Filed under: Humor, Working Out | Tags: fat, grouchy, guy, gym, help, losing, mean, offering, running, support, treadmill, weight, weight loss, workout
So I’m at the gym this morning – I don’t want to be there. No sleep last night until about 1:30–boy I’ll tell you the alarm goes off pretty early when that’s your bed time…
Then I wake up and my ankle and toe are swollen with arthritis, I can hobble but not walk. Lovely. I promised myself I was going to do this no matter what, so I drag myself down to the gym.
I get on the bike, it’s not bad after a while. I listen to RadioLab podcasts, truly inspiring stuff. So I’m digging it.
Then this guy comes in. A pudgy guy. The most obnoxious gum-chewer yet to walk this planet. I have headphones in, but I can still “hear” him chewing he’s so over-the-top about it. He jumps on a treadmill. Walking at first, then fatboy breaks into a run. And he runs, and runs, and runs. It’s kind of mesmerizing, as his front foot is coming down all of his fat is moving up. A visual symphony of opposing forces.
But he can run.
He can run.
It breaks my heart to see it. I would love to be able to just turn on a treadmill and run. I don’t care if I can only do it for 3 minutes at a time, I want to run. But arthritic ankles have me on a bike instead. So I watch him, chewing his gum in time to his running – wishing…
Now it’s time to get off of my bike, one step and I remember my ankle. I hobble up and down the hallway trying to coax my ankle into working again. As I come back down the hall I notice another guy looking at me.
You know how they look at you, begging for eye contact. Sigh. So I look at him…
He’s younger than me I think. About 6 feet 2 inches tall, pear shaped. He’s wearing a baseball cap. As he talks to me he takes it off to wipe his clearly bald head. He starts off by saying “How are you?”.
I do my first double-take. I think maybe I know him because of the familiar tone he used with me. I don’t–never seen him before in my life.
“I’m OK” I say in a way that means I’m not really OK.
“You know”, he says, “I used to be your size, I know how it feels”.
I start laughing inside. I’m an artist for a living, I’ve got a pretty good grasp of sizes, volumes, how things fit together. Quickly in my mind I grab him with a mouse by one corner and do a shift-drag to scale him up to my height. He’s still about my size! But he’s clearly trying to reach out to me…
“You know”, he continues not noticing my size-comparing smirk, “if you ever need any help, I’m here for you”.
Now he gets a full on double-take from me…
He sees it and says “I know it’s a little strange, but I’ve been down your road, let me know if I can help. I’m here all the time, just ask me”.
God love him. I’m sure he’s lost a lot of weight and thought he was doing a good thing. Between no sleep, a work out I didn’t want to do, watching fatboy run like I wish I could, and a body that seems to be bent on keeping me from accomplishing my goals just made it seem surreal to me. “Just come talk to me, I’m here all the time”??? Crazy.
He didn’t tell me his name. I didn’t ask.
P.S. Sorry if this one seems mean. That’s how it is sometimes, you know?
Filed under: Inspiration | Tags: clothes, different, feel, losing, pants, shirt, weight, weight loss
Pulled on my jeans this morning, fresh from the laundry (thanks LeeAnn for doing that for me, I am grateful) and they just buttoned.
I pulled them up, braced for the stress of pulling the button and the button hole together around my waist, and there was no exertion needed. They just buttoned.
Sitting in my car on the drive to work, my shirt hangs around me differently. I can’t really put it into words, it just feels different.
I’ve been here before, the front end when the weight starts coming off. Where you feel the difference but nobody can really see a difference yet. This time I’m celebrating them. I’m counting them as signs that I’m getting where I need to be.
So it’s been what, three weeks since I worked out? Are you keeping track? Neither am I really…
But I got this amazing head cold. Oh the gory details I am sparing you! But it’s finally in the clearing stages, I hope, and I woke up today pretty motivated.
You see, I’m getting on an airplane in five weeks. My annual business trip is upon me, and I woke up just sick that I’m still fat and will have to overflow my seat into some other person’s seat, and who knows, if it’s Southwest Airlines maybe even be asked to leave…
It’s not a thing I look forward to. I keep thinking, it’s only in San Francisco, maybe I could drive…
So I wake up feeling pretty good and feeling really motivated to do the best I can for the five weeks I have remaining until I board the plane, so I get up and have a delicious Isagenix shake (peanut butter and chocolate is the best – easy on the pb!) and run down to the gym.
Now the gym is my “official” scale. I’ve been to so many doctors in the past three months, and all of their scales are all over the place. One has me at 415, another has me at 390, that’s a pretty big range.
I wasn’t really worrying about food intake, I was worrying about feeling good. I found that eating helps the achy feelings – so I feel like I’ve been eating a lot. So the thought of getting on the “real” scale was, um, let’s just say I wasn’t looking forward to seeing how far I had slid.
392.
Last time I weighed myself after one week of working out and Isagenix I was 391. So basically I’m still there – I don’t have to start over again.
That’s a nice surprise indeed.
Doug Losing Weight 