A New Day

This is the end of a very long journey.  There are no sign posts, no welcome to the end or even a single landmark.  This place looks very much like a million places I have been along this journey.  But it is different because this is the bottom.  Looking down I can see, feel the ground.  It is a ground made up of fatigue, upset stomach, sore joints and an aching head.  There is nothing new in all that.  What is new is what I see when I look up, light.  

For years I could only see down into the darkness, the darkness of my belief that I was fat so I deserved to feel all these things.  Today I know better.  Fat or not I don’t have to feel any of these things.  I can be fat and fit.  Being fit is a much simpler goal then being thin.  Weight lose is burdened with decades of data showing that losing even a small amount of weight is nearly impossible and keeping it off is even harder.  There are also decades of personal yo-yo dieting keeping even the hope of weight lose deeply buried under a pile of contrary experiences. 

Being fit is far easier.  I know that if I eat less sugar my joints won’t hurt.  I know that if I eat good food my stomach will not feel bad.  More vitamins and minerals and my head will no longer hurt.  If I practice healthy sleeping habits and walk every day, I will not be fatigued.  Looking at it from here I almost feel a fool because all that is so simple.  I have done it a hundred times and always felt better.  

But I remained fat so I slid back to my old ways because I was fat so I had no business being fit.  What I silly thought.  It is a thought I did not come up with on my own.  It is not native to my way of reasoning.  Maybe you recognize it.  Maybe you too have picked up that evil thought.  It comes from our collective eating disorder and I choose to put it down right now.  

My fitness has nothing to do with my fatness.  Fatness is not what causes disease.  Unfitness is the real danger.  It is not the obesity epidemic that is our problem it is the unfitness epidemic.  Now I bet many are saying, “But you can’t be fit and fat.” For some being fit will mean they also lose weight but for most of us, as the studies show, the weight will not shift much and we will be fat and fit long before we reach thin and fit, if we ever get thin at all.  So I have reached the end of my weight loss journey and the end of my fat journey and I am at the beginning of my return to fitness and a return to myself.