skinny

No fewer than three people have commented to me this week that I must not be eating because it looks like I'm "wasting away". Truth is I haven't lost any weight in about ten months - I've been at 175 ± 3 since last August, which is the same weight I've been at for the past eight years (except for a brief soiree in '06 and '07 into ~200 territory). Since I hit "adulthood" I've been pretty close to the same weight the whole way through. I was a little lighter when I got to college (around 160) and there was a time I pretty much stopped exercising at all and just drank a lot of beer that pushed me up over two hundred, but mostly it's been steady.

It got me to thinking how much of it is genetic predisposition (metabolism) and how much of it is diet and exercise. As soon as I started riding my bike and playing basketball again, my weight returned to normal. The funny thing is that I didn't look much bigger, at least, I don't think I did, I just had less muscle and an extra inch of fat around my midsection. Which doesn't make since since muscle is supposed to weigh more than fat.

Either way, the experience brought me to one very important point: it's about taking small steps. Go slow, one step at a time, baby steps, and any other cliché you can come up. Tasks that seem daunting need to be broken down into smaller parts. It's not about losing twenty pounds and becoming healthy this week or this month, it's about spending twenty minutes on the bike in the morning before work and twenty when you get home. It's about replacing that danish and coffee with an apple and glass of milk. Maybe not even every day, start off by doing it on Fridays, then after a couple weeks, Thursdays and Fridays and go from there, in a couple months it'll be every day and the difference will be noticeable. Apply the same approach for large projects, like say, Master's projects that seem impossibly demanding =\

Anyways, don't worry Mom, I'm eating plenty.