Tag Archives: weight loss

Post-Surgery Update: Part 2

July 22, 2022 By in Uncategorized Tags: Leave a comment

I’ve put this off for a while, partly because my feelings about the aftermath of the surgery are complicated, and partly because some of the fallout is still going on.

Once the drains were out (which normally takes two weeks, but for me took a month), I thought things would finally begin to heal. I was wrong.

The first indication of trouble was that the intersection of the two huge incisions on my stomach began to open up. First it was a tiny hole, then a series of tiny holes, then one big hole, leaking yellowish/greenish fluid (there is no better color to say “this isn’t a good thing”). The surgeon thought it was pseudomonas, a fairly common post-surgical infection normally cured with the antibiotic Cipro. I took the Cipro for ten days…nothing. Another ten days…nothing. Another ten days…nothing.

By this time, I had moved. Going to my surgeon’s office twice a week for him to look at me for five minutes and swear I was getting better wasn’t an option anymore. I went to my regular doctor, who cultured the wound (which had now become three wounds at different points along the incision). It turned out to be actinomycosis, an infection so rare that neither my regular doctor nor my surgeon had ever seen a case of it. I was referred to an infectious disease specialist, who confirmed the diagnosis. The treatment is a LONG course of penicillin.

It’s the end of July now, so it’s been nearly six months since my surgery. I’ve been on penicillin for two and a half months, and I’ll be on it for at least another four months. Probably longer. The infectious disease specialist said that actinomyces is a really slow-growing bacteria, but that means it’s also slow to cure. And it’s hard to tell how things are going – the disgusting discharge has slowed, but I now have about twelve open wounds across my lower stomach, with new ones opening up occasionally.

Was it so bad?

There are so many things about this surgery that didn’t turn out the way I was hoping. The first is that I had specifically asked my surgeon to remove my belly button. There’s a complicated reason for this that I won’t go into here, but I made myself very, very clear. He ignored me. What I have now is a wrinkle of skin a good 4″ higher than my belly button should be, in the middle of a bunch of other scarring. It looks like what it is – a mistake. The second is that the loose skin I thought he would remove from the backs of my thighs is still there. My buttocks look like deflated balloons. And the disgusting, leaking, yellowy-green cherry on this botched meat cake is the line of open wounds along my lower abdomen.

I know far more about wound care than I ever thought I would. There’s now a shelf above my dresser that’s full of nothing but combine pads (they’re thick, 5″x9″ surgical pads), surgical sponges (normal people would call them gauze), and prescription antibiotic spray. The amount of medical waste I generate is embarrassing, because the wound dressings have to be changed at least twice a day, and medical stuff is all individually-wrapped for sterility.

All this drama has meant that it’s taking me a lot longer to process the emotions than I think it should have. I’m finally coming around to feeling okay about how I look in clothes. It’s still a surprise to me that I now fit in easy-to-find, off the rack clothes, and post-surgery, they fit the way I expect them to. It’s now been nearly three years since I had my bariatric surgery, and I haven’t experienced the weight rebound a lot of people experience. I weigh myself daily, and it’s been within a few pounds for the last year and a half. My bariatric surgeon, my regular doctor, and my other surgeon all say this bodes very well for my long-term success. So, that’s a victory.

I wonder how long it’ll be before the good feelings outweigh the bad regarding this whole exercise. We’ll see.

The Next Step

January 31, 2022 By in health, weight Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

The Lead Up

In thirteen hours, I take the next step in this whole bariatric process. Back in September, I went to a follow-up with my bariatric surgeon and asked when I should think about getting all the extra skin removed, and he said now would be the right time. He said he recommended it as the final step in the journey.

That was the first shock. For some reason, I had gotten it into my mind that skin surgery, the step that would take off a bag of fatty skin from my lower abdomen that’s been there since before I was 20, was something I had to earn. What did “earn” mean, though? I’ve already lost over 100 pounds. My weight has been steady for months without the rebound I’ve heard of from others. What else did I think I needed to do?

