No excuses. Just do it.

Dark. Raining. Cold. My body not overly sore but tired, more tired than I've felt it in a long time. I had every excuse in the world cued up as to why I shouldn't or couldn't exercise. But I put on my gear (which is woefully inadequate for a rainy night), stepped out into it, started up the tools on my iPod and took off for Day 2 of the C25K program.
While it kicked my ass, I genuinely enjoyed it. There was something... affirming... running along a dark neighborhood street, soaked like a rat. I even ran along Center Street for a portion. I figured if someone wants to give a fat girl running in the rain any gruff, I'd have full justification to flip them the bird. Of course no one did.

It had been hard to make it through the day. I had not rested the day before: I'd done an hour of yoga and then that same night an hour of swimming.My body and mind felt great... but the body was exhausted.

It's different this time. I've lost weight before. (Few who know me now realized I weighed 137 when I was 18 -- after I lost 75 lbs in 5 months). But I cared little other than about the scale.Which is why I gained that back and more in college and afterward.

This is different. Yes, I want to lose weight, but I want to do it through fully inhabiting my body and developing a sense of "this is not right" and being moved by that internal motivation. Not by a scale, a dress size, or an image. That's the only way it'll work (the definition of work meaning long term).


It's an interesting position to be in -- as someone who spent a lot of time workign to "accept" her body and learning to fully inhabit it in some ways... there was a lot that I was purposefully blind to, a lot that I overlooked, pushed under the rug, refused to see. It's like having an amazing car and you spend all this time caring for and learning about how to adjust the leather driver's seat with the 12 way automatic controls... and ignore the whole rest of the car while it goes to hell in a handbasket.