Weight Loss #5 / Low Fat and Exercise

After the birth of my child, I was 43 pounds overweight. The baby kept me REALLY busy! For the first 5 years, I was more focused on motherhood than I was on my obsession with weight loss, although it was always there lingering in the back of my mind. During those years, I tried a couple of “weekly-weigh-in” programs that counseled me to eat the “right” foods in the right amounts, but it was very time consuming. With a child, and working a full day again, I had very little time for anything else. Still, I would lose about 15 pounds on these programs before I gave up. I’d soon gain it back, and return to lose it again. This happened a few times before my body finally settled itself back to my original 20-30 pounds of excess weight.

My daughter started kindergarten and I started thinking about what my life would be like once she was in school full time! How about when she went off to college?!! I was a wreck! The obsession was back in full force. I HAD to lose weight!! Of course, looking back now, I can see that my relationship with my husband had reached a point where I was thinking about a separation. Focusing completely on my daughter had been my way of not dealing with that issue. Now, all of a sudden, with the thought of her leaving (even though she had only just started school) I had to face some difficult decisions. So instead, I reverted right back to doing what I’d always done in order to avoid emotional issues, I focused on my weight problem! I blamed everything on the weight. If I was thin, I would be a happier person. My relationship with my husband would be better. My life would be easier. Everything would be perfect. Wouldn’t it?

One day I was standing on a grocery check-out line and I saw a little book called the “T-Factor” Diet, on the magazine rack. It said, LOW FAT WEIGHT LOSS. Of course, that attracted my attention right off, especially the WEIGHT LOSS part. It was one of those little books that only cost a couple of dollars, so I looked at it quickly and threw it in with the rest of my groceries. At the end of the day I picked it up and read about the concept of eating only low-fat and no-fat foods. I thought I’d tried all of the known diets by then, but this was new to me, I was interested. The book went on to explain that the diet consisted of eating very little fat, especially saturated fat and cholesterol. It said that it was important to get some fat in the diet for good health but not much was needed. I think the number was about 20 grams of fat, per day, for women and 40 grams of fat for men. The rest of the book was a list of foods with their fat and calorie values. It seemed easy enough, but the thing that appealed to me the most was that it said there was no need to count calories. I could lose weight by just counting grams of fat and I could eat as much of the low-fat foods as I wanted. Depriving myself of food has always been a diet-breaker for me and I knew that the diets that worked best for me in the past, were the ones that didn’t limit my food intake. So, this low-fat, no food limit idea really appealed to me. I looked up some of the fat values of the things I liked to eat, and started the diet right away. I found that bread was very low in fat. I could eat an entire loaf of Italian or French bread if I was really hungry. At least that was MY interpretation of the diet. If it was a low-fat or no-fat food, I could eat as much of it as I wanted. Of course that really isn’t the way it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to keep an eye on the calories too, but I just followed it in my own way and ate as much as I wanted of anything low in fat. And it worked! I lost 20 pounds in 4 months!! I ate a lot of food at first, and then I didn’t want as much, as I learned to eat a more balanced low-fat diet. In other words, I only ate an entire loaf of Italian bread a couple of times before I realized that I didn’t need a whole loaf to make me feel satisfied.

Looking better made me feel better about myself. I also had a lot of energy and felt healthier. I started thinking about doing some kind of exercise to go with the new weight loss. I hadn’t exercised in YEARS! I remembered that in highschool I used to like to run. I never liked walking much, but I loved to run when I was younger. So I decided to give running a try. I asked the guys at work what I would need to get started. These guys were cops and some of them were in great shape and ran every day and worked out in the gym. They all told me the same thing. Get the best running shoes I could get, and that was it. I went out and bought expensive well-fitted running shoes and set out early one morning for what I thought would be a nice long jog. I got as far as the stop sign down the street, which was probably about 200 yards away, and was so out of breath that I had to stop and lean on it to try to keep from falling over. I was standing there, bent over at the waist, trying to breath, when a car stopped and the driver asked if I was alright and could he help me or call someone for me. I couldn’t even answer. I tried to smile and shook my head and waved him on. I couldn’t believe how out of shape I was. I walked slowly back home, trying to breath and feeling embarrassed and defeated. I felt bad about myself for the rest of the day, but I didn’t let that stop me from getting back out there the next day. It was hard the next day too, but at least I knew what to expect. I ran to the stop sign and this time I didn’t stop, I just started walking back and when I caught my breath I ran the rest of the way home. It took me 2 weeks of this running and walking to be able to run to that stop sign and back without stopping. Then, I measured a half mile distance with my car and did the same thing with that. I would run a ways and then walk until I caught my breath and run again. I did this for another 2 weeks and when I could finally do it without walking, I measured out a mile. After less than 2 months, I was running a mile out and a mile back and I wasn’t walking anymore. I did this at a slow steady pace, but I was really proud of myself! I was running six days a week and Sunday was my day off. It was October and Thanksgiving was less than a month away. In my home town there is a five-mile road race that has become the traditional way to start Thanksgiving Day. Everyone in town either runs the 5 mile race, or goes to watch and tailgate. It’s a fun race. Some people dress up as Pilgrims or Indians or turkeys or anything else they can think of. I had run it once in highschool, but now I always joined my family’s big tailgate party to cheer on friends that were running. I started to wonder if I could run 5 miles. It was a scary thought. Two miles was still a long way for me. I didn’t tell anyone that I was thinking about running, but I thought a lot about it myself. One day I ran 3 miles and I had no problem with that, so I kept running 3 miles a day, and two weeks before the race, I announced to everyone that I would be running and that I expected them to be out there to cheer me on. My obsession with weight loss was gone. My running became my stress reliever. I cherished the time to myself. It was my time to think and be alone. I lost another 10 pounds and ran for the next six years. During that time I weighed 120 pounds. I ran 5 to 6 days a week all year round and sometimes I would run a road race on the weekends. I continued to eat a low-fat diet and had a body-fat index of 15%. The guys at work (yep, those same guys that had given me advice in the beginning) often came to me for advice on diet and exercise and people would always ask me the same thing, “How do you keep motivated?” “How do you do it every day?” My answer was always the same. “Just do it”! Don’t think about it, “just do it”!!

A. zudro

Tags: Exercise, Health, Low Fat, WEIGHT LOSS