Life Change #1: I Don’t Get Enough (or any) Exercise

My wife says I need to lose weight. My mother says I need to lose weight, my daughter says I need to lose weight….I have acquired nicknames ranging from “jelly belly” to “fatty”…all of course intended to be terms of endearment as opposed to outright slanders….Thing is, losing weight is not so much a change I can make (Surely, if I could lose 50 pounds today, I would do it!---and man would I look good!)…No, I think losing weight is a goal, not a change, so I will start with the change that makes most sense….EXERCISE!

Like most Americans, I have been on some kind of diet since I was about 22 years old….and really, I was on a diet before that, just headed the other way…The first time I ever heard my weight challenged was in high school while playing basketball….the coach told me I was too skinny, and that I got knocked around too easily on the boards…I was not amazingly tall, just over 6’-0”….skinny players who are not too tall have a nickname….they call them “Subs”. I became familiar with the sights and sounds at the end of the bench….and I seldom had to shower or launder my uniform after a game. But since the coach did not like how much I weighed, I figured I would do something about it…..Chocolate Mint Ice Cream! It was my favorite…bright green with all those flecks of chocolate…just about a carton every day…all in the name of gaining some weight and perhaps getting a bit more playing time. I ate ice cream, extra helpings at dinner, two bowls of cereal in the morning…my mom would pack two sandwiches (I never liked that part…I think she gave me the same amount of meat, just laid between four slices of white bread rather than two). I never thought twice about what or how much I ate...

Thing is…even though I was not playing in the games, I was still practicing every day…running jumping, sweating…playing basketball…pretty much every day. In fact the days that I got almost no exercise were, ironically, game days…on those days, I would rest up! I gained not a single pound, so far as I could tell…and if I did, it sure was not obvious to the coach…I was still skinny…but I was eating a lot of ice cream, so life was good!

And when I stopped playing basketball, and as you might guess, I stopped eating all that extra food. Well, not exactly. That would have been a smart plan, but actually, I was pretty set in the rhythm…open up the freezer each day around 4pm and whittle away at a half gallon of ice cream, drain a bottle of apple juice, and then sit down to dinner and eat a full plate or two, depending on if I liked it or not. And then, ice cream for dessert. I sure never stopped to add it all up, but I think it might have been about 8,000 calories in about a 4 hour time span.

Initially, I stopped playing basketball, because I blew my knee out, had surgery, and got to sit on my ass for like 6 weeks. Seems pretty obvious now, but I had no idea at the time what that would mean…all that time just lounging about (pre video games, if you can imagine) watching TV and eating to kill the time….and when I was sort of done with the recuperation time…finally, I noticed, I had gained a little weight!...Too late for basketball season, and pretty much none of it above my waist where I could really use it trying to grab rebounds. NO, at age 18, I had a little paunch…kinda cute at the time…my legs and arms were still skinny, my butt as flat as the bench in our high school gym, but the beginnings of a belly…

After my knee was healed up, I went back to playing sports of all kinds, mostly pick up basketball games, softball, flag football…all the sort of things you play in college intramurals, and with friends…and I didn’t gain any more weight, but I don’t recall ever losing the little belly that had joined me. And I noticed that when I went home from college for holidays, ate well, and neglected the activity for even a few days, the pants got a little more snug…the belly grew just a bit…weight gain seemed to be a one way street….

I finally got the clue…obviously too late, that eating a ton of food and then not exercising is not such a good idea…and since I have sworn that I will not buy any larger pants than the size 38 waist I presently wear, I figure it really is time to stop “adding to the belly”—otherwise I’ll need to simply walk around in my boxer shorts…since none of my pants will fit, and frankly, that has a real sad ring to it. If I stick with the exercise, perhaps at least I will stop growing, and then perhaps when I get to one of my later Life Changes (“Eliminate Food from my diet”, or something like that), I can finally start to reverse the 30 year growth trend that is my belly!
I am not alone. Many of the folks that suggest that I lose weight, should also lose weight themselves…I have never known if a proper retort would be something like, “I’ll drop 20 just as soon as you Buck-o!” I am pretty sure if I said it to my wife, she’d help me to stop eating by knocking out all my teeth. Really though…we are all fat, or so many are, that I wonder if maybe this is the way we are supposed to be. Everyone, thick or thin, seems to be on a sort of continual diet that is nothing more than an expression of guilt over their eating habits. I always thought it interesting that the word “diet” starts off with the word “die”, and though it seems so ripe for some sort of clever pun or joke, I can never think of one. Maybe the thin people are really just too skinny, and they should consider a half gallon of ice cream a day as a sort of therapy so they can catch up!

