Typing While Walking

At the risk of being one of ‘those people’ I’m going to talk about a topic which has been done and done again and frankly I’m not sure of the utility in covering it again. Why? Well, diet and weight loss tend to be of interest to all, fads abound, and quite possibly every human being is unique in their approach to making it work for them. In general, the equation is simple enough: eat less, exercise more, and the fat will reduce. Note that I’m not saying weight, here. If you are moving more and working muscle, then you may weigh more before you firm up and weigh less. Muscle is denser than fat. Knowing this equation will work, and getting it firmly lodged between your ears are two different things.

We’re surrounded by messages on weight loss. Told that being fat isn’t bad for you, in recent years, which is on the face of it, ridiculous. Should you lose all the fat? No. Fat has purposes, it is a reserve that your body can pull on in times of scarcity (no matter how unlikely that is for me, personally) or in times of illness. There is a reason rapid inexplicable weight loss is an alarming sign to get thee to a doctor and figure it out, now. Gross obesity is never good for you, though. Body positivity is all well and good but only to a comfortably curvy level; Rueben’s women were rounded, not round. Carrying around more weight than you can structurally bear leads to wear and tear on joints, your heart works harder, and the toll of age and misuse is bad enough as it is.

To come back to the title of this post, I am typing it while I am walking on the treadmill. I lack the time to get outside and walk most of the time, and I have a treadmill in my studio I can’t take out, so why not put it to good use? I can work and walk, and I need to do more of it. The discipline to get up and move is vital. Literal sense of the word, there. If I sit, as a writer, an artist, and marketing is also a sedentary task, then I am condemning myself to a shorter and more unpleasant life. I’m a woman of a certain age. I need the muscle mass and the bone density, now more than ever. When my husband lovingly and gently tells me not to diet on his behalf because he always sees me as beautiful, I have to explain it’s not about him, although it is in an oblique way. It’s about me getting more healthy, stronger, and doing what I have to do to get there.

This is what I have to focus on, when the temptation to just sit, and bake, and not do… anything is strong. Keeping focus on the motivation is the thing I probably struggle with most. This year I did the diet that has worked for me in the past, going low carb and intermittent fasting, and lost about ten pounds until I couldn’t manage the diet, and life, so let the diet go and regained five pounds again. It was very frustrating hitting a point where I was carefully watching what I ate… and maintaining, not losing, for months. I don’t know. I do know I’m in a season of life where the endocrine system is (more) out of whack. I may not be able to lose the weight.

What I can do is rebuild the muscle, one treadmill session at a time, and adding in other exercises as I recover from this last couple of weeks of being ill. Every time I fall down into a comfy armchair, I have to get back up again. It is easier, that getting back up, with practice. Movement, focus, and right now? Remembering that this actually feels good once I’ve gotten over the initial reaction of dreading activity. Change states in people, as in chemistry, take energy and can be eased by use of a catalyst.

Which is why I wrote this post while I was walking. Sometimes for me, the catalyst is seeing someone else take an action I know and need to make as well. Perhaps this can be your catalyst to stand up, move, and get your heart pumping.