I think there were three things that I mentioned or implied here that I intended to do yesterday. Two of them I did not do.
First, I said I was going to get at least an hour of walking in. Well, I didn’t do that, but what I did was better. In mid-afternoon there was something I needed at Staples, a little less than a mile away. I ran over there and back. More about that below, but I burned up more calories in 30 minutes yesterday than I’ve been burning in over an hour.
Second, I said I was about to have some fresh strawberries on my cereal, but I had raisin bran instead, without fresh fruit. Today I have already atoned by having some delicious fresh strawberries, the last of them, on my Fiber One morning twigs.
Third, a close textual reading of yesterday’s entry reveals some level of fixation with reaching the milestone of 15 pounds of weight loss. That one I nailed, yesirree Bob, as of today, after 13 days of Big Man Getting Smaller I have officially lost 15 pounds. As the Wizard of Oz would say, give this man a certificate!
Actually I don’t need a certificate, but I am pleased.
Back to the exercise thing.
In an earlier post, I shared the ridiculous but plausible theory that my average monthly weight gain of 3.7 ounces a month over the last 40 years was could be attributed to an extra cheeseburger a month. An interesting factoid, but not something that anyone could really do anything about, because what? You’re going to eat healthy for 29 days and then go all to hell if you slip in an extra cheeseburger once? (Or an extra tofu burger, if you prefer, Donna?) It just doesn’t work.
But it does work to extrapolate that my average 3.7-ounce monthly weight gain can be attributed to a little bit of daily exercise that I did not do. How much? Less than 900 calories a month worth of exercise made the difference. That’s an hour of jogging at my present size, or 90 minutes of jogging if I weighed 170 pounds, like I did at 17.
I remember that 17-year-old kid. He could run a mile in well under 5 minutes, and he ran and ran and ran all day. Between cross-country, basketball, soccer, track and chasing girls he regularly got a couple of hours a day of real exercise and burned up over 1000 calories a day without ever thinking about it. No wonder I started gaining weight, after training my body to exercise that much, when I started spending hours and hours sitting at a desk!
Exercise alone won’t do it. I have to eat right, as well. But what pleases me about my little jog yesterday was that, because of the weight I’ve lost, I felt great doing it. So I can do more, and I will. As I continue to lose weight I will be able to run a little longer each day, and burn off a few more calories through exercise each day fairly effortlessly.
I even went on the website of the gym in my neighborhood yesterday and made plans to join soon, as the weather starts to turn. That way I can mix in a little elliptical, run on the treadmill on the days that aren’t nice enough to run outside, and even enjoy a little steam now and then.
So I am going back to running, creaky ankle and all.
Maybe I will meet that 17-year-old along the trail somewhere. Hope so. He wasn’t a bad dude.
One's body is the way it is at any given moment because of how the owner has treated it. The only way someone is "over weight" is because they are eating too much of fattening food and not exercising.
There are no overweight people in most of Africa or India or Japan... they (sorry) only use animal protein as a condiment and not as the main course.
There is also another way of looking at this which says if you just enjoy animal protein and sweets too much, embrace your belly. I just may get to that point myself!
Donna