There are some people that remember me skinny (hard to imagine, since I really cannot recall that myself), and they are the some of the most biting critics….”why you used to be thin as a rail, and just look at you now!” The tough ones are the few folks that I know that have no weight problem at all. They often barely say a thing, but instead mutter asides barely audible but loud and clear all the same…as if to say, “You are weak…why cannot you be like me and show some self control?” I imagine them saying that in a sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, and I resent them, because, in my heart of hearts, they are right. After so many years of trying to “diet” or exercise or whatever else you can do to lose weight (which in my case was pretty much confined to thinking about losing weight), I was pretty much a failure…I have managed to add a pound or two…maybe even more, every year that I live…the slow, inexorable march toward obesity…or at least to a size 40 waist!

The critics that most ably break down my defenses are those that play the health card. “You really should lose weight…you don’t want to wind up like your father”. He lay dead on the bathroom floor of my parents home at the age of 61…far too young for a man with ambition and a lengthy “things to do” list. Nope, I was hoping not to wind up like that…and if something like that can’t scare you into change, then it truly is a long uphill fight. I know there is the health thing, the heart attacks, the diabetes, the huffing and puffing up the stairs…and for some folks that is (or should be) the most important thing. I think I am in that group…but the fear lays dormant in favor of my taste buds that still want that second helping or a bowl of ice cream just before bedtime (another wildly bad “no-no”!....).

I still think it is mostly because we want to all “look” a certain way…sort of like Jason Bourne or even Indiana Jones (in the early days)…I’d love to take my shirt off at the beach or the pool, but frankly, I just could not put those folks through the trauma of that, to say nothing of how mortified my son or daughter would be! But the fact that I still WANT to take my shirt off but refusing to do so puts me in that category of folks who are still uncomfortable with how they have let themselves go to seed. I admire, in some weird way, those dudes that peel off the shirt only to expose the huge mound of flesh that is their belly, jiggling, usually pale and pasty, sometimes hairy, but primarily BIG. What self confidence! Or cluelessness…or perhaps I am witness to the simple acceptance of reality. Perhaps that is it. I have failed to grasp what is obvious to everyone else…I’m a fat guy.

Thing is…I don’t feel that fat…it is that belly thing again…it keeps growing…but my feet are not fat…nor are my legs or hands, or arms…or even my butt….sure, I could lose a pound or two in the face, but it is still all about the gut! I am just a good Photoshop session away from looking marvelous….at least in my own brain…of course in that same brain I am also about 22 years old and were it not for my gut, I’d have to scrape the hotties off with a spatula. Maybe it is because I buy loose fitting clothes (Translation: XXL!) and it hides the girth a bit. Sort of like wearing a tent as a disguise, or standing next to something huge, so that by comparison, I appear small. Just a thought…but maybe if they slid all the sizes down, so that what passes for an XL today, might morph into a Medium….at least we could feel a bit better about ourselves.
I marvel at the self confidence some folks have when they pack themselves into tight fitting shirts daring the buttons to pop….in the case of women, I think there is some sort of brainwashing going on that tells them to wear it tight whether they are a size 8 or says 18. Perhaps none of us feel fat…even if we are. Perhaps we all see ourselves as svelte 18 year olds. Perhaps we all buy clothes assuming we are about to lose weight. I have a fair assortment of pants that I hang onto just in case…

Exercise takes time, or so it seems despite all the claims that you can lose a pound a day by shoving this thing between your knees and squeezing for just 10 minutes a day, and then the whole contraption slides under the bed for easy storage…that way that you can more easily forget that it is there….and that you spent 3 easy installments of $29.99 on a piece of crap that probably cost about $1.50 to make in China (Free! Lead paint included!). Because they sell so much of this stuff, I must be the only person that reads that part of the ad that says “Individual Results may Vary”, or “Results not typical”….that seems to drain all the water out of the bucket for me, so I have never made the purchase, and so the underside of my bed is reserved for old shoes, cat hair and a lost remote or two. Perhaps I need to heed the request from my wife that I stop being so cynical about everything I read or see on TV. I’ll add that to the list of things I intend to change…”stop being cynical”…that shouldn’t take more than a day…

