For the longest time I felt dull and listless. I imagined that this was the way that life worked. You grew older and you ran down on energy. The thing is that I so readily accepted this because it was so easy to slip into that mindset. The vicious circle was that I would eat junk food which sapped my energy, which made me want to do nothing, which made me somewhat depressed which made me want to eat.
Took a lot to break that cycle. Took even more to keep it broken. Those first few weeks… Coming home after just half an hour of walking at night, bathed in sweat, achy, tired. But you have to commit and you can’t expect instant or even near instant results.
For weeks I kept going out, I researched and researched health and fitness and my eating habits on the net. I learned that a healthy person takes about 10000 steps a day and a fit person about 12500. I bought a cheap little pedometer and found that I took about 2500 steps a day. Some figuring and measuring and I determined I had to do at least 5 miles a day to be healthy or 6 and a half miles a day to be fit, so those became my initial targets. Walk in the morning, in the afternoon, and night. Add it all up and come up with my targets. Later I would do that in one go but that took a long time.
Eating came next and in many ways it was tougher. I read up on what minimum amount of calories I needed a day and came out with 1800 to 2000 per day. I was around 3500 to 4000 a day. An immediate cut in my calories. I tried to negotiate with myself as to junk food. I got the health guides from the restaurants and tried to come up with 1800 calorie menus but the thing is that those health guides may be right about the calories but it’s calories with a lot of starch, a lot of sugars, a lot of fats. Three of the toughest things to burn off. I had to get myself away from these things and that was a long, long battle. In some ways it continues to this day.
The thing is that you don’t really see a result. You can try to go the weight scale route and get super happy when you lose five pounds and depressed again when you gain back three but I put a stop to that early on. No need to stress my emotions on top of everything.
My scale of success was how I was able to increase my daily mileage over time. How I one day just broke out and began running, how I stopped coming home out of breath and feeling half dead and started coming home more relaxed and energetic.
I never got that magic moment when I could proclaim “you’re healthy!” I have started getting those looser clothing moments, I have begun to see some definition in the bulges, and a lift in my mood, but I doubt that I will ever be able to say that “I’ve made it”
Recent Comments