It’s hard to believe that it was 31 years ago when I was 25 years old and even harder to believe that I had allowed my weight to reach 263 pounds. I write this with the perspective of looking back on what has happened since as a young real estate agent I found myself struggling to climb stairs while showing houses and decided that I needed to do something about it.
It took about 11 months on a popular weight loss program and much discipline for me to reach a goal weight of 168 pounds. Although my main strategy was to find foods and meals that I could eat and then stick with them, eating the same thing over and over, I did learn a lot along the way. I learned much about reading food labels and became willing to experiment with foods that I would have never considered eating before. After a couple months at goal weight I was awarded a life time membership. Then the hard part started. Fully participating in life and maintaining a healthy body weight.
Since I had previously had problems climbing stairs I knew I needed to do something to improve my fitness. As a boy, I had jogged with my father along the bank of the river in the town that we lived. I believe that my father had encouraged my participation because he recognized that I was having weight issues. I set about jogging laps at the local high school track. At first, I couldn’t complete a full lap while jogging. I worked up to completing a full lap, then a lap and a half and so on. I saw a 5K running event advertised a few months down the road and thought that I might be able to finish that distance if I worked up to it. I put the check in the mail and can still remember the pride I felt when I crossed the finish line of that 5K. Jogging the entire distance.
This of course kicked off a running period in my life in which I made running friends, ran longer and longer distances, worked on getting faster and maintained a healthy body weight. Inevitably, as happens to so many, I was plagued with knee injuries which forced me to take time off for the knees to heal from time to time.
At some point a few years later when a career change led to extra emphasis on learning new skills and then a cross country move my workouts became more scarce until they just fell to the wayside. It was probably a combination of an injury time off and other life changes that led to a sedentary period where I found my weight climbing again. When I reached a point that I became uncomfortable with my weight I found that I could draw on all the things that I had learned in the past to deal with my increasing weight.
My weight has gone up and down a few times over the course of my life. I have used words like struggle, fight and battle to describe my relationship with food and the scale in my bathroom. Perhaps the word I should use is journey, for each time I have struggled or battled or fought with food choices and maintaining a healthy body weight I have engaged myself in learning how to make healthy choices.
The benefit of these struggles is that now in my mid 50’s I am more knowledgeable regarding nutrition than my average peer and in better physical condition than many. The scale in my bathroom said 172.6 this week. My training journal has running, cycling and weight training listed almost every week. I look for ways to fit these activities into my life because I enjoy them and the health benefits they provide.
The knee pain that plagued me during the 1st running period of my life is no longer a problem. I found that increasing leg strength with weight training and cross training with cycling has pretty much resolved that issue. Sure I have aches and pains from time to time but as a friend recently said “You can exercise and have aches and pains or not exercise and have aches and pains. The choice is yours”
I can now look back and see that struggling to climb stairs one day in 1980 may have been the best thing that ever happened to me.
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