Nearly 20 years ago, I tried getting a tummy tuck. I went to a surgeon who first told me I needed to lose another 20 pounds. He said that weight loss for people “my age” was nearly impossible, though.

I was 36.

I lost the weight and paid him far more than I could afford for the surgery, and instead of doing an abdominoplasty, he did liposuction on my inner thighs and under my breasts. It wasn’t what I asked for, it wasn’t what I paid for, and at the time, I didn’t know what to do. I never talked about it, I tried not to think about it, and to this day, I have a hard time thinking about it. Every part of that experience was deeply damaging, starting with this man’s dismissive assertion that I’d never be able to lose weight, and that what I wanted was not just a waste of time, but an outcome I didn’t deserve.

I went into the entire bariatric surgery thing knowing that I’d be facing this scenario at some point. What I have on my side is many more years of life experience, and a good grip on the knowledge that what happened to me the last time should never have happened to anyone. If the statute of limitations on medical malpractice hadn’t long since run out, I would have sued this man for everything he was worth (which would have been a whole lot financially and very little morally).

But this leaves me in such a weird place. In twelve and a half hours, I’m having the surgery I wanted decades ago.

The Next Few Hours

But that’s not the only thing freaking me out. The other thing is the surgery itself.

The doctor came highly recommended, and I’m sure I’m in good hands, but this will be the fourth abdominal surgery I’ve had. I had my tubes tied after my younger daughter was born, I had an emergency gallbladder removal, and then bariatric surgery. After every one of them, I was in a lot of pain. When you can’t use your abs, anything that involves changing position is hard. Standing to sitting, sitting to lying, lying to sitting, sitting to standing, agony to agony. In a perfect world, I’d be able to stand on a step with my back against a soft surface, and the entire thing would gently lean back until I was lying down. Not going to happen.

The anticipation of pain is a punishment all by itself and is the basis of many forms of torture. It’s why I believe most doctors avoid the use of words like “pain” and “hurt.” Most doctors will come at you with a bone saw and tell you that as they take your leg, you’ll feel “discomfort.” But this doctor has told me more than once that this procedure is “very painful.” It wasn’t just the one time he said it during the initial consultation. There was also the several times he said it during the second consultation. And the eight million times it was mentioned in the sheaf of paperwork I had to sign in the pre-op appointment. These people want to make sure I know this is going to hurt. A lot.

Into the Future

This is the final step toward becoming something I’ve never been. As of tomorrow, I will be yet another size and shape. There are certain clothes I haven’t worn because they just don’t look right, and this surgery will remedy that. It will make finding bathings suits and skirts that fit easier. It’ll mean that I won’t be dressing around the one part of my body that’s still out of proportion.

This is it. The last step. The last thing I have to do. Apart from the familiar maintenance of eating right and getting enough exercise, this is the last step toward a goal that I’ve realized is always going to hover on the horizon.

Fictional Normal

November 30, 2021 By in health, vacation, weight Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I just got back from a two-week cruise. I could tell you about the surreality of no longer being camera shy (as though not having my picture taken would hide the fact that I was fat), or the subtle shifts in how I viewed my fellow passengers, but what I want to focus on is the food.

There are two types of dining on a cruise. The first is the all-you-can-eat kind (which some passengers seem to take as a personal challenge) and there is the sit-down kind. Our evening meals were all the sit-down kind with the same two servers, so we got to know them quite well. The dinner menus were normally two or three appetizer selections, a few soup and salad options, several entrees, and a few desserts. I normally ordered either an appetizer or salad, and an entree, and then dessert. Every time, I would eat a few bites of the dish and be ready for the next one. It took a week to convince our servers that this was just how I eat. I was never going to finish anything, and I didn’t appreciate being harangued to keep eating. Yes, the food was excellent. No, I wasn’t going to have any more.

