Motivation for Fitness

So I’ve realized (and not suddenly or anything) that I am overweight. I’ve been technically overweight for probably my whole life, but I’ve been thinner and in better shape than I am now.

As it is, I’m approaching 40 and am carrying around 50 too many pounds and I’m just more lumpy than I care to be, and if I gain any more weight I’m gonna have to start shopping in a different section of the department stores and dammit I’m not gonna do that.

So I need to lose some weight, but more importantly I need to tone up the little muscle I have and add more where needed. I’m not gonna lose 50 pounds but 30 pounds and better fitting clothes would be okay by me.

The fundamental problem is that I like food. I didn’t get fat by accident. I like food. And you can’t give up food the way you can give up cigarettes or alcohol.  You still need to eat.  And if you have a family who are NOT dieting, then there’s going to be food in the house that you probably shouldn’t have.  I like to cook too – and I’m a pretty damned good cook so I’m gonna eat what I make.  Otherwise why bother?

Furthermore, I do a lot of things for which I sometimes feel the need to be rewarded. I have a good job and help support the family, I raise a kid, I manage the household, money included.  So dammit I should get to eat oreo cookies whenever I damned well please.  Get off my back!

See how this works?  Not so good really.  I can justify anything I want.  That doesn’t make me thinner. And you can’t both like food and hate exercise.  One of those has to go and I’m not giving up the food I love, so I guess I have to exercise.

And I have a plan — a list of things I plan to do everyday, for at least the next several months, and see where we are. The trick is to keep at it, even when I don’t want to (which is always), because while I don’t want to be doing it at the time, I’ll feel better about myself later.  I just keep telling myself that and hope at some point it turns out to be true.

So anyway, I’ve been corresponding with a friend who is in the same boat and has come to a similar realization about his weight and his health and so he and I have exchanged messages.  And it cracks me up because I swear to god everything he says should be on a t-shirt or poster or something.  And maybe what motivates me isn’t the same thing as motivates other people, but I think this stuff is golden. So I’m sharing it with you.

 Doing the exercise is easy.  Commitment is the key. It’s like demolishing a building with rain. 

But here’s the thing: the bathroom scale is a fucking bullshit metric. It’s a total head-faker. Scales are about as useful in getting fit as Phil the groundhog is in planning your landscaping schedule. 

Where you are is nothing. Where you have been is nothing. Where you are going is nothing. All that matters is pointing in the right direction and working–not even working hard, per se, but just working, in the right direction. The goal is useless; it is only the aim at the goal that can help you. And even then it can only help if you follow the aim with discipline and persistence.

Beats me if any of this will help or not.  I like to think that if I have something like a mantra, I can push through the inertia that sets in (sets in, hell, it MOVES in like unwanted relatives).

I’ll let you know how it comes out.