That One Question

[darkemeralds]

I figure one or two people who've been reading about my adventures in Riding Clyde might have asked themselves That One Question by now, to wit: "Has she lost any weight yet?"

It's a legitimate question, all things considered (all things being our weight-obsessed culture, my own lifelong obsession with my own personal weight, and the fact that I'm consistently burning a chunk more calories than I used to be).

The short answer is "No."



For once in my life, the question of weight and the loss thereof wasn't part of my decision to take up a new activity.

(Hell, even Project Empty had a weight loss component in my mind, so it was revolutionary that I began an actual exercise-thing without part of the calculus being And Maybe I'll Get Thinner.)

But I still know the calculus: one pound of fat is 3500 calories. (Some numbers just get imprinted. I can't help it.) It takes me about seven round-trip commutes to burn that many calories. I've bike-commuted about 49 times so far. I don't think I've changed my eating very much--in any case, I feel as if I'm eating enough but not too much, and the kinds of things I eat are about the same--so I should have lost 7 pounds by now.

I don't think I have, but that's not the point. The point is that for bike-commuting alone to "make me thinner," it will have to go on steadily for two years--and ever after, which I'm planning on. The point is that I don't care.



The point is that riding Clyde every day--because I love doing it--has given me the power to turn to the browbeater in my head and say, "Screw you, buddy. I'm finally doing your magic exercise and I'm still the same big gal I was before, so bite me."

There's considerable freedom in that point.

Comments

[serenity-valley.livejournal.com]

What an amazing milestone this is for you! It's the height of health, to my mind, when we can just revel in the fact of all the amazing things our bodies are capable of, and enjoying what they enable us to do. Instead of shame and disappointment that our bodies aren't thinner, taller, stronger, tanner, blonder, whatever. (If we thought of treating our bodies the way we are counseled to treat children -- to champion who and what they are instead of comparing them to what they aren't -- I think the world would be a much better place.)

The words "GO YOU" never seemed more warranted. :) Hooray for beating down your Inner Browbeater.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm living in a whole new world with this change. I like it here. Forty years' bad habits of thought don't vanish overnight, or even in a few months, and certain kinds of stresses can still sling be back toward the old addiction to self-loathing (which makes a wonderful excuse for all sorts of more correctable failings).

But most of the time, I live here now, and it's a good house.