Healthy Tomorrow Starts Today! My Weight Loss Journey
With my 38th birthday come and gone I feel very optimistic about my progress. I achieved losing over 40 lbs by that time. I am walking from 1 block when I started to 4-5km almost every day now. Many aspects of my life are seeing […]
Today was very nice to step on the scale. I have been struggling the past few weeks. My weight loss seemed to have leveled off right before hitting my first goal of losing 40lbs. It had been frustratingly stuck. Today stepping on the scale and […]
These past few months have been going really well up to this point. When I first started a healthy tomorrow today I began with the foremost goal of clean healthy eating . Exercise was to be an addition at a later date. What was surprising was how fast I began to want to exercise and how much I have been enjoying it. So much so that until recently I had been walking 5km everyday after my weight lifting. Unfortunately this eagerness has led me to now working my way through a persistent foot injury.
I decided to order myself some shoes online. The ones I had noticed seemed to give my feel the most support in the past. I am a big advocate in buying what you need to take care of yourself while exercising including good shoes. These shoes worked great, with one exception. Because they were new they caused a significant blister on the back of my foot over my Achilles tendon. Foolishly instead of taking a day off I chose to ignore this blister and the pain. The next day I again went for my walk causing a significant issue with this blister. This was however not the ultimate problem. Instead of resting to rectify the issue I decided instead to just switch to a sandal shoe I had. This sandal had no back allowing my foot to heal while I continued my walks. This worked well at first and with a few weeks of walking and some moleskin to protect the problem it has been rectified. Unfortunately it cause a whole new problem and I am now dealing with some internal foot issue on my right foot. This has caused significant pain after walking. I am certain this is due to walking with limited arch support in these sandals. In any case all issues are involving one factor. Not giving my foot the rest it needs and pushing things too far.
When I was fitter than I am now many many years ago I decided to try to go for a jog. In my mind it was a good idea. I felt pretty good and I thought I would just go as far as I could then just walk. Each day maybe I could go a little further. When I began to run it was very apparent this was a bad idea. It was not that my cardio could not hold up, or my legs even. But the shock being sent through my feet, knees and hips was beyond what I could have expected. That experiment stopped pretty fast and for good reason. When you are the size I am the impact magnification on joints and muscles is substantial. It is a vicious circle to be sure. To make you body move better you need to lose weight, to lose weight it helps to be able to move. I get it, and activity has to be done, but for me at my size, low impact is paramount to keeping injuries at bay. I also have to be cognizant of compounding issues and injuries as even walking is much higher impact on my body than to an average sized person.
As mentioned my walks have been passing the 5km mark. With this foot injury I decided to scale them back to 4km. This is where I feel comfortable, I am exercising, burning calories but not pushing the limits. 5km and above I can feel my feet are at the limit of what they want to be doing. I have to decide if pushing that extra km every time is worth the potential of a more serious injury that causes me to have to reduce or stop walking all together. It really comes down to risk management. I am happy walking 4km. It feels good, it makes a difference and for now it is what I will be doing.
Ultimately it is up to any individual to figure out where the line of challenging themselves and hindering themselves is. This process is full of ups and downs and looking at the larger picture is always important. For me that picture is achieved by eating healthy and exercises. That is the overarching primary goal for my actions. An extra km walk is nice, but I have decided it should never come at the potential coast of that ultimate goal.
I am at around the three month mark now and the difference in how I move and feel is night and day. Having written a lot about that so far and with how happy I am about that change. I have not mentioned much about […]
Three months is closing in from when I started this lifestyle change. The change is dramatic and so far most impactful in my mobility and energy. There is some difference in my appearance and a few people have noticed but this is not as important […]
Today was a fun day! I decided right before my walk that instead of going to my normal area I would try something new. I decided to call a friend and see if they wanted to go for a little hike. What was so fun about this for me was that when they said yes, I was excited. What is so different about that feeling is that going on a walk like this has often brought me apprehension and anxiety. I have referred many times to my weight loss so far as being very freeing. Like lifting chains off my shoulders that weigh me down. I can’t think of a better example of that metaphor than this walk.
