These shoes are made for walking
While on my hiatus there was a moment of pure excitement. The kind of excitement you can not purchase or happen upon by someone else bringing. The kind of excitement that only those who have had more weight than they wanted on their bodies know. The excitement when something no longer fits like it did before. When a shirt or a pant now feels much looser than it did before. It’s the kind of excitement I imagine my toddler must have felt when they learned to walk or first was able to play with a toy a new way. It’s the amazement that you feel when you think that you did something we wanted so badly but didn’t think it would happen.
Thus, I tempted myself and got on the scale. It still said 254 pounds. Now in my younger years only 4 pounds would have been heart breaking. It would have made me doubt that the space I now felt in some of my shirts that had been a bit tight was just all in my head. I would have been saddened and thought “that shirt must have been stretched out” or some other self-esteem put down that people who need or want to lose weight tie into their feelings of self-worth diminishing any progress. I know because I did do that the last time I was in this position. It wasn’t until I did some reading and some research to know that sometimes when losing weight, the scale lies to you.
The scale is a tool to tell you your total weight, fat, muscle, liquid, and bone. While we all hope that bone weight never changes because bone loss is a horrible thing to have, fat, muscle, and liquid weight all ebbs and flows depending on the day and what state your body is currently in. This means that while you could be losing fat and water while exercising, if you had little to no muscle mass prior to your work out this may be increasing. The scale will measure the fat loss and the muscle gain as potentially a net zero change in the amount you weight but your clothes will begin to tell the story. This was why 4 pounds was exciting to me even if it was only 4 pounds.
So, what had I been doing differently? I didn’t feel like I had been more active. I hadn’t joined a gym or taken up a sport. But I noticed on my phone I had been walking more. Not leaps and bounds compared to the numbers that you read in articles, or I see when my work hosts “fitness challenges”. But an average of 3,500 steps when the weeks before I was lucky if I was averaging 1,000 steps is still an increase. That coupled with the drive only eat when I am actually hungry, snack a few times a day and drink 1.5 – 2 liters of water a day, which will help in keeping my migraines down, I believe is where the weight showed a little lessening from my body.
Is this a miracle and I will now shed all the weight? Magic 8 ball says “concentrate and ask again”. Let’s put this into context. The last time I went through this process of losing this much weight I was able to shed 50 pounds in 6 months because I was walking to and from work which was almost 2 miles each way with one way up hill. According to my phone statistics the roughly 3,500 steps was a little over a mile and a half. So almost half of the walking I was doing before. Ok. So not a miracle but also not nothing for some walking I wasn’t even aware was having an effect.
In comes my little experiment. One day last week when none of the family was requiring my attention, I walked around the grounds of where I live. It was probably not the ideal time of day but I made to circle the entire grounds once trying to take the longest route I could walking briskly but not speed walking by any means. It was roughly 2,500 steps or a little over a mile and took about 20 minutes to accomplish. It won’t get me to 50 pounds on it own but every task begins with one step.
So the goal. Find 20-30 minutes to walk the grounds 5 times a week. Today the little one was excited to take a walk. Maybe tomorrow the significant other will want to go as well. Either way, it can be a moment for me to get out of the house, have some alone time and wear out my walking shoes on the way to losing weight. Because lord knows cutting out soda (which I did 2 months ago) did bumpkis for me. Grumble grumble significant other did that and lost 15 pounds.
