Weight-Loss...or why I stopped worrying and learned to run.

I discovered I had gotten fat somewhere around my 26th birthday. I looked at a picture of myself from a birthday party and did not see a waistline. Instead, I saw ill fitting jeans and a really lame t-shirt that did not cover up my increasingly  I had been fat for the three years prior to making this discovery, but the plus sized clothing and the wrenching pains in my knees really had no effect on me. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the cute, pain-in-the-ass 22 year-old who could drink anyone under the table and still not gain a pound.  Unfortunately, that 22 year-old had gotten older, developed hypothyroidism, and, had not stopped eating and drinking her friends under the table when her metabolism had stopped cooperating.

I really was mad at 22-year-old me, but decided that I would not deal with my issues because I was going to be an enlightened 21st century, don't mess with me "fat girl". I planned to embrace my weight, attempt to eat a little better and live with fat pride.I also wanted to buck the yo-yo dieting trend that seemed to make every woman in my parent's generation go back and forth between Kate Moss and Roseanne Arnold. I found the entire idea of moving back and forth between a life where I hated eating to one where I despised how I looked, nauseating.  This don't care attitude was great for the self esteem, but fracking horrible on the knees and the back. And it also sucked that I moved slower than my thin friends, and couldn't shop in normal clothing stores. My stay fat plan, lasted about 2 years.

Plan B was to find the most awesome fad diet ever, lose the weight in an entirely unhealthy way and then make the slow transition back to normal eating without regaining the weight. I LOVED, and still LOVE reading the diet books. Diet books are the cable news of nutrition.  They provide endless hours of edutainment, and don't bog down the material with factual information. I tried Atkins, Sonoma, South Beach, various "Detox Diets" (P.S. Detox just means "this diet will make you poop a lot") and even Slim Fast.  I lasted at least an hour on plan. Usually by the end of the day, I was getting bogged down in the reality that I what I was doing eating gross food and following ridiculous advice from a variety of experts whose main goal was to live the American Dream by making a lot of money selling diet books.

Then I tried Weight Watchers, it works and is not a fad diet. Mostly because it works on the basic principle that if you eat less and exercise more, you will lose weight.  The problem for me, on any diet, including the rational ones, is that I really ENJOY food and dessert and beer and all of those things that I had to eat less of to lose weight.

And this is when I discovered running. I had been walking, using the Wii and taking the stairs to get in my "30 minutes of movement on most days" But all of those things only provided me about 200 extra calories a day. That is ONE pint of beer or half a cookie at the awesome bakery down the street. Running gives me 750 calories an hour, I can do it anywhere and I can drink a beer after I am done(okay maybe after I have a glass of water).  I lost 30 pounds (but gained it all back plus 20 during pregnancy) with the diets. I have lost 60 pounds with running and get to eat what I want. I still write down all of my calories (because believe me, if I could eat 10,000 delicious calories a day without gaining weight, I probably would), but I now can focus on other aspects of what goes into my mouth rather than, "will this make me fatter".

And the awesome thing with running is that once you get over the back, knee and side pain, it gets into your blood. Jumping on the treadmill at the end of a hard day starts feeling almost as good as a chocolate bar or a dip in a hot tub.  There is something about making your body temporarily fly through the air as you move from step to step that provides a combination of energy, meditation and catharsis.

More to come on running and weight-loss later....

Post-Running

Pre Running