Pedometer Challenge: Days 5 & 6
Ok. As Kai Ryssdal from Marketplace would say, “let’s do the numbers….”
The last couple of days have been busy, but good. The number of steps I’ve been getting at work each day seems to be dwindling a bit, but that’s just meant that I’ve had to move my ass a little more in the evenings to make up the difference. Of course, I say that so flippantly, as though heading out after dinner in search of 6,000+ more steps is no big deal. (Especially on a Thursday when you’re just plain tired and want nothing more than to go to bed by 7:00pm and cement, once and for all, your status as a senior citizen).
In this way, the pedometer challenge has been such a good thing for me. I’ll tell you, on Thursday, after dinner when my number was just barely touching 4,000 steps, I’d all but decided that I was just going to chalk it off to a “bad day,” post my picture and go to bed… but there’s something about that little plastic box… staring up at you, daring you to take just one more step, and then another and another. Finally, I gave in and went for a walk, convinced that while I might only bump it up a thousand or so more steps, that at least *that* was better than nothing. But in the end I just kept walking until finally I’d topped that magic 10k number. Gosh it felt good.
This coupled with John’s recent post on the subject has gotten me thinking about inspiration. I read a lot of weight loss blogs and I see people talking about the things that inspire them. And it’s interesting to me, because (like John) I often find that I am *not* inspired by what other people find incredibly motivating. I’m not all that interested in having my body look like what the media holds up as beautiful, I don’t have a “vision board” filled with pictures of slender girls in the hopes that one day I’ll look like them. I don’t draw incredible inspiration from television shows like the Biggest Loser and I don’t read diet books filled with the inspirational stories of those who have already lost all of their weight and want to pass on their secrets to the rest of us chubbies. Sometimes those things can be interesting, but none of them make me want to jog 10 miles or gnaw on a celery stalk.
Rather, for me, I think a lot of what inspires me is the challenge of all of this. It’s important to note here that I’m *not* talking about competition. This isn’t a race and nobody gets a gold medal at the end. This is, however, a challenge — a fight — a struggle. And what’s more, it’s one in which every last one of us is the underdog. The odds are stacked against us, folks. Hundreds or thousands of people “go on diets” every day and the vast majority of them throw in the towel, or lose the weight, only to gain it back. And as strange as that may seem, in some ways, I draw a great deal of inspiration from knowing that I’m the “long shot” in all of this. I love the notion of beating the odds, of throwing a monkey wrench in the statistic, and especially of proving all those people who say it can’t be done, wrong.
Like most fat people, I was fat for a long, long, (long) time before I finally decided that it was time to do something about it. It wasn’t like I was living in a funhouse where every mirror was distorted such that, even at 300+ pounds, I always appeared willowy and svelte. No. I knew I was fat. And I wanted to lose weight, sure. But for years and years I went about my business simply not caring enough about it, or perhaps myself, to actually do something that would facilitate taking off the pounds. So what changed?
People started giving up on me.
I know I’ve told the story here before about the fateful doctor’s appointment wherein my health care professional said a) you’re going to die and b) you have start taking medication to keep from dying because c) you’ll never lose enough weight to keep from dying on your own. I can still remember going home that afternoon so pissed off. Pissed at everyone and everything: the doctor, myself, my mother (why not??) and feeling like I’d been dealt a terrible injustice. Then, to make matters worse, when I got home I told my husband about the whole story and even though he tried to be supportive, I could see that he too believed that the doctor was right… that I was too far gone.
That was the turning point for me.
That was when I knew I had to do something. And yes, a huge part of it had to do with not wanting to die, but I’m not ashamed to admit that a massive amount of my inspiration came from wanting to prove everyone wrong. How dare they give up on me??? At the time, I felt betrayed and abandoned. But now I’m so thankful that I hit that low… because if I hadn’t, I’d have never felt the need to start climbing my way back up.
My husband (and mother, by the way) are fond of telling me that I am probably the most stubborn person that they know. And perhaps stubbornness isn’t the attribute that I sometimes like to think it is… but in this case, I think my stubborn streak may deserve at least some of the credit for saving my life. I don’t know where the rest of you draw your inspiration, (though I wouldn’t mind hearing about it), but I know that for me, a great deal of my motivation comes from my desire to always do and be a bit of the unexpected.
And perhaps that’s why this pedometer challenge has been such a good thing for me. Right now, I’m so determined to get those 10,000 steps in each day that I’ll do just about anything to make it there… including move on nights when I might have otherwise decided that it was ok to take the night off. And again, it’s not about winning, per say, it’s more about wiping that smug look of my pedometer’s face when the sun’s going down and I’m only at 5,000 steps. It’s about knowing that someone in my physical condition isn’t supposed to be able to move quite this much. It’s about proving that I *can* do it… especially to those who said I couldn’t.
Anyway, here’s Friday’s number, folks. And with that I’m off to start my Saturday.