Oh but today we are all about the exercise. Like so many Americans, my days are filled with sitting at a desk, pounding away at a computer terminal, and compressing the cushions on the chair on which I sit. Exercise does not seem to erupt spontaneously in my day. No one stops by with a basketball under their right arm and suggests we head down to the park and shoot some hoops for a while. Frankly, the walk back and forth from the coffee machine is not much exertion, though I have detected lately that I grow winded even doing that….I either need to get in shape, or perhaps give up coffee so I no longer even need to make that walk…a change I am not presently willing to make, despite the fact that I have heard it said I should do it. I believe the only people who suggest that you give up coffee are people that DON’T DRINK COFFEE. Currently, the folks at Starbucks are hunting all those whacko's down and so they won’t bother me much longer….still I might add it to the list…”Give up Coffee”…yeah, right.

See how exercise seems to get pushed aside? Even as I write these words about adopting exercise as a life change, I keep getting off message. Same way in real life. I find so many things to do instead of exercising…cleaning my desk (Life Change # 23), or Surfing the Net in search of football news (to be addressed in Life Change #19). Somehow, everything seems more important than exercise. So I made it number one on the list. I figured it could use the emphasis such a declaration would add. Even still, I imagine I will need, at some point, to make Life Change #7: I find too many excuses (not to exercise, wear sun block, etc); though hopefully I will never again have to make Life Change #27 (Start exercising again).

The odd thing is: I really love it RIGHT AFTER I AM DONE….there is this sort of high…I have heard it is the result of endorphins, but I thinking it is really the absence of guilt about what I will have for lunch or dinner…I feel like I have taken my body out for a test drive and rather than staying in the parking lot or in the residential areas of town, I have taken it out on the freeway (though perhaps not into the fast lane just yet!), and pressed the accelerator pedal just a bit. I feel more alert and focused all day long, and I always wonder why didn’t I do this sooner…why do I put off exercising?

For me, the toughest part is the continuity, and the question of how much is enough, and how much is too little. If I exercise 3 times a day…basically every other day…that seems like not enough. Though I am sure that exercising 7 days a week is probably the best solution, it sometimes is simply not convenient. Work, travel, and life’s little complications all seem to conspire at times to keep me from making my appointment with my cardio vascular system…and if two days in a row are like that, it often derails my progress entirely. If I keep up steady progress, then I miss it when I don’t do it…but if I don’t do it for more than a couple of days, I shift from missing it to dreading it…and it becomes all too easy to find easy excuses not to do it …”I have a hangnail today”, or “I have no clean socks in which to sweat”…or the worst, most legitimate excuse: MY IPOD BATTERY IS DEAD!

On the other hand, on those few times where the momentum has truly taken over and I sustain my effort for several weeks…there is that moment…I put on my pants, cinch up my belt tight, and …”WHAT IS THIS???!!!—do I need to tighten my belt to a previously undiscovered notch?” Or…when a person you have not seen for awhile sees you and asks “have you lost weight?” WOW…better than any drug I have tried or could imagine (Life Change #84: Give up Drugs).
As far as ownership of this particular habit, I know I am in a really big club…maybe the biggest club of all. You cannot spend any time channel surfing without stumbling on an infomercial selling Bow Flex, or some sort of exercise programs involving weights or judo, or dancing or yoga or big round balls, or spring loaded contraptions that look so cool on the screen and promise dramatic results in as little as 5 days! QVC sells a parade of similar crap, and there are countless books, tapes, and thousands of health clubs around the country. Exercise, it seems is everywhere….why then are we so fat?

I stop to think about all the things I have bought that were intended to help rediscover my love of exercise…..mountain bike, jump rope, punching bag, boxing gloves, tennis racket, rowing machine, bike rack for the car (so I could haul around previously mentioned bike), countless gym memberships, a basketball, a volleyball, a canoe, walking shoes, stair master, weight set, stationary bicycle, and an elliptical trainer. I think I still have most of this stuff, but the elliptical trainer sits in my office (the only place in the house that it would fit) and so I see it every day…just as soon as I knock the cobwebs off and give it a thorough dusting, I climb aboard that machine and begin my first life change…to start exercising.

After 27 minutes at level 3, I figure that is enough change for one day, I climb down, dripping wet, thirsty, but on my way to the greatest reclamation project in (my) history.