At the all-you-can-eat places (the breakfast/lunch buffets and the fast-food type places near the pool), I realized that I no longer felt self-conscious about going up and getting an ice cream cone or plate of fries. I was going to eat what I was going to eat, and didn’t particularly care what anyone thought about it. I was surprised, though, at the number of people who piled their plates full at every meal, and then sat there looking miserable as they ate. If food is your comfort, shouldn’t you at least enjoy it?

Here’s where things got weird. Over the course of two weeks, I gained weight just like a lot of people do. And by “gained weight,” I mean that I was .1 pounds over my normal range. In the past, I would likely have gained at least 5 pounds while on vacation, and I would have done what everyone does: I would have stopped eating and started working out 12 hours a day. And in the past, I would have either lost none of the weight, or actually gained another pound or two. That was the reality I dealt with, and the whole time, I was angry that I wasn’t “normal.” “Normal” people didn’t gain five pounds on vacation. “Normal” people lose the five pounds once they get back. (I know this isn’t necessarily true – but in my mind, this was how it worked for everyone who wasn’t me.)

When I got back, my eating habits went back to what they always are when I’m at home, as did my exercise routine. And just like that, my weight was back to what I usually expect. I’m now what I used to think of as “normal.” But am I?

I’m starting to realize that the reality I experienced before was much closer to normal than the one I experience now. That not everyone can step back into their normal lives and lose their vacation weight in a week. But I also realize that I had been sold a lie by a commercial culture whose main aim is to get me to hate myself enough to buy endless products to improve myself. The “normal” I had aimed for was a fantasy that I would never have achieved on my own. In so many ways – from the variety of clothing options available to me to the way I do my grocery shopping – the definition of “normal” has changed radically for me. “Normal” is a fiction used to make me feel like I’m not part of the group, and that I should want to be.

I don’t want to be part of the group, especially any group whose main focus is how I look. I don’t think anyone should be subjected to that. The way to break out of that mentality is to first recognize that if your definition of “normal” comes from outside yourself – from the media or your social group or even your family – it’s fictional. Normal comes from inside yourself. Normal is where you feel healthy and comfortable in your own skin. It should never be anything else.

Moving the Needle

September 28, 2021 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

You’ve heard me say it before – the rules regarding diet and exercise are different if you’re fat. How many times did I exercise until I injured myself and diet until I felt faint, only to watch the scale fail to move, or worse, go up? Even my husband, who truly believed the “just make calories in less than calories out” lie, couldn’t believe it when I showed him that at the end of a week, the scale had crept up another two pounds.

Cut to now. For the last few weeks, my weight has settled into a range between 142.5 and 144.5. I weigh myself every day, and on those days I’m toward the top end, I limit my carb intake and when I’m at the lower end, I don’t worry about it. I always keep in mind the advice I received before surgery: Stop eating when you lose interest, not when you’re full.

Then came a day when I realized that I had eaten my normal yogurt breakfast, then a dozen graham crackers between breakfast and my lunch salad, then jellybeans until I had a whacking sugar headache. What the hell was I doing?

I needed to figure out a better way to deal with that cycle, otherwise I’d be right back where I started.

First, I stepped back. What’s going on with me? We’ve had some stressful uncertainty lately, and I realized that the stress was making me eat too much of all the wrong foods.

Second, I talked to someone about my anxiety. I admitted that I was terrified of having to move again, knowing that we would likely move to a place that was smaller and less well-situated. I was losing patience and hope about the rebuild – everything is taking months longer than it should. And also, I need to buy a formal for some upcoming events, and I’m terrified that, given my history, I’ll buy a dress and by the time I need it, it won’t fit.

Third, I took the time to address the sources of the anxiety. I increased my depression medication. I wrote to my county supervisor about the permit situation. I signed a lease for another year on this house, with the understanding that we may leave sooner than a year (but no sooner than 7 months). I know that I am exercising every day, with Sundays off. I acknowledged that I have the support of my family in eating a healthy, balanced diet, so there was no reason for my weight to go up.

