The Labor of Weight Loss

How many people do you know who can successfully hold down a full-time job, and/or maintain a household (not me), and/or raise their kids without losing or killing them (again, not me, because I luckily don't have any kids), but yet cannot manage to stick to a weight loss or exercise program?

So many people are able to cope with job, home, and family - even when it's not fun, even when it's downright unpleasant - but fail when it comes to establish an eating and exercise program that could improve and perhaps save their lives. I guess with the job and kids we know we don't have any choice. We do the work even when we don't like it, because we have to, and the alternative is unacceptable (unemployment, letting the kids starve). (The other, taking care of the house, is something some of us have learned we can let slide without too horrible consequences. But undoubtedly our lives would be better if we got it together in that arena too.)

I think I finally succeeded in losing weight and keeping it off when I started treating diet and exercise like a job - something I have to do whether I like it or not, which may be unpleasant at the time but ultimately offers me rewards greater than the pain I have suffered.

And I have to keep plugging away at it day after day, into a future that stretches ahead of me with no foreseeable ending point. (Reaching a point of retirement is not something I can imagine right now!) Sure, I'll have vacations when I can get away and let myself have some fun (for example, eating scones and cream in England), but then I'll be back on the treadmill again (figuratively and literally), probably working harder than ever to make up for my hiatus.

This probably sounds rather dreary and depressing. It really shouldn't be. To continue the job analogy, I don't hate my (real) job. There are moments when I hate it. There are moments when I really love it. And there's a lot of time when I just do it, plugging through the monotony and periodic frustrations, enjoying the small successes and, of course, financial rewards.

My other job, losing weight and maintaining weight loss, running and exercising regularly, is such an ingrained part of my life that most of the time I can now do it on relative auto-pilot. I know pretty much what I'm going to eat each meal, I know when I am going running and when I am going to the Y, and I'm pretty good about sticking to that routine even despite the temptations of the outside world.

And the rewards have been huge. Well over a hundred pounds lost, maintained for over a year, and the ability to run half-marathons and still live to run another day! Furthermore, I love (well, really like) what I eat, and I like the feeling I get when I'm running and working out (especially afterward).

Will I ever retire from diet and exercise? I think I'll be like the job retirees that move on to other pursuits. Someday, when I'm too old to run, I'll still be walking and maybe take up swimming (hard to imagine that, though). Older people seem to have more delicate appetites, so maybe I'll be able to exchange my jumbo-sized vegetable salads for the small portions of "real" foods that naturally thin people eat. By that time (another 40 years, at least), I'll be a naturally thin person myself!