A few months after I started my Get Fit Initiative my daughter came home from a visit with her aunt to tell me that Julie was blogging about her weight loss journey, too. I started following Julie's blog that day. You can read it here: www.theweightofmyweight.blogspot.com. We chose different paths. Julie attends Weight Watchers meeting regularly and has lost about 50 pounds over the last couple of years (is that right, Julie?) and has only 23 pounds to go. She wants to weigh 150 pounds because she knows that will be a healthy weight for her and getting to 150 pounds will allow her to be a Weight Watchers leader which is something she really wants to be. Her strategy has been, "slow and steady wins the race," and she never set a timeline for her weight loss. While she has been incredibly successful in losing the first two-thirds of what she was trying to lose, she has been stuck for several months. We ran a 5K together in August. On that day we both weighed right around 175 pounds. (Julie, I checked my chart and I weighed 175.8 on that day) Since then I have reached my goal of 150 pounds and Julie is still in the low 170s. She has gotten frustrated with being stuck. When she read my blog posts last week, particularly the part about helping someone else reach their weight loss goals now that I have reached mine, she reached out and asked me if I would help coach her to her goal. I gladly accepted her offer.
We are very different people and have different strategies for reaching our goals. We have been following each other's blogs for months. We have known each other for decades. Julie knows that I take a kind of hard line attitude towards reaching goals and she is a little afraid of that for fear of not succeeding. In spite of this, or maybe because of this, we are excited to be working together.
I confess, I have become a Get Fit evangelist. As many of you who follow my blog know, I give the book, 'Younger Next Year' a lot of credit for being the game changer in my life. Since reading that book I have no longer been able to consider not exercising every day as an acceptable way to live my life. A year ago I would have told you that I hate to exercise. If you go back and read my early blog posts you will read about how much I hated to exercise. I was doing it because I felt like I had to exercise to achieve my goals, but I was complaining a lot about it along the way. A year later I feel like a million bucks. I feel better than I have in years and years. I don't know what to compare it to. 40? No, I feel better than I did at 40. During my 40th year I started Tae Kwon Do after I topped out at what I am guessing was around 250 pounds. I had an incredibly stressful job and was way overweight. In fact I was so overweight that I would not get on a scale. I did not weigh myself until I had been doing Tae Kwon Do 5 nights a week for about 3 months and on that day I weighed 238 pounds. That is the highest number I have ever seen on a scale (and I will never forget it), but I had already lost some weight, so my best guess is my high weight was about 250 pounds when I was 39 years old. On my 40th birthday I tested for my blue belt. A few months later I got my recommended black belt. I had lost about 50 pounds. I felt pretty good at that point, the Tae Kwon Do had helped a lot. In fact, I think it laid a foundation that I am still building on. But I was still in the 180s and was not yet at the top of my game when I stopped doing Tae Kwon Do, for a couple of reasons. First, I switched jobs and my school was now almost an hour from work. It was no longer convenient. Second, my mom was dying of cancer and I was spending almost a week every month in Sequim, WA. My work was very generous about paying me without taking time off without pay. I reciprocated by working as much as I could the 3.5 weeks a month that I was in town. I no longer had time for Tae Kwon Do. I don't know exactly when I started gaining weight again, but it probably wasn't too long after that.
30? No I pushed over 200 pounds for the first time in my life in my 30th year. I was fat, stressed, depressed, and had no idea where I was going in my life. 20? Yeah, I was feeling pretty good at 20, I weighed about 135 pounds and felt strong and pretty happy. I was exercising a lot, including a lot of jump rope. Most of my exercise was cardio though, there was very little, if any, weight lifting. I was probably wearing a 10, which is a size larger than I am now, even though I weighed less. Yeah, I felt pretty good at 20, until I got pregnant. My pregnancy was rough though. By the end of my 20th year I had been hospitalized for several weeks with preeclempsia and was a day away from having my son, Steven. It was a rough year, to say the least.
