My Perfect Health Storm

Something monumental happened to me last week. I'm talking really, really monumental. I'm talking really, really, really huge-on-all-sorts-of-levels monumental.

I weighed myself. I weighed myself and for the first time in a long, long, LONG time, I was not overweight. According to the BMI calculator, I was normal. NORMAL.

Last January, according to the same BMI calculator, I was obese. OBESE. And now? I'm not. Normal. Feels good to say. Feels even better to be. I've lost 37 pounds this year. I worked my way off medication for high cholesterol, and am working my way off medication for high blood pressure (I've gotten my dosage cut in half, but I'm still working on it.)

So what happened?

Honestly, a lot of things happened at once. I had a perfect storm of sorts that motivated me to get my health back. I've been wanting to blog about it for a while, but the timing never seemed right. But last week's shift into normalcy seemed like the time to stop and reflect. Here goes - here's my perfect health storm:

Storm Front #1: I turned 38. Not your typical threshold kind of a birthday. It's not like I turned 30, or 40, or 50. Just dumb old 38. But here's the thing: I turned 38 and felt like crap. I was fat, my back hurt, my joints ached, I had no energy. And I was only 38. I started thinking about what it would feel like to turn 40 in two years, and feel worse than I already felt. I'm young. My kids are young. They don't need an old lady for a mom. It got me thinking.

Storm Front #2: I learned how to cook. This one was a couple years in the making. But in the last few years, I've learned more about food than I ever knew before. And I discovered that the more good food I cooked - really GOOD food, really GOOD ingredients - the less I could tolerate bad food. Little Debbies, chips, fast food - all of it lost it's appeal. It just stopped TASTING good. I didn't start giving up junk food because I felt like I had to, I gave it up because it didn't taste good anymore. I still have a sweet tooth, but mostly for treats I make myself. And I can now properly appreciate the taste of a good peach. Or a good apple. Or a good tomato. Or a good....well, you get it. I've learned that eating is all about balance. I've learned to eat food because of what it has, and not because of what it doesn't have. I've learned that if it doesn't taste good, it doesn't make sense to eat it. And I don't starve myself - I eat well. But with a little education, I now know what I should be eating a lot of, what I should be eating in moderation, and what I should have on rare occasions. And it's working for me.

Storm Front #3: I started walking. One of my new year's resolutions was to walk more. And I did a lousy job of walking early in the year. So when Lent rolled around this year, I decided to make a promise to walk thirty minutes every day. And I did it. But when Lent was over, I was afraid I would fall back into old habits. At exactly the same time, the company I work for issued a "Walk for Health" challenge. They issued pedometers, and challenged us all to start walking. The people logging the most fitness steps could win prizes, and everyone logging at least 100,00 steps would get a shirt. I'm a sucker for a free shirt, so I started walking. There are three sessions, two months each. For the first session, not only did I get over 100,00 steps, but I finished in the top ten overall with 260K. That got me thinking that I could actually win! So in session two, I logged 459,965 steps. And I came in second. Bummer. But wait! The winner (by 45K) was the director of the program, and was not eligible for the prize! So I won a $150 gift card to Dick's Sporting Goods. We are now deep into session three. So far, in all three sessions, I've logged over a million fitness steps. That's 500 miles. That's like walking from my house, to my parent's house in Florence, and back as far as my brother's house in Greenville. That's a lot of walking.

Storm Front #4: The Big C. Not me, but in a year's time, a lot of people that I know were diagnosed with cancer. Many of them children. Many of them in perfect health. And I got really tripped up over it. Because here I was, unhealthy because of choices I was making. And all these people were handed this disease when they didn't deserve it, when they had done nothing to bring it on themselves. It was so unfair. And I started praying about the unfairness of it. But you can't really talk to God about "unfair", because he just makes you talk to Jesus about "unfair" and, well, you're just not going to get anywhere with that one. But because I was praying, I started hearing that small voice - you know the one. The one that tells you what you already know. The one that told me that the only way for me to make it even close to fair, was to stop talking my own health for granted. Start taking care of myself. Not just for me, but for my kids and my husband.

And so here I am: eating well and exercising. I feel great, and there's a lot less of me. I don't know when the weight loss will plateau, but as of now, I'm still losing, slowly but surely. I'd like to get a little more of a buffer zone between "normal" and "overweight", but time will tell. I feel like I finally have eating and exercise habits that I won't move away from (like going off of a diet). It feels like this is me now. I hope so. I like normal me.