It’s about a month since I signed up for my second gym membership, which really only came about because I couldn’t continue doing my usual classes whilst my knee was recovering. I was really scared that if I got out of the habit of working out whilst I was getting over my surgery, I’d never go back to it, and swimming seemed like a good compromise in the meantime.
I’m not sure what happened, but I appear to have become a bit fixated with being in the water. With the exception my weekend away, I’ve done an hour’s worth of swimming every single day for the last month and you know what, for the first time yesterday I noticed that my shape is changing.
I’d gotten to the point, before I pressed pause on my workouts, where I was starting to catch an occasional glimpse of collar bone as I chucked the kettle bells around in the Kingdom of Pain, and that was exciting enough in itself because it’d been buried under a mound of flesh for donkey’s years. Yesterday, I noticed that my waist has started to become a bit more…well, waist-like. It sort of goes in, like a waist would go in on normal people.
Completely by accident, I found myself standing with my hands on my hips, and it dawned on me that I had this sort of curve down the side of my body, which somehow my hands just fitted into without a fight. When you’re really fat, you can’t do the hands-on-hips thing. For one thing it’s hard to be sure where your hips are because there’s so much body sitting on top of them, and in any event there’s nowhere for your hands to rest naturally. Not unless you tuck them into one of your spare tyres or grab a hold of your fat, you know? It’s not comfortable. But yesterday it just worked, all on its own.
Now, I appreciate that probably doesn’t sound like a big thing, but in terms of the way it’s made me feel it ranks right up there with being able to cross my legs for the first time. Or being able to cross my arms across my chest. Crossing anything when you’re the size of two people in one body is pretty damned impossible but as my shape changes, my body is slowly remembering how to do all these things that skinny folk take for granted, and I’m here to tell you it feels really fucking awesome.
It’s not very often I get fixated on something that’s good for me, but this swimming malarkey is definitely the right kind of fix. In the space of a month it’s become something I look forward to doing every day, and I find myself bending my plans around making sure I can fit it into my schedule.
It’s a bit like cycling…it doesn’t feel like a chore. And so it’s not on the Asshole Voice’s radar as something I need to be talked out of. I love it, simple as that.
I’m not sure whether discovering I have a waist has turned my head a bit, but I’ve got a good feeling about my conversation with the Shitbird Scale this week…just sayin’ 🙂