Elk Falls is a beautiful park trail just 10 minutes out of town. I used to love going here when I was a kid. As the name suggests the trail ends at a spectacular waterfall. The trail was recently updated in the past few years. It now winds down a slope ending in a set of stairs and a bridge giving you an above view of the amazing falls.
I have done this walk a few times in recent years. Normally it is when someone is visiting and I want to show them the location. These other times have always been when I have had made previous efforts to lose weight. I have successfully completed this walk, but it always left me out of breath, needing many breaks and with back pain. In the recent year I would not have even attempted this walk. The hike back out involves many stairs and a slow climb up and out of about 1km. It is not something I would have been capable to complete.
Today was night and day from those experiences and was a lot of fun. walking up the stairs was no problem. I had to take no rests walking up the hill on the way back. The whole thing felt like I was now and finally totally mobile. It feels amazing to look forward to walks like this than to worry about if I will be able to complete them. Or if I will be so slow as to hold up people I go with. This lifestyle change has literally turned fear and anxiety into fun and relaxation.
While this is not a new place for me, it is one I have not been to often or recently. There are in fact many local areas I have not been to or not been to in a very long time. I was never an overly outgoing person but I did have a spark of adventure in me at one point. It has been weighed down by my size and back pain for an awful long time. It makes me very optimistic about what could be in my future and what I may be able to achieve. I think maybe underneath all this mess I created for myself I am an optimist. I just needed to let that optimism breath a little.
Today I was mowing the lawn yet again and it was becoming overwhelming obvious how productivity increases with this lifestyle change. The thing I realized yesterday, and was so obvious today was that I had zero back pain. Up until now I have been enjoying […]
Weight loss to Date -32.8lbs Today I feel very strong, not just physically but in many aspects. I am learning the strength you gain when you convert your lifestyle is not just the weight you can lift. The lifestyle change strengthens your ability to withstand […]
Weight loss to date -30.2lbs
Trying to quantify how much better I feel on week seven is hard to do. Not because it is hard to find what is improving, but so many things are improving at once. I am now noticing a difference and improvement in all aspects of my health that I can think of. In regards to my mobility the most interesting part is not just how far I am now walking, or how often but how fast.
As I have mentioned before in previous posts when I began this I could not even make it to my mailbox without back pain. My very first walking attempt was to muster the courage to walk around my neighbourhood block. It was the very model of a basic start point, close to home, and not very far. I was very happy with myself to have complete that small walk as it was twice as far then to my mail box. Fast forward only 7 weeks, I am now walking 4km almost every day, and almost every day I am walking faster and with less strain.
When I started this my goal was to move better, live longer, have less health complications. Those goals are still all primary. Right now the focus is not to be able to walk at any specific pace. Having said that, it is certainly encouraging to be able to push myself faster than I have been able to before. It is kind of fun to be passing people on my walks like I am navigating some passing maneuver in a race car. I think it is important to listen to my body with these improvements and on days were I feel I need to slow down I do just that. I am not sure where these increased speed developments are taking me, but I watched someone jogging the other day. That is something very far down the line for me, but I am no longer counting it as impossible.
Buy the equipment you need to be comfortable. Good socks, shorts, shoes, whatever your need to feel your best working out. Having quality socks with breathing tops and padded soles have helped a surprising amount reducing foot pain. they are a tad expensive at about $15, but are holding up well and I think will last a long while. You don’t need to break the bank to start exercising, but look after your feet.
Look for all you are achieving all the time. If you focus on one or two things you can feel discouraged. For example if your weight loss stalls you may feel down for a bit but are you moving better each day? Are your clothes fitting better? Are you moving a little slower but you lost a few more pounds? I have even notice my skin colouring has improved for some reason. That is not a metric I thought I would be counting but it is actually nice to see. You can see where I am going with this. I am getting more convinced that changing your lifestyle in this manner improves a great many aspects of ones life. Finding and measuring those success may be a key motivator to a happy successful lifestyle change.
Weight loss to date 29.8lbs As I am progressing through this weight loss and lifestyle change I am constantly reassessing things. My activity, my eating, my reasons for doing this. It seems like each day my activity increases and my ideas around food seem to […]
