Month: January 2011

I was fat for a long time and didn’t even know it. How could that be? I’m not sure.

I was always a thin kid, didn’t start really chubbing out until I hit 30 or so. I kept buying larger waist-sized jeans: 34. 36. 38. 40. 42. 44…. 44!!!! That was a mini-wake-up call, but not definitive.

I remember going to a reunion of people I hadn’t seen in 20 years back in 2003. I saw a friend of mine who had gotten much larger and thought to myself, “Wow, Jeff sure got huge.” I didn’t see the photos of that event until many years later on Facebook, and you know what? I was huger than Jeff! But I didn’t realize it at the time.

My true wake-up call came in 2007, when I saw photos of myself on vacation. I was just large, larger than I thought I should be. 5’10”, 235. That’s obese. Plus, I was on two blood-pressure medications, and my insides would hurt for no apparent reason. I guess the fat was probably squishing my organs.

It was then that I woke up. Gotta lose weight.

Have you had your wake-up call? Have you been buying larger and larger jeans, but not thinking, “Hmmm…. Maybe I need to lose a few pounds”? Maybe you are like I was at one point and just figured — and this makes sense if you look around — “Well, I’m getting older and that automatically means getting fatter.”

WAKE UP!

I have been working out with Tony Horton’s P90X and One-On-One DVDs for about a year now. I was, and continue to be, amazed at the differences these workouts have made in my body.

But some days I just don’t feel like working out, and today was one of those days.

I’ve learned over this past year that these “lazy” times appear for different reasons. Today’s reason was an attack of allergies that had given me a huge headache.

I was going to just do Ab Ripper X, which is a 15-minute ab workout, and some yoga, but, man, my head was splitting, so I only did the Ab Ripper X workout, and quit after that.

Do I feel as if I failed because I didn’t get a full workout in today? No. At least I did something, and that counts for a lot in my book. Now, I can’t do that every day, or then I have failed, but is taking a bit of a break for a day all that bad? Absolutely not.

Today I listened to my body, and it was telling me to only do the abs.

Tomorrow will be a different story.