FatBlogger

A Journey of 1000 Miles Must Begin With A Single Step

Lao Tzu said that over 2500 years ago, and it is still true today. Good advice I am going to heed as I begin my own thousand mile journey in two weeks.

That's right, on May 1st I am going to begin walking, my only goal to complete 1000 miles, hopefully in a year or so. The way I look at it, and calculate it, I can lose at least 40 pounds just by the simple act of walking for an hour every day.

Of course I won't be able to do that at first, but this month I have been walking an hour once or twice a week to get back into it. Soon enough I will be up to an hour a day. Eventually I will want to jog a bit, then a bit more, then maybe even, dare I say the word...run!

This all came about because of my Nano, Nike+, the Houston Marathon and Lao. The Nano with Nike+  really is good motivation. You can join other challenges online, compete with friends, or just against yourself. Now they even have training programs like "walk to run", 5K, 10K, all the way up to marathon. It really is pretty neat. Not cheap though, but still less expensive than what you will pay for a gym membership you don't use! I think Nike has come out with a version that is less expensive, I don't think it plays music though.

Anyway, the thing can tell you how many calories you burned on that walk, and I started to notice that I was burning around 500+ for 3 miles. it occurred to me that if I just did that I could counter the 500 calories I over-eat everyday, and eventually my weight would go back to normal. Yeah, it's a long term project, but what the hell, I'm not doing anything anyway. Get moving, worry about the food part later, that is my new motto. It was probably my old motto too, I just forgot.

I had to change the site around a bit to accommodate my new widgets from my Nike+ but now you can see what I am doing, when, my pace.

I have tried this kind of thing before, like in "October Rules", and it did work for a while, but eventually crap happens and that motivation just fades away. This won't fade away until I reach 1000 miles. It will be glaring at me right up front every week.

What I am really looking for is to begin building a habit of exercise, before I try and change my dietary habits. Exercise alone, if I do it enough, could very well eliminate by weight struggle, probably in your case too. I have found it much to difficult to try and do both at the same time, so once again, I will attempt to separate the activity in my life from the food choices in my life...they really are two very different things...why do we lump them together?

Join me if you want, and we can take this journey together. You don't have to buy an iPod, I can figure your calories per mile, but you will have to e-mail me your age, weight and height. I can keep track of all our miles with post updates or something.

Hey, it could happen. Why not? We'll get started and figure out the rest as we go...and go, and go and go and go!

Just bitch slap me please....

For a long time now I have been searching for answers, and in the process not really helping anyone else that comes here, maybe that includes me. My struggle with my weight and self image is a long one, going back my entire adult life, into my teens...maybe even before that, at least 30 years that I know of.

In those 30 years I have reached the nirvana of "the perfect me", or at least the me I was happy with, maybe a dozen times. It's fleeting and hard to hold onto, like a white hot edge of a knife...and for every success, I ended up letting go. These last few years I have really let go, and lost interest in the struggle, instead searching for the reasons behind the whole thing...looking for the disease instead of the symptoms. That search has unfortunately heaped more fat on me, and middle age has taken its toll and made the slippery slope much more slippery and hard to dig out of.

Over the course of this journey I have become an expert on diets, calories, nutrition, psychology, but not so much on motivation. I have "begun" a diet so many times now, and failed, that I no longer have the desire to even try. I have countless books, research reports, articles. I have visited many of you struggling like me, a few who were successful. I have learned much, but at some point it has to stop right? I mean there is a saturation point, a point of no return...or at the very least a point where there is diminishing returns on what you are doing. I know there is a tipping point for your heart, it can only take so much abuse...why should the mind be exempt?

There just comes a time when you have to say, this is the bottom, or the top depending on your point of view, there is no more to find, and even if you do find something new, what then?

Discovery #9,999: Everything about us humans is habitual, even soul searching.

Well...I have to really shake up my psyche. Do the unexpected, which is so unexpected even I don't know what it is. I have learned enough, I have my PhD in weight-loss, now I have to get out there and put it into practice. I want to help others, but I can't very well do that when I am still fat...can I ? I mean, who wants advice on losing weight from a fat guy...the world doesn't need another Dr. Phil. Still, I have valuable information and experience locked away in the gooey corners of my mind...if that info is of no help to me...maybe someone else might get lucky with it.

Discovery #10,000: Never sit down at your laptop, alcoholic beverage in hand, with the sole purpose "to post something no matter what". I should have stopped 6 paragraphs ago.

FatBlogger 3 years old today....

Yes it's true, for three years I have been blogging, admittedly off and on, about my troubles with weight-loss. Hmm, 60 excess pounds divided by three years means...aw hell why bother with the calculation of what could have been...I am fat now and that is all that matters right?

What is going to be different from here on? Damned if I know. I can tell you one thing I feel pretty confident about though, no more promises, no more plans, no more procrastination. I am ditching the the 3 "P's". That is not to say that I will get my fat ass moving in the right direction and lose weight, only that from now on it is either I am doing or I am not....the limbo in between is just, for the most part, an illusion.

Still, lots of people visit, still Googling "I hate being fat" and coming here. Add "not being able to help, not leading by example" to the list of guilt trips for me. "The loser that never lost" could end up being my new tag line under FatBlogger.

If I had lost the weight, if I was someone that could offer advice based on the last three years and two decades before it...what would it be? If I was somebody else who had my experience, what advice would I give me? I am going to have to think about that one, because I could really use the advice I could give to myself right now....

Um...yeah.

PS - After writing this bit of prose, I went for a 3 mile sojourn at the park, only my second time doing so since the marathon. Felt good.