 This afternoon I worked out for the fourth time in a seven-day period. That’s a big deal.
For me, I mean. I’m not an “exercise” kind of person. I never have been.
I didn’t really care for softball even as a young girl, and later on when my “Worried-About-My-Weight” dad forced me to start exercising in any and every way possible, I still didn’t care for Organized Activity.
Not running, not walking, not bicycling (though it and swimming were the least of the evils), not aerobics, not yoga even.
The only exception was dancing. I always loved taking tap, ballet and jazz dance classes as a little girl. (They came in handy for the talent competition in beauty pageants.)
Nevertheless, whether by coincidence or as a result, I also have never been a particularly skinny kind of person.
Not even close, in fact.
The “thinnest” I have been as an adult was getting “all the way down” to an occasional size 12 several years ago, and I was extremely unhealthy at the time.
Since then, I have steadily regained the weight I’d lost right after my divorce — a total of approximately 40 pounds.
Now, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if I don’t already have enough things to be discouraged about in my personal life without the added “weight” of knowing that particular number.
I have struggled, as I indicated above, with my weight all my adult life and most of my teen years (though really I was totally normal back then, but I had this crazy idea — one I believed thoroughly and devastatingly — that I was fat). I have only once bordered on what they call dangerously obese, but I have always been about 20 to 30 pounds over what physicians would say is my ideal weight: around 150 (I’m tall).
Yet, every time I go through a dieting phase, the dieting and the motivation wear off — sometimes before any success and sometimes after some (temporary) success.
The same goes for exercising phases. I don’t make it past a few weeks. I get bored, or I don’t see results quickly enough, or I just get tired of it — or just tired in general. Quit going. Slide back into the unhealthy lifestyle: Totally sedate, sit all day at work, sit around a lot on my time off, no regular exercise or activity, eat out (unhealthy foods) at least once a day, usually twice … .
Until a year or so later, I decide to try again. A vicious cycle, and it has lasted my entire life. I got sick of dieting years ago and swore I would never do it again. And I won’t. I’m not going to go through life starving myself or eating stuff I hate just because I’m worried about an extra 10 pounds; however, I’ve come to see there is a balance that can be achieved, and that’s what I aim for, when I am “eating right.”
But I have been resting on my laurels for several years now, and I’ve been thinking that the time has come — has passed, actually — for me to do something.
I was successfully ignoring those thoughts, for the most part, despite my slowly increasing jeans size — until I started reading all these danged stories we’ve been publishing about the “Fitness Challenge” among Courier employees, Fitness Unlimited staff and city employees.
So, more thoughts about the need to Get In Shape, and the warming temperatures, and the preliminary plans to attend the summer music camping festival on the big lake … .
And here you have me, Issues Galore, but ready to give it yet another try.
I’m ready to do that difficult thing we must do in order to embark upon a diet or work-out program: Acknowledge that I do not like myself. I am not OK, apparently, “just the way I am.”
Whew. That’s hard to even type, much less say out loud — or admit.
But it’s the truth.
Why? How do I know I am not OK?
Not because of anything anyone is saying to me.
I just don’t feel right. I don’t feel as attractive as I used to, not so long ago. (Or at least I rarely do.)
I don’t feel healthy. I don’t feel as energetic as I used to. I can’t walk as far or as fast as I used to. I don’t even feel as funny as I used to — and I definitely don’t laugh as much.
And I am beginning to realize I am not as confident as I used to be. Not in the important way, the personal-realization-of-self way. (In other ways I’m probably a bit overconfident at times, and I usually end up paying for it by eating crow at the most inopportune, and humiliating, times.)
Anyway, I’m struggling to remember Who I Really Am, and it’s happening more often than not lately.
And that’s not cool.
So something has to be done.
This a challenge, for me. But mine is not a 14-week Fitness Challenge or whatever you want to call it. Unfortunately — I know from experience — as soon as I stop whatever I start here, the weight and the unhealthy feelings and emotions will come right back.
But as I was walking today, I was thinking, No, this is not a weight loss challenge. This is not about swimsuit weather, or energy level.
This is bigger.
For me, this is a Reclaim Your Life Challenge.
I have completed several of these Reclaim Your Life Challenges of different sorts, in past lives. One, for example, was when I divorced. Another was when I decided to leave the party lifestyle and clean up my life. There have been others, and I have survived them all.
This, too, shall I survive. I just have to do it. I’m taking yet another piece of my life back!
Kristal Kuykendall is a Courier copy editor and paginator. Her column appears periodically.
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