Fourth, I took a day off. I have the privilege of not having to work, so I slept in. I took my time over my morning tea. I sat on the couch watching crappy television and doing crochet. I let the mental break sink in and remind me that nothing is on fire, nobody’s bleeding, and we’re not going to be thrown into the street tomorrow. I am fine.

After my day off, I had my normal routine: wake up, weigh myself, hit the stationary bike. When I stepped on the scale, my weight was down half a pound from the day before – down to 143.2 – still in the good range.

Back when I was nearing 250 pounds, this would be about the time that the scale would have started creeping up, not just because I would have been stress eating, but because my metabolism was trying to protect me from the danger by hanging on to every calorie. I would panic, exercise like crazy and stop eating in an effort to lose weight and when it backfired, I’d say “Fuck it, it’s futile, I may as well have some pizza.”

Now, even modest changes will move the scale in the direction I want it to go, and when that happens, I feel encouraged and continue to drink a lot of water, snack on fruit, and get on the bike every morning. I feel that I cannot say it often enough: weight loss works differently for fat people vs. thin people. As of this morning, I’m at 141 even.

A Country Where I’ve Never Been

August 21, 2021 By in health, weight Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I had a meeting with my bariatric surgeon. It’s only my second since the pandemic began, although I was supposed to check in twice a year. I reported my weight to him (142.6 as of that morning) and told him I had been stable, plus or minus about a pound and a half, for the last couple of months.

I’ve been struggling with the idea of having the excess skin from my abdomen, buttocks, and thighs removed. Right now, it looks like a deflated balloon – sort of limp and slack. It’s never going to go back, in no small part because I have never, even for one single day of my entire life, had a flat stomach. No matter how thin I’ve been, I’ve always had a flap of fat hanging off my stomach like an apron. I come by it honestly – my grandmother had the same thing, which she always called her “panza.”

I asked my bariatric surgeon how long I should wait before getting skin surgery, and he said now would be the perfect time. I don’t know why, but hearing from my surgeon not just that I should get the surgery now, but that he considered it the last step of the entire process, made me feel a lot better about it.

Now comes the really mind-bending part. At the age of 56, I will be getting a body that I’ve been wishing for since puberty. I’ll be able to wear any bathing suit I want. I’ll weigh less than I did in high school. I will wear an adult clothing size I’ve never worn.

Before the bariatric surgery, I wasn’t sure how my life would change. It has changed, but not a lot. And I’m wondering if it will change any more once I have skin surgery. Here are the biggest surprises from “I’m now 100 pounds lighter.”

  • When I find something really cute at a store, chances are better than even they won’t have it in my size. When I was heavier I never found clothes in my size because high-end stores didn’t carry them. Now it’s because they’ve sold out.
  • It doesn’t matter how great I look in clothes – my gray hair means that no one’s staring when I walk down the street.
  • Nothing ever fits quite right. It doesn’t matter what size you are, there is no way to buy clothes off the rack and have them fit perfectly. The places they’re too tight or too loose may change, but the lack of fit stays the same.
  • I will never have whatever body type is currently fashionable. And that’s okay, because neither does anyone else I know.

Planning for the Future

July 28, 2021 By in weight Tags: , , , 1 Comment

My weight has held steady at around 143-144 for the past couple of months, and I have created a nice routine of getting up and hitting the bike, and my eating is generally decent, but I’ve bumped up against a pretty big issue. I know I will have to buy new formals for the inevitable round of holiday parties at the end of this year. I’ve been looking at all the places I used to shop, and every time, it’s the same.

I’m terrified to buy a new formal, because there’s some part of me that says that because I have failed in the past, I will fail again, and if I buy something now, by the time I need it, it will be too small.

Those of you with weight issues know that sometimes, there’s literally nothing you can do. I would pare down my calorie intake to the barest minimum and work out for an hour a day (on top of holding down a job and maintaining a household) and I might still see the scale creep up. When that happened, it was easy to drown my sorrows in pizza, thinking “Fuck it. I can’t lose weight, so why am I making myself miserable?”

