20/20

More reflection on being twenty years out of high school will follow, but I am kicking something off, and I wanted to write about that.

I decided to treat my last doctor’s visit as a wake-up call. My blood sugar levels are being a bit stubborn about going back down after my little ER visit. They’re not horrible, but they should be lower, or I will need to start looking at more drastic remedies, and I don’t want to do that. The doctor focused on the importance of exercise, saying that simply walking just fifteen minutes a day could be really helpful.

Well, that was doable. I started on July 28th and have been doing pretty well, missing only two days. Part of that was insufficient planning. If I go on a walk with my sisters, we go in the evening, and sometimes we are good about that and sometimes we miss, but if I had been planning on a walk, and then it doesn’t happen, I have to work something in. This happened three nights.

The first night, I just wandered around the family room for twenty minutes. Sometimes it was walking back and forth, then running in place, then throwing in sequences I could remember from old aerobics tapes, but it was all very odd, and the only saving grace was that I did keep moving for twenty minutes. Yes, it was twenty instead of fifteen. There’s a reason for that.

During the first day, during the first fifteen minutes actually, I started remembering this recommendation made by a President Richardson at a stake conference. Looking at things to improve the lives of the members, he recommended what he called the 20/20 program, where everyone should exercise for twenty minutes a day and read the scriptures for twenty minutes a day. I decided to do that, so along with improving my health I would also be keeping on track spiritually.

Scripture study, like exercise, is another area where I tend to be off an on. I go strong for a while, and I know it has blessed my life, strengthening me at times and certainly increasing my knowledge of the scriptures. However, having been through them so many times by now, maybe I wane in my enthusiasm. Still, I want to be strong, and have mastery over my thoughts and behavior, so that is good.

Actually, at the time I had already started a new thing where I was reading the Book of Mormon backwards. No, I am not looking for evil messages. I can’t tell you how many times I have read it, but a conservative estimate is fifty, and I worry that the familiarity will make me miss things, and thought that perhaps going out of sequence would help me weigh each verse individually, and help them stand out. It’s going okay. I’m sure I am still missing things, which of course is one reason that I could read it fifty times more, but actually with the frequent use of chiasmus, there are passages where it kind of reads the same.

Anyway, the second time it happened, it was late and I hadn’t read either, and though it seemed unbelievably lame, what I decided to do was to read while doing various isometric exercises—I would just flex or stretch something and hold it while I read. Sometimes it ended up being more yoga-like, but I had done something for another night.
Still, both of those sessions were so lame that the next time it was late and I had not exercised yet I just blew it off. (I think that was when I spent two hours more than I had planned helping at the blood drive, and that had left me irritated, which did not help.)

The other time I did not get in my twenty minutes was quite recent, and it was a bad decision brought on by negative emotions. Julie had been showing some discomfort with my use of the treadmill. She didn’t say I couldn’t use it, but it was still there, so finally it came out that when she was researching them she kept finding a weight limit of three hundred pounds. I decided we needed to check for this one, and it is actually 275. Ouch.

I had already been worried about keeping the exercise going after starting work. Now I was losing one more tool (and I was still worried about the VCR at that point), and losing it in a way that reminded me how far away I am from normal people. So obviously, when you are depressed about being fat, the best thing to do is to skip exercising, and maybe eat a batch of cookies while you’re at it. (Okay, I did not eat a batch of cookies, but I should have exercised and I didn’t.)

I’ve covered my weight issues in depth a few times, and if anyone needs to go back to that, I’m putting links, but there is so much new material to cover that I don’t want to recap here:

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/12/trending-downward-316.html
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/01/sporky-pig.html

The last time I posted my weight (June 2009), what happened was that the scale broke, which I mentioned, but I don’t think I ever mentioned why I didn’t start again. We replaced the scale, and the new scale weighed me about ten pounds higher than the old scale. That was a little discouraging, but the one at the doctor’s office always weighed more than the one at home, so I figured it was probably more accurate, and I could live with that.

The problem was that it varied so much from day to day that I was concerned. One day I weighed before and after my shower, and I was six pounds heavier after. Now, I know I have a tendency towards water retention, but I did not absorb six pounds of water in the shower! So I couldn’t trust the digital one. We do have an old-fashioned scale also, but as you move the weights back and forth, it can be hard getting the right balance, and if you shift position it throws everything off again.

As important as it is to monitor yourself, I think right now it is something that I can’t do closely. I did check today, and I was 316.8 on the digital and 315 on the old one (analog?), and that is probably about right. My heaviest on the old digital was 346, which was probably more like 356-360. I was thinking that I would probably not weigh again until Halloween, but I will probably do it at the end of the forty days.

You see, thinking about what I had accomplished, and what I need to accomplish, and what obstacles I have and will have, I decided I wanted to give myself, well, a Lent. The exercise and the scripture study will go well beyond forty days, but I am abstaining from video games. I had taken a break from them while I was finishing the one screenplay, and then I started again, and it is amazing how much time I will spend on them when I have other things to do, so really the only thing that works is abstinence, and with a specific time period, it is easier.

(Really, I get addicted so easily that the most fortunate break of my entire life may be having been born in the Church so that I never even tried alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. I don’t think I would have done well.)

Part of this (the non-game playing part) will be being more effective, and getting all these things done that I want to do, but another important thing is getting the exercise down and scripture study down, during the first few weeks of work, that it is just non-negotiable.

One thing that has always handicapped me for weight loss is that I will have specific targets in mind, and I want to fix—well, fix myself, really—and I can’t look at it that way anymore. Wrapping my personal worth (and worthiness of love) with my body size has just not been effective in the past. Also, I just need a more realistic scope.

I will not be thin in time for a reunion, or vacation, or wedding or holiday. This is a marathon. It could easily take me five years to reach my correct BMI, if it is even reachable, so I am not about that. (For my height and age, the range appears to be 110 to 145, which does not sound plausible, but that will not be my only gauge of my fitness.) I am just trying to make my body healthier, and I am starting slowly.

I remember once thinking that for me to really get healthy I would probably need to be completely regimented, with every meal and snack measured and planned ahead and multiple exercise periods worked in, and it didn’t seem possible. Well, maybe that needs to be reached incrementally. I have already modified this twice. On the first day I lengthened it, and shortly afterwards I felt like I needed to do something weight-related (maybe because the lame isometric workout had me feeling so loose.) So, now I am alternating push-ups, wall-sits, and crunches. And they are the weakest, wimpiest push-ups, wall-sits, and crunches you have ever seen, but they do cover different body areas. They will get better, and other evolutions will occur, long-range.

I don’t know where I am going to end up, but perhaps the biggest change in me personally has been my growing comfort with uncertainty, and acceptance of things beyond my control. Took me long enough.

Anyway, I intend to blog daily during these forty days, and there will be a little report at the end of what I did. We’ll see what happens after September 25th. (Oh, and the reason I did both push-ups and wall sits today is because I didn’t do push-ups yesterday, but I did walk.)

Beginning belly dance (30/30 minutes)
Push-ups and wall sits
Mosiah 15 – Mosiah 7