100 Miles or More: Part One

I was still just over an eighth of a ton, and my body was more than vocal about its unhappiness. Two hundred and fifty-seven collective pounds don’t want to pick blueberries from the branches of a bush dwelling twelve inches off the ground. It’s more than just the knees. While I had shed thirty pounds, and was seemingly holding that position steadily, picking blueberries required energy. Years and years of High School science class, and one of the few things I remember is that energy is required to move mass. My thighs cannot power me upwards, thrusting at the knee, without the required amount of energy. I also know that moving mass becomes more and more difficult when the mass is greater and greater. When I think of my body this way I imagine that level of Dante’s inferno where the man is pushing a great rock up the hill, only to have it roll down again. And like the consistency of daily life, the rock must always be moved again. It cannot be sedentary at the bottom of the hill, it must always be moving. I was twenty-three years old. Quitting my life was not an option that was presented to me. I would be moving the rock again.

I wrote these words recently about the summer of 2009, now eighteen months ago. I have been asked so many times about my journey of reinvention that I decided to start writing about it regularly, in hopes of compiling something coherent, logical, and poetic eventually. The complexity that weaves this process is enormous and entangled, and the thought of unwinding the fibers one by one in order to tell a complete, tightly woven story is daunting to say the least. While it will be impossible for me to recall every moment, every event, every passing word and fleeting action that led me to this contentment where I now dwell, I have promised to share at least a portion of it with you, in order to help my friends and family understand how someone goes from 287 pounds to 189 pounds in a healthy, transformative way.

I could spend several paragraphs now detailing the changes I made to my eating habits, and explaining the different kinds of exercises I have tried, done and re-done to lose this amount of weight, but that would be like giving someone a basket of ingredients and asking them to create a specific dish without also providing them with a recipe. There is a story behind every great success and every great failure. As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I love words, and like my literary heroine Baroness Karen Von Blixen, I love stories and understand their importance. For anyone who is reading this thinking they’d like to make positive changes to their lives, I encourage you to think about why you want to make these changes, and to understand that you have a story of your own, so make it personal to you and envelop these changes within your own pages.

I have to begin this story honestly. I will not lie to you and say that it was divine intervention, or cosmic karma, or that something specifically struck and inspired me one day in the mid-winter of 2009. I remember the day well, and I remember the first decision I made to which I actually adhered, but I have no recollection of why I made that decision, or why it realistically worked for me that time. I know that I had tried and tried so many times before. I had tried since I was eleven years old, when I began to hit puberty and realized that my body wasn’t going to develop into an hourglass, or even a tender, ripe pear. I realized that my body was already large, it was fat, and that I wasn’t going to embody the hyper-sexualized image into which all of my friends’ bodies would be maturing. Until that February day, two years ago, I hadn’t been able to commit to making any changes concerning my body. It was therefore surprising to me when I decided on February 24, 2009 to give up dessert for Lent, and when Easter Sunday morning dawned, I hadn’t broken my Lenten promise. Not only that, I had lost seven pounds.

That’s where it all began. I specifically remember eating two prune paczki on Shrove Tuesday, then bagging the other four from the box and throwing them into the freezer. I don’t know what rennet caused that decision to separate from the rest of the so-called decisions I’d made in the past. It was different, however. This decision led to another decision soon after. Instead of spending my long, unemployed days sitting around doing nothing, I’d try to start exercising a little. As I sit here in the shortest skirt I’ve ever worn in my life, legs crossed with sheer black leggings stretched tightly across my thighs, I can’t help but be taken aback by the evolution of my exercise routine. I remember sitting in a baggy pair of navy blue sweatpants, an over-sized neon orange Cleveland Browns hoodie, and pair of worn, old pink and gray Vans sneakers on my living room floor, thinking that walking for fifteen minutes was exhausting.

My mother walks in circles around our house. It’s good for her knees, and more comfortable for her all around. My Mom has had a lot of success. When I was living in Athens my house was set up in such a way that I could also walk in circles around it. I tried to walk for 15 minutes every day. I had no motivation to do it, but for the first time in my life I forced myself to do it. I wish I could explain why or how I did. I have theories, certainly.

At that point, there were so many things about my life that were slowly eroding. The previous June I’d graduated from Ohio University with no job prospects. That September the economic recession hit. By the time February rolled around, I’d spent eight-months without work. It wasn’t just that I was without work, but rather without ever working. I hadn’t had an opportunity to take that important step into adulthood and I was feeling worse about myself every single day. It was far more than just not having a job, and not being able to support myself. It was constantly thinking that what I’d studied in college, which I thought to be so important, was thought to be useless by so many people. After hearing it so many times I began to believe it and I began to resent the university, resent my degree and resent the idealistic values I’d set. My confidence was plummeting to a place from which I never thought I’d be able to resurrect it.

Simultaneously this, along with some other outside factors, was causing strain on and within my long-term relationship. While delving into the most intimate and personal details of what happened isn’t the point of this blog, it is a part of this story. I believe anyone can relate to how changing relationships affect our lives in one way or another. When you feel something that you once held securely begin to slip out of your fingers, you grapple for control. There came a point in my relationship, much later than where this story is beginning, where I was losing it. My deep-seeded mission of crafting and changing my body gave me a sense of control over at least one portion of my life. When the relationship finally ended, and my focus was able to shift solely onto my own needs is when I really dove head first into this journey and started making major changes.

That brings me to the last thing I want you to understand about making changes to your life. While you may start with one goal, one plan, or one course of action, it’s highly likely that it’s going to be altered, shifted or changed. On that February day when I threw the paczki into the freezer, my goal was to not eat another one (or any of its decadent kin) until Easter Sunday; it wasn’t to lose a hundred pounds. My goals evolved, my routine evolved, and the path by which I traveled evolved. For me, it was essential to be open to changes. In the end, it benefited me greatly. If I was still eating the way I used to eat, only omitting dessert, and walking for 15 minutes a day, I would still be unhealthy and probably unhappy. Life is about change, growth and development, so embrace it.

Because this is a story, I’m going to break it down into chapters. It wouldn’t serve well for me to simplify it too much, to try to squeeze it into one blog post, without giving it proper credit. This is the beginning: one small decision, leading to another small decision. That’s where I started.