These days, when the scale starts creeping up, it does so by ounces, not by pounds. And normally it doesn’t take much to get it back to where it should be – an extra 15 minutes on the bike, skip the toast with my morning yogurt, that sort of thing. Still, I am having real issues overcoming the fear of failure.

Now that the weight loss has stopped, I still don’t have the body I wanted, so it’s hard to feel like it’s been a total success. In my dreams, I would lose weight and immediately become supermodel levels of beautiful, and I’m not even close. Decades of living in a larger body have left their marks not just where you’d expect – my stomach, butt, and upper arms – but in places I didn’t realize would be so affected. I now have deep nasolabial folds (the ones that go from the sides of your nose to the corners of your mouth). My neck looks like a cow’s with folds of loose skin hanging off it. Between the crepey skin on my body and the added wrinkles on my face, I went from looking 10-15 years younger than I was to looking 10-15 years older.

I’m struggling to tell myself that it’s natural to want to feel good about yourself, and that even if I don’t change another thing, I’m still a worthwhile person. But it’s hard. Right about now, I’m very much feeling like I traded one problem for another, and I’m not sure where to look for a solution to this new one.

Full Circle Crazy

June 14, 2021 By in health Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s happened. I knew it would, but I was hoping it would take a little longer. I was hoping that there would be some period of time between the “honeymoon period” of my bariatric surgery to be over (that period where, no matter what you do/eat, you will lose weight, usually 12-18 months) and the time when I would look in the mirror and decide I was still fat.

To be clear, I now weigh just under 143 pounds — this is the lowest my weight has ever been in my adult life. The things I find wrong with my body have much more to do with folds of sagging skin, and no amount of exercise will address that. Getting those cut off would take another 5-10 pounds off my weight. I wear a size 6 to 12, depending on the garment and the brand (anyone who has ever bought women’s clothes can commiserate over the completely arbitrary nature of women’s sizing), although normally, 8-10 works just fine for me.

Now that restrictions are being lifted in my area, my husband and I have decided to go back to our dance class. For a few years, we spent an hour every Wednesday at the dance studio in our town learning salsa, and for those years, I was just fine looking at myself in the mirror that covers one entire wall of the studio. Yes, I was 100 pounds overweight, but I was fine with how I looked. I wasn’t comparing myself with anyone else in the class, because I knew that wasn’t going to be a productive or useful comparison.

“…compared to them, I was a walrus galumphing around the dance floor, jiggling my blubber from side to side in time to the beat…”

Last week, though, I looked at myself in the mirror, and all I could think was “I look fat.” At 143, I still have hips and big boobs, and as I said, I’ve got that skin that adds a layer around my middle that can be minimized, but never completely obscured. Now I can see the other people in the class, though. Like the woman who leads the class who is at least 20 years younger than I am, and who has been a professional dancer since she was a child. There’s a group of college students, one of whom is a woman who looked about 19-20, who could best be described as “willowy.” She was wearing those thin, bell-bottomed yoga pants that one can only carry off if one is emaciated, and this woman was carrying them off just fine. These were the only two other people I could see, and compared to them, I was a walrus galumphing around the dance floor, jiggling my blubber from side to side in time to the beat.

I wanted to run.

I am wondering if it took this long to happen only because we’ve all been staying inside during quarantine. I didn’t have anyone to compare myself with except my daughter, and she and I share the same clothes at this point (yes, that’s weird too). Objectively, if my daughter and I share clothes, that means we are roughly the same size, and I don’t look at my child and think “oh, jeez, she’s fat.”

I guess now is the time to not just continue taking care of myself by eating right and exercising, but by remembering three things:

  1. This is not a contest. No matter what anyone else may look like, the fact that I am bigger/smaller, taller/shorter, lighter/darker than they are has no impact on anyone’s worth as a human being. I don’t have to be the world’s most perfectly perfect person in order to be a good person.
  2. I am fine just the way I am. I have stamina, moving my body feels good, I don’t spend all my time feeling like I have no energy or motivation. If I never lose another pound, if nothing about my body changes between now and the day I die, or conversely if everything about my body changes between now and the day I die, I’m still fine the way I am.
  3. So are you.

