The Pilates Kid
July 9th 2009 00:27
In fact, I'm looking forward to it, not as the start of something but as the continuation of something started in the week after last Christmas.
I weighed myself that day when it all started and the scales read, in red, flashing numbers, 109 kilograms. Here I was, 55 years old and the heaviest, most sedentary, laziest, slobbiest I had been in my life. Not good.
Today I weigh 101 kilograms and I'm aiming, ambitiously, to return to a fighting weight below 90 kilograms. My brother, who is the same height and weight and drinks far less beer than me, weighs 87 kilograms and has a flat stomach.
I lust after a flat stomach.
I miss beer.
I have lost eight kilograms partly by eating less, partly by drinking less beer, and largely by moving my lard out on to the nearby river pathway three times a week and getting mobile.
I have done quite a lot of running in my time, and many years ago ran four marathons. I am acutely aware these days, however, of creaking joints, fragile muscles and susceptible tendons. When I started running seven months ago, I swore to myself that I would take things very, very, very slowly.
It has taken more patience than I have shown for the sum total of everything else I have done in my life, but it has worked. I started by walking interspersed with two-minute joglets during which I was regularly overtaken by elderly trees. After seven months, I have built up to 75-minute runs, and I have also built up the speed to the extent that the only trees that pass me now are some of the younger, more energetic ones.
The weight loss has been steady, but more remarkable and obvious has been the inch-loss. The stomach is far from flat yet, but I look like half the man I used to be. It's fun trying on old clothes. If I lose much more, I can start trying on some of my wife's clothes.
Most remarkable of all, however, is the change in the way my body feels. I have lost 10 years. I get into and out of chairs without thinking about it. It had become a groan to get in to the car, but no more. And, most stunning of all, when I bent down yesterday to pick something off the floor, I felt nothing!
I have been bending down and touching the floor ever since, reminding myself what I felt like when I was younger. It never occurred to me that I could reverse the aging process like this, although I suppose the truth is that I'm not reversing the aging process, merely hauling back the accelerated aging I had manifested by overeating, over-beering and lack of exercise.
So I feel great because, through slowly increasing my exercise program, I have avoided injury while strengthening joints and muscles and all the other bits which help us move. And Pilates, as my knowledgeable wife has explained to me, is going to improve that process even more. That's what it does.
I'm looking forward to it. There's just one question unanswered for me now: when can I start drinking beer again?
image: www.balanceinme.com
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