Running or running or walking is the easiest thing you can do to burn calories.
Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who can't run and hates to walk. I have really bad shin splints and even running on a rubber track causes me a lot of pain.
If I'm walking, I want to be walking somewhere, not just walking for the sake of walking. But I live in Seattle at the bottom of a hill. Everywhere I want to go is uphill. I am just not very good at that.
This is ironic, considering how much I love hiking. But hiking is a whole different zeitgeist. If I had a way to walk into the woods, with a river or lake on one side of me and mountains and trees on the other, I would be gone every day. I would be muscular and thin and strong.
Why can't I apply those same feelings to walking in the city? Even if I'm walking on concrete, next to hot stinky asphalt parking lots, past cracker box apartment buildings, it all looks the same. Walking the six or seven blocks uphill it takes to get to Trader Joe's, I just have a hard time getting started.
But see, that's just me, whining. If I sit on my butt all day, by the end of the day I'm extremely depressed that I didn't get out and do something. Sometimes I spend all day in my pajamas.
And because I have an eating disorder that will never go away, I pretty much constantly think about food and plan my meals and what I'm going to eat later.
The worst thing I do is I sit and formulate a plan, for instance, to write something. I am a writer. I used to get paid for it. I have books in progress that I could be working on. But instead of getting up at a certain time and sitting in a certain place like my office chair and writing one of my books, I just make my bed and then sit on it with the pillows propping up my back. I turn on the TV and I watch it. I rarely get up except to go to the kitchen and get some food. I spend a lot of time planning what I'm going to eat, including how I'm going to cook it and what I have in my pantry and what I have to go to the store and buy.
Now, I don't say these things to put myself down or reveal something secret and negative about myself. I suffer from depression and PTSD and it takes a superhuman effort for me to do anything that involves physical activity. I maintain my weight because I control how much I eat, but I don't add much exercise to that, which would make things so much easier. I fight depression all day long and at night, I cycle through nightmares and in the morning I am tangled up in my covers or they are on the floor.
This actually factors into my eating disorder, even though I was a thin young woman with what people called a nice figure until the shit hit the fan. I'm not really sure when that was or what the shit was, but it was about the same time as I gave birth.
Up until that time I had always been able to count on male company and a lot of it because I had a good figure and I knew how to dress. Gaining weight change my entire wardrobe and sapped my confidence.
That's a long story, but I bet you that someone here is nodding her head or his head and saying, "That's the same thing that happened to me."
I know there's a wise old saying that sums this up really well but I can't think of it right now. It's all about putting the cart before the horse. Well, I put the horse before the cart and the cart just sits there and the horse is completely bored. And instead of doing something about it, I just stare and reflect on the failures of my life.
Fortunately, I can usually purge my feelings everyday and banish them to a place where I can't find them and they can't find me. But if not for the fact that I took the step 13 years ago and had RYGB surgery, I don't know where I would be today. RYGB surgery changed my life and made it possible for me to HAVE a life.
So, for people who might be struggling, even people like me who struggle to get up and get started and go out the door and walk, try to remember that action can destroy negativity. It's like those arcade games, like Galaga, where you shoot a missile and boom, the spaceship in front of you just blows up. My eating disorder is my spaceship. My missile is my consciousness and self-awareness.
If anyone else feels like this, I hope it's comforting for you to know that you're not alone.