Who’re You Gonna Trust?

April 23, 2021 By in health, practical advice, weight Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Spring is here! And with it comes Easter eggs, chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, and all the other rich, sweet foods that have always been my Achilles heel. I had gotten pretty sloppy with my eating, but after all those cookies, candies, and pies, I knew I wasn’t doing as well as I should be. Whenever I get anxious about my weight, I do that thing most people do: stop weighing myself. But if I don’t know the truth, I’m free to imagine all sorts of worst-case scenarios.

And that’s exactly what I started to do. Because I wear leggings a lot, my shape is right there on display. Leggings may be able to even out a bit of cellulite or smooth a silhouette, but they can’t disguise the extra pounds you may start to pack on. I would look at my calves and think that they looked huge. My stomach looked bigger. Everything just started looking like I had gained at least 15 pounds, and I was panicking.

Once the orgy of Easter gluttony was over, I needed to get back to some discipline. I went back to recording my food intake (one of my main tools), and weighing in.

Which do you trust – the scale, or your own eyes?

The first time I stepped on the scale, my heart was pounding. It was first thing in the morning, I had just peed, I was completely naked, I had even taking off the three rings I habitually wear. If I could reduce a 15-pound weight gain to a 14.8 pound weight gain, I’d consider it a victory. The little digital numbers started at zero and went up, and….I had lost two more pounds.

This is part of my dysmorphia. At my heaviest, I couldn’t tell what I looked like, and often thought of myself as much thinner than I was. Now that I’ve lost over 100 pounds, my brain is still telling me I’m fat, even though I exercise every day, and I mostly try to stick to foods I know will work for me – salads, chicken breast, Greek yogurt, fresh fruit and vegetables. But I haven’t said no to treats, and spend a decent amount of time planted on the couch, and all my past experience tells me that if I’m not starving myself and working out 10 hours a day, I will never lose a pound, and in fact might actually gain weight.

The knowledge that most people stop automatically losing weight and start having to be more mindful of their habits 12-18 months after bariatric surgery is always at the back of my mind. My surgery was at the end of October, so I’m right at that 18 month mark. I don’t know what it will look like when the honeymoon period is over. My weight loss has slowed from a high of 10 pounds per week (the first couple of weeks right after surgery) to about half a pound per week for the last six weeks or so, but it’s still heading downward.

How is it that, even as I continue to lose, my perception of my own body is that it’s getting bigger? Now I have two competing feelings to muddle through. Even though my clothes aren’t any tighter and my measurements continue to go down, all I see is the fat. At the same time, even though I’m still more than 20 pounds away from dipping below a “normal” BMI, I worry that I’m never going to stop losing weight. That I’m going to dwindle away into a sack of bones. My desire to keep to a healthy diet and exercise routine is always at odds with my desire not to disappear.

All this is to say that losing weight is great and solves many problems, but getting the pounds off is just the start of the process. Understanding how to take care of a body that’s changing all the time – with age, with the seasons, with stress – and how to feel good about the body I’m taking care of is a much, much longer journey.

Tomorrow Is Yesterday In a Different Place

March 12, 2021 By in autism, weight Tags: , , , Leave a comment

One of the many things I lost in the fire was all my archery gear. I had a beautiful one-piece recurve bow and dozens of arrows, a left-handed hip quiver, a couple of arm guards – all the stuff. And then I didn’t.

I’ve been part of the local archery club for a couple of years, but first the coronavirus hit and nobody could use the indoor or outdoor ranges, then I lost my house and all my stuff and was relocated too far from the range to make using it practical. In the time since I last saw them, I’ve lost over 100 pounds, and when I went to replace my bow, quiver, arrows, etc., nobody at the archery shop I’ve been frequenting for years recognized me.

