I should lay this on the table right away: I’m not trying to lose weight. I may possibly be the only woman in America who is not actively trying to lose weight. Now, lest you think me invulnerable to the pop-culture swamp that I live in, I would like to be about 10 pounds lighter. I would. But I know I don’t need to be. And it’s possible that I wouldn’t be healthy at that dream weight anyways. But the real reason is just that my body likes where I’m at. All my adult life, sans five pregnancies, I’ve been within a few pounds of where I’m at now. I can accept that. I can love it even. So there you go. This is not a weight-loss blog. You will find no ticker-tape on the sidebar charting my “progress” to oblivion. You will find no exclamatory posts trilling my new poundage. Nor will you read self-evisceration for when the scale goes up.
I do weigh myself. Daily. I also chart my bodyfat percentage, my lean muscle mass, my measurements, my cholesterol, my resting heart rate and a host of other numbers that I obsess over. It’s my way to measure what works and what doesn’t in this land of pie-in-the-sky promises where everyone is trying to sell you something and where no one is telling you they love you for who you are. My numbers are just numbers to me. A point of comparison.
So what do I want, then? I’d like to add a bit of muscle and lose a bit of fat. I want to climb a 5.12 rock wall. I want to run a marathon. I want to jump double-dutch again. I want to do Scorpion in yoga. But even all that isn’t what drives me to daily sweat fests at the gym and an eating regimine that pretty much everyone tells me is insane. The thing that I love is the thrill of the journey. The process of finding stuff out. The little discoveries, the trial and error, the measuring and accounting. The constant change. It’s why I’ll never stop. It’s just fun. 🙂