Exercise - the Evil 8 Letter Word
Part of the new life and losing weight deal is moving the body in a meaningful way. You might call this exercise, but that word is so commercialized that it no longer means what I am trying to get at here today. We simply need to move more than we usually do in our daily living that has led us to being our current size. In the beginning it may not even involve sweat.
Even though it might not involve sweat, we want the movement to burn calories and build muscle. The good news for the person needing to lose a great deal of weight is that we burn more calories with less effort than a person who is fit. Maybe you were a jock at one point in your life, but now you weigh 300 plus pounds. You may now gain the same benefit from a 2.5 mile an hour walk as a 2 mile run when you were a jock.
So why don’t we do the simplest of exercises to begin losing weight? One reason is embarrassment. Being big does not make for the sexiest guy in the gym. There are the stares, the whispers, and sometimes people are obnoxiously rude to our face. Exercise clothes don’t fit, our thighs chafe from simple walking, and I for one sweat buckets from simple walking. These are all reasons that I didn’t exercise, but the biggest reason is a mixture of being resigned to my condition and being morbidly complacent in my inactivity. By not exercising I could pretend to be comfortable in my own skin while I watch TV eating a slice of pizza.
Don’t we all feel more comfortable with weight when we ignore it? Avoiding full length mirrors, wearing loose fitting clothes while avoiding clothes shopping, and above all else not exerting ourselves keeps us in a comfortable make-believe land of being fit. Once we exert ourselves, try to put on something tighter than normal or catching our image unexpectedly in a mirror can send us into a pitiful depression. At least I know that it can send me into a depression.
So to begin the process I need to decide that I wish to lose the weight and that I can accept myself enough at the current weight to begin the difficult process of facing my reality. That is what it took for me to simply start walking. A person needing to lose 10 or even 50 pounds does not have to face this dilemma. We do.
The next thing we need to determine is the level and type of exertion we will do.