I’ve seen lots of episodes of different television shows about exactly that scenario. A person walks into a place they’ve been in many times, and the people there don’t recognize them. On television, the person runs around screaming at everyone they meet until they wake up, or the devil shows up and tells them they’re in hell, or until they go running out of the shot, driven insane by the knowledge that nobody knows them.

In real life, I mentioned that I’d been in various archery leagues and done well. That I am an archery club member. That I was on a team with the club president and his family, that I had just been to the house of the club treasurer. That I’d taken third in the last league I participated in at the archery range all of us frequented.

Nothing. Not a glimmer of recognition.

Then I started thinking about other places I used to go a lot, and other people I thought I knew, and wondering whether they’d recognize me. When I had an office downtown, I would walk down the street from my office and run into half a dozen people I knew. Would any of them recognize me?

That feeling of disorientation I feel is battling with my deep need and desire to be left alone. Maybe this is fulfilling my dream of being able to walk through the world invisibly. Which is better? To be completely visible, but no one recognizes you, or to be invisible?

Fear of Flying. And Running. And Walking.

January 10, 2021 By in health, personal Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Before surgery, when I was at my heaviest, my exercise routine had a predictable pattern. I would go out hiking in the woods every day for weeks, maybe months, and then something would happen that would make me stop. Sometimes it was an injury or illness. Sometimes it was weather conditions that made walking in the woods unsafe (in windy, rainy weather, entire trees fall over). Sometimes it was something else, like the time a guy on the trail threatened to kill me.

However it happened, I would stop hiking. And then, after the illness/injury/weather/fear passed, I would still stay inside. Before my house burned down, this didn’t mean I wasn’t getting any exercise – I still had an elliptical, a stationary bike, and a treadmill at home, and I would just use them. But I don’t get the same kind of workout on a machine indoors. Running on a treadmill is a million times easier than running on the earth, because even the flattest places have those little up- and downhills, uneven pavements or no pavement, and places where I have to stop for a light or negotiate a weird bend in the road. All those things affect my speed, my balance, the amount of effort it takes to keep going at the same speed.

It means that, if I hadn’t been outside in a while, I would think about it and my mind would say “It’s gonna be haaaarrrrd” in that whiny voice my mind adopts when I don’t want to do something. Out loud, I might say “I don’t have time for a walk or a run,” but inside my mind, I know the truth. I’m resisting it because I’m afraid it’s going to be hard.

There was a time when taking a four-mile hike through the woods at a fast pace would mean that my hips and knees would ache for a few days, and heading out the next day on a hike would make the problem worse. There was a time when going too far or too fast, even in my walking shoes with my orthotics in them, would make my feet hurt. Sure, my heart and lungs were up to the job, but my skeleton was struggling. And during that time, I often listened to that little voice inside me that said “You stopped for a good reason. Don’t start again, because it’s going to be difficult and you’re going to hurt yourself.” A hundred pounds ago, that little voice was protecting me from doing myself an injury.

Now that I’m about 100 pounds lighter, I keep forgetting that it’s not hard. It’s just not. I can walk for miles in Converse (the shoes I wear most often around the house) and my feet will be fine. If I’m short on time, I can run my 3-mile circuit, saving 15 minutes off my normal walking pace (I walk with my dog, who slows me up considerably), and my knees and hips will be fine.

It’s hard work to re-program your brain. We’ve all got behaviors we’ve internalized over years – things that protected us at one time, but that aren’t helpful anymore. When I find myself in a situation where those unhelpful instincts kick in (a lot of them have to do with growing up with food insecurity, and so involve eating more than I need), it’s difficult tell myself “This is an old reaction to a situation that doesn’t exist anymore. I can react differently and it’ll be okay.”

Now I need to put that thinking to work in my running routine. It’s not as hard as I think it will be, it won’t take as long as I’m afraid it will, and I’ll be fine afterward. Thanks, little voice. I know you mean well, but you can stop now. You’re no longer needed.