The Sorness Sets In: Being more active as I approach 40

   I've written before about taking better care of myself including a plan to walk 8000 steps a day. I know I also updated my progress two weeks in, but now I'm over a month into those goals and holding pretty steady to them. I'm not always completely on time with my updated bedtime (10:30-11:30) on the weekend, but I'm never off by more than 45 minutes or so, so I'll call that a success. 

  I'm now a month into my goal of moving more and I am most certainly doing that.  My average steps have increased drastically, as has my average activity level.

Six Months: Steps aren't the only metric of activity, but they're a pretty good start. 

 

One Month: Obviously the average has increased SIGNIFICANTLY.

  Hell, even my "low activity" day was close to my six month average, at 5,072 steps. I decided, as I started this project, that a 4 week spin-up time was good enough to decide if I was going to stick with it. If nothing else, the walks have been amazing for my dogs who are happier, healthier, and generally more ready to go to bed at the end of the day. That said, I told myself that if I stuck with it for four weeks I would start going back to the gym: I am paying for a YMCA membership, after all. 

  See, in 2013 I was around 400lbs, mostly fat, very unhappy, and extremely unhealthy. I decided in December of that year I would start counting calories. Initially it sounded like empty promises, since I decided that in mid-November, but it was really so I could not worry about it and have a big Thanksgiving meal with my family. I bought a food scale and started with the only focus being to get 2,000 calories a day. 

  By the end of December I had lost 31 pounds. I had decided when I started that I would eat clean for 30 days, have a single cheat day that coincided with my plans to spend New Years' Eve with my friends, and then go back to clean eating. After that I opted for 60 days of clean eating. In two months I lost 50 pounds and decided to get a gym membership and start lifting weights to try and restructure my body. What followed was me figuring out what worked best for me, learning how inflexible I am, and another 9 months of counting calories. By November 2024, a couple of weeks shy of a year of my decision to count calories, I was 262.3lbs, the lowest I had weighed since my addiction days, and the lowest healthy weight I had ever been in my life. 

  It's pretty safe to say that I have the discipline to override whether motivation exists or not. I don't enjoy working out, I hate every minute of it while I'm doing it but I feel better about myself after the fact, so it balances net positive I think.  

  It took 12 years of inactivity and increasing sloth for me to get close to my old weight, and even when I did I am smaller in size than the last time I weighed 370-380 pounds. I truly restructured my body and put on a lot of muscle during that year. The increased steps were a measure to combat feeling bad, I've been struggling with my body image for a while now and they were a start, but it's time to add more to the pile now that I know I can be consistent in my movement. 

  It seems to be working, remember that I've been going on around 2.2 mile walks every night for the last month when you see this: 

The bulk of the increase is "traditional strength training" and is determined by my effort rating.

  My walk effort has actually reduced by about 11% in the last week, but that's most likely because I went for a few walks during the day over the last month and I haven't in the last week what with it being blistering hot outside. That said, I intend to take the dogs out for morning walks in addition to our evening walks on the weekends from now on; they're just so damn happy about the time and who am I to deny them that or deny myself a longer-lived companion? 

  I started back in the gym, I had flirted with it a few months ago but fell off when I was more active in the garden. It's really easy to allow "some activity" to override "scheduled activity," when the additional activity should be just that, additional. Next thing I knew it had been two months and I hadn't been to the gym, so I'm back at it and the soreness has set in. 

  I divide my workouts into Push (Triceps, Chest, Shoulders), Pull (Back, Biceps), and Legs (...legs, what did you expect?). Right now I'm going three times a week but I've made the decision to follow my one month trial setup right on down that road. If I am consistent in three times a week for the next month, I'm going to move to a schedule that looks like Push, Pull, Legs, Rest, Push, Pull, Legs, Rest. It will give me a kind of cascading schedule since it doesn't line up with the days of the week but I don't think that will really present a problem. Even having increased from 3 sets per exercise to 5 sets, it's still less than an hour in the gym. It does skew a little more than that if I throw a swim in at the end, and gods know I need the cardio. 

  I'm aging, my body had been hurting significantly, and I'm pretty damn mad that moving more was the only real answer I needed to alleviate that. I'm also pretty mad that something so simple is helping me improve my relationship with my body slowly, and helping me feel better mentally because what the fuck do you mean it's that easy? Why haven't I been doing this? Why did I let myself stop (the answer is a relationship that didn't like how much time I spent in the gym, but that's neither here nor there anymore.) 

Ugh, it's annoying. And good. I'm doing alright.