I'm not going to say that there weren't times in between the "Big Birthdays" that I didn't get in ha;f-way decent shape. In 2007 I did the AIDS/LifeCycle ride for the first time. That was a 565 mile bike ride from San Francisco to LA. I had been working with a personal trainer in San Francisco for about a year or so and he talked me into it, in spite of the fact that I had not been on a bike in 20 years. I lost about 25 pounds while training for the ride with the primary motivation being to make it easier to get up the coastal mountains that we were going to cross on our way to LA. I was feeling pretty good by the time the ride was done, I was down to 178 pounds, when I ended up in the hospital for an emergency surgery due to an ovarian torsion (you never want that to happen to you - this was the most painful moment in my life). I was also having other "female troubles" so I had a hysterectomy at the same time. As hard as I tried not to let it happen, the surgery was a set back. I blame it a little on my hormones changing. Maybe that was just an excuse.
There were other times that I almost got there over the last 30 years, but I don't ever remember feeling as good as I feel now. I have never been so sure that I have changed my lifestyle forever. I have never known, in my heart of hearts, that I will exercise an average of 6 hours a week for the rest of my life. I am a completely different person, when it comes to exercise, than I was a year ago, than I have ever been. I get it now. I have a choice to make every day, grow or decay. How I want to feel tomorrow is my choice. Whether I can play into my 80s, 90s, and 100s or end up on a couch watching other people play on TV is up to me. If I get up tomorrow morning and exercise, I will grow a little. If I stay in bed and sleep for an extra hour, I will decay a little. The choice is clear. This morning, I really did not want to get out of bed. But I didn't have a choice to make. I got out of bed. I did an upper body workout. I am glad I did.
My transformation has changed more than my body, it has changed me. I feel brand new and I am full of joy and energy. I am 50 years old and I feel brand new. It's crazy. And I want to share this amazing gift with other people that are struggling with the exact same things that I struggled with my entire life.
There are so many things that factor into why we are overweight and don't take great care of ourselves. We are all unique individuals. Different things motivate us, scare us, excite us, make us happy, bring contentment. So part of helping others is really listening to what they have to say, really understanding what motivates them, really understanding their fears, really understanding what they can take on right now, and really paying attention as they grow and can take on more and bigger challenges throughout the process of reaching their goals. It isn't just being a person that "holds someone accountable," it is about helping a person break through their own mental blockades. It is true, Julie and I are very different people, but she wants this thing. She is committing to her goal. She is ready to take the plunge. She is admitting that what she was doing wasn't working for her anymore. She is ready for a change. I am excited to be here to help her. I am looking forward to learning about helping someone else reach her goal. I know we have a lot to teach each other. I know Julie will reach her goal in the next 26 weeks. I know helping her will help me.
We have both agreed that we will blog about this process, so if you have time I hope you will read her blog, too. It will be interesting to see where this journey takes us.
A quick update about me. My Week 6 exercise chart was completely filled in! I did not miss a single session and Week 7 has started off well. Saturday, I did a bike (36 minutes) / run (6 mile) brick to complete Week 6. Yesterday I played racquetball with Jack and then did my lower body workout. This morning I did my upper body workout.
On a less exciting note, on Saturday morning I weighed exactly 155.0 pounds. That is the upper limit of my comfort zone. I started dieting Saturday morning. This morning I weighed 152.8. I will diet until I weigh 150.0 pounds again, then I will stop dieting. I think this is a reasonable and healthy way to maintain my weight. For the most part, I can eat as much as I want and stay around 153 pounds. Therefore, most of the time I am not dieting and I am not decreasing my body's metabolism. I should be able to diet for a couple of weeks and get back to 150 pretty easily. It was amazing how well the 155.0 pound trigger worked. I saw that on the scale, came out of the bathroom, announced to Jack that I was dieting again until I got to 150.0, and felt fine about it. Perhaps this is exciting. I like a plan that works.
That's it for now. I better get to work. It looks like we may have another snow day, tomorrow.
You should send this post to Harry of YNY.
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