industry. After a short stint at a low-paying apprentice job with no chance
for advancement, with a young wife and a new baby to feed, Dad got a job driving a New
York city bus.


He would do that for almost twenty years, always looking for the next step up.
Eventually he made dispatcher, then chief dispatcher, and then he was promoted up and into
management with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, reaching the rank of Inspector.


We were all so proud of him. His drive and determination rubbed off on his children. We
would strive to make him and our mother as proud of us as we were of them.


When he retired, he was excited and determined to enjoy life. My dad found pleasure in
being with his wife and his grandchildren, and in his lifelong hobby of deep-sea fishing.
He cultivated a newfound love of jazz, started a mentoring program for middle schoolers at
a local public school and walked with a group of fellow retirees at the local mall.


But all of that was now behind him. His entire future had now collapsed into being
measured by weeks, if not days.


Every day I made it a point to stop in, first thing in the morning, before heading to
the studio to do the Today show. We’d visit, and then about six twenty a.m., I’d
head on to Studio 1-A in Rockefeller Plaza, where the show goes live at seven a.m. On my
way home in the afternoon, I’d head straight back to the hospital to spend more time with
him—time, something I had all but taken for granted until my father got sick.


Time.


Why hadn’t I gone fishing with him more than a handful of times, and why didn’t I come
by the house more often? I always thought I would have plenty of time.


My father was always healthy as a horse. Mom was the one who had beaten lung cancer and
breast cancer and survived two heart valve replacements! Dad almost never got sick. Now he
was dying and I had just about run out of time with the man I cherished most in life.


There was nowhere near enough time.


“Son,” my dad said one day, “I’d do anything for more time. I wanted to make fifty
years of marriage with your mom so, yeah, I’m pissed about that.”


It was kind of funny, actually. My father always liked things well-ordered and tidy. He
was sixty-nine years old and had been married forty-nine years. To him, seventy and fifty
felt neater—more complete.


I knew my dad was going to die. There was no hope that he could possibly recover. I did
my best to hold myself together until one morning I simply couldn’t hide my grief about
losing him. I started crying, and being the incredible father he was, he comforted me.


He said he was proud of the life he had lived—that he’d had a good run. He told me he
was proud of his children and he loved his grandchildren more than life itself. Hearing my
father speak that way was simply more than I could bear; it was all so final. My tears
kept coming. I could tell that my father had something important he wanted to say.


“Look, we both know that I’m not going to be here to help you raise my grandkids, so
that means it is up to you to make sure you will be there for your kids.”


I could feel my heart begin beating faster with every word he uttered because I knew
what he was driving at. My father and I had been around the horn too many times to count
on the subject of my weight and overall health. For whatever reason, no matter how many
times I said I’d lose the weight, I couldn’t—or wouldn’t, or did only to gain it back
again.


“Promise me that you are going to lose the weight.”


I tried to play it off like it was no big deal. “Who, me? I’m fine! Don’t worry about
me, Dad.”


I could tell he was really struggling to get the words out now. “No, not good enough. I
want you to swear to God that you’re going to lose the weight.”


I realized there was really only one respectable thing to do—promise him I would lose
the weight.


Ugh.


Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to make a deathbed promise to someone you love,
but if you have, you know the kind of guilt and massive responsibility I felt in that
moment. And if you haven’t, let me assure you, it was heavy—heavier than me, and I was
damn big. I couldn’t say a word. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, because I did, but I was
hesitant. Nothing I could say would mean all that; I had said it all before, without ever
doing the work to permanently change my mind-set and lose the weight for good.


So, I promised him I would lose the weight. Still, that wasn’t good enough for him. He
wanted me to swear to God that I was going to lose the weight—and so I did.


“Dad, I swear to God I am going to lose this weight.”


“I am going to hold you to that son. You don’t want to make me angry.”


Trust me, I didn’t want to get him angry.


I remember when I was twelve years old and my folks had gotten me a brand-new Sting-Ray
bicycle for my birthday. It had a banana seat and a metallic blue paint job. I loved that
bike!


Well, one Saturday afternoon, some young thugs from outside our neighborhood came
cruising through. They surrounded me, punched me a few times, knocked me off the bike and
took it. My pride was hurt more than anything else, but when I got home and told my dad
what happened, I saw a look come over him that I had never seen. “Get in the car. Let’s go
look for your bike,” he said through clenched teeth. He got behind the wheel and I got in
on the passenger’s side and we went looking for these guys and my bike.


After around fifteen minutes of driving around, I noticed a dishtowel wrapped around
something sitting on the seat between the two of us. I unwrapped an edge of the towel and
saw a steak knife! Dad was going to find that bike and was prepared to fight anyone
who got in his way. That’s who my dad was. We never actually found the bike but I
discovered I loved my father that day even more than I knew because of his willingness to
protect who and what he loved.


He was also the same man who cried when he deposited his firstborn son at the dorm on
my first day of college. Everything he was made me who I am.


And now that was all about to go away.


So on the morning I made that promise to my dad, I left the hospital thinking about
what he had said—a lot. I don’t usually get distracted when I am on the air, but his words
echoed in my mind the entire show. I was so upset about my promise to lose weight, in
fact, that I had two grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches for lunch. My mantra at the time
was “When in doubt, eat.”


When I returned to the...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451414942
ISBN 13 
9780451414946
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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