I can’t imagine that there would be too many folk doing a happy dance at the prospect of being ninety eight pounds over their ideal weight, but it’s all about perspective isn’t it? I lost a solid two pounds this week, which means that for the first time in years I have less than one hundred pounds to go before I can officially check into Skinny Town and unpack my bags. And you bet your sweet ass I did my happy dance.
I’m halfway towards beginning the rest of my life as a person who lives in a body that’s nurtured with all the things it needs, and I’m starting to get curious now about what effect that’s going to have on me as I get older. I’ve abused my body for years, with little or no exercise and a volume-rich-nutrient-poor diet. You don’t have to look very far before you come across statistics which suggest that’s not particularly compatible with old age…once you get the wrong side of fifty it seems the ice upon which we all skate gets very thin if you live on a diet of cheese balls.
I used to be very blasé about it when I was younger – sure, I’m bigger than the average bear but I’m as healthy as on ox. I’ll be fine. Except, somewhere around my late forties, my stamina disappeared faster than a puff of smoke on a windy day, and shit started to hurt. And somehow, despite people who knew about stuff like that the world over declaring it to be inevitable, I was naive enough to believe that it would never happen to me.
I can’t help wondering whether there are things on the inside of my body that I can’t see which have taken a proper battering as a result of me yo-yo dieting for the vast majority of my life. I mean, there’s plenty of evidence on the outside…one look at my bingo wings and it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that they’ve been fat and not so fat and then fatter again on an endless loop for the last forty years. I wave my arms and there’s immediately a tsunami going on in my sleeves.
It’s not pretty, but I doubt it will kill me. Same with the dimples in my knees…unsightly, but harmless in the grand scheme of things. There’s probably a bloke with a scalpel somewhere who would happily suck nip and tuck the evidence away for an appropriate fee and who knows, if I win the lottery I might choose to walk that path. To be honest though, I find myself more pre-occupied with what’s going on inside.
I remember reading once that if you stop smoking before you’re forty, by the time you’re fifty your lungs will look like you never smoked. No residual harm. I quit one month before my fortieth birthday, so by rights my lungs should be as pink and healthy as a baby’s bum by now. I wonder how long it’ll take all my other bits and pieces to forgive me for subjecting them to a lifetime of food abuse…? They surely must be more battered than those in the body of a fifty-year-old lifelong skinny string bean.
I wish this epiphany hadn’t come so late in life, I mean I’m not old old, but if I’d got the measure of my Asshole voice much earlier I can’t help thinking that my engine room would be looking a little less tarnished as I bump into my middle years. I’m just grateful that the lights are all on now. I’m doing better.
I know that cheese balls aren’t a food group, and that making healthy choices is much easier once you’ve built up a head of steam. I know that using the remote to switch TV channels doesn’t constitute exercise, and I’ve learned that even a knackered old body will respond given the right sort of encouragement.
I feel strong, actually. I had a great walk yesterday with a bunch of good friends…it wasn’t hard, even though there was a lot of going up and down. It was just enjoyable you know? I didn’t really think about the walking, I was too busy looking around at all the beautiful scenery and watching Charlie dog having a ball jumping in and out of the river. I could have been doing this years ago, and it pisses me right off that I wasn’t.
But I am now, and that’s what matters, right? 🙂
