Having once discovered that the best place, indeed the only place to start from was here, right where I was, 100+ pounds overweight, cholesterol count just beginning to outnumber red blood cells and blood sugar surging and pulsing like a swimming pool full of frisky sperm whales, I had to begin the most difficult step of all: the Things I would do to lose weight. Whenever I say overweight people know more about weight loss than most medical specialists, people nod their heads. At least the overweight ones do. Everyone else crosses their arms and raises their brow as if to wonder why, if they Know so much, wouldn't they do it?
But what you know isn't always what you DO. You know that you should never drive while holding the cell phone in your hand, and yet invariably the stupid blue tooth gives out or the headphones echo or you have the top down and the speaker phone is just picking up a sound like in a hurricane, and bingo, you're driving with your elbow holding the phone and talking with one hand and trying to reprogram the GPS with the other.
And that is how, knowing all they (we) know, we nonetheless remain overweight.
We know we are supposed to do as the TV doctors instruct and get at least a half hour's dull, unchallening exercise a day. We know we are supposed to eat what seem to us to be tree frog sized portions of things with more green than white and brown combined. We are supposed to starve and torture ourselves and otherwise suffer for our sins. We've earned it, we tell ourselves, that's what we get for all that indulgence. All that lack of self control. That's our comeuppance.
And so that is what I did. Every night in the dark after work, middle of January, rain or shine, I would saddle up the dogs and traipse through our unadorned, hilly, suburban neighborhood, up something I called "Heartbreak hill," (because it was so steep I had to have my cigarette After climbing it to avoid giving myself a heart attack).
Then I would come home and do crunches and leg lifts all through the final round of Jeopardy. The first leg of the fitness venture was dull enough to put me to sleep if it hadn't been sub arctic autumn out. The second leg would have put me to sleep but I can always survive Final Jeopardy, even if those obnoxious chopper, hacker, slicer, dicer commercials come on.
Then one day, half way through leg lift 317, I spotted it. It was dusty. It was dismantled and stuffed behind an unfashionable, puffy, down coat (the one that made me look like the Michelin Man ate the the Pilsbury Dough Boy for lunch). But there it was. And now that I was a svelte 260 I just barely exceeded the weight limit.
I dragged the mini trampoline out from behind the stay-puffed-marshmallow coat and screwed the legs into the body.
It was pretty sturdy. I stepped on and nothing went sproing. I did a few lunges and nothing went ping or ricocheted off the converted park bench I used for a couch.
I turned off Jeopardy and turned on "Take It" by Janis Joplin. Pretty soon I was Dancin' With Myself and Shaking' My Booty and actually collecting songs from iTunes into a play list I called "Trampoline Non-Torture music."
And that was when I took the first giant leap from punishment to reward. I don't know if, having lost a few pounds I now felt that I had human dignity again (a thing I clearly did not believe I possessed in the old Heart Break Hill days) and had earned the right to not spend half an hour to an hour a night paying my penance, or whether I was just sick and tired of huffing my way around a neighborhood full of Mount Everests at sub-human temperatures I'll never know. Whatever the case, that night I pulled out the trampoline from behind the Incredible Bulk's coat I committed an act of such pure, if unintended self love it would change a whole, ingrained, lifelong, deeply held and very nearly worshiped view: that exercise was a means of paying the piper, a release for all the shame I felt at having indulged, let go, lost myself.
I began to believe, as I ducked to avoid hitting the ceiling while belting out "take it! Take another little piece of my heart now darlin' yeah!" that, if exercise had to be torture, moving my body didn't have to be exercise. I could burn calories singing and dancing, and since no one was home at that hour, no one had to know I wasn't doing any drudgery.
I didn't even have to feel guilty; I could still do some crunches later if I felt the need for something more punitive.
It also helped me do something that would start me on the one road I believe everyone must find a way to if they are to ultimately succeed at managing their weight: the abandonment of self loathing, and the first, tiny glimmers of self love.
I had, instead of my usual switching from hurting myself with food to hurting myself with foul tasting fitness food and tortuous exercise routines, stopped hurting myself altogether.
I had begun the process of helping myself, and that out of real, natural, healthy love. The same kind and amount of it I would show toward anybody else.
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