Walking and wondering

I’ve gotten fat. It sucks, but it’s true. I first realized it last summer, when I caught sight of my reflection in the plate-glass window of a storefront in Greensboro, Alabama and thought, “Is that what I look like?” I had already noticed that my 33″ waist pants were getting harder to button, but I chalked that up to shrinking in the laundry.

The final straw for my insistent denial came in November, when I had to go to my health insurance plan’s required annual wellness check. Though it is masked as an effort to help us take care of ourselves, it is really just their Gestapo way of obtaining information that our doctors wouldn’t otherwise share with them. In a particularly seedy move, this year they scheduled the nurses to come on-site and do our checks on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving— after we had all gorged ourselves on sweet potato soufflé and dressing and red velvet cake. My weight was logged at 187 pounds.

A man who is 5’9″ tall shouldn’t weigh 187 pounds. (I don’t necessarily to care to maintain the 160 that their chart suggests, but a solid 170 or 175 would be nice.) The reason that this weight-gain worries me is: my father, who I resemble a great deal, very slowly ballooned into the little round man that he was when he died in 2011. I’ve looked at pictures of him in his 40s – the age that I am now – and he had the same pudgy little belly I have. By the time he was 60 and wearing pants with a 40″ waist, there was nothing he could do about bulk that he carried around his middle. He was 5’7″ and weighed well over 200 pounds, and no amount of work at the gym helped. My dad suffered a massive heart attack nearly six year ago, while he was jogging on a treadmill— trying to lose weight.

So I’m making an effort to get less fat, before that happens to me. We got a new dog for Christmas – his name is Chip, he looks like a border collie with shorter hair – and this walk doubles as a daily treat for him. Instead of sitting down each afternoon with a Shiner Bock or a Blue Moon (or, if I’m feeling sassy, a Dickel-and-Coke), I’m going for this walk. Just a one-miler, with the kids and the dog. Nothing big. Nothing radical. We’ll see how that goes.

Herein lies the rub: I hate exercising. I hate it. Not because I dislike physical activity, but because I despise the monotonous boredom of repetitive acts. And I also love food and beer. I would much rather be passing afternoons on my porch with a wheat beer or a Belgian white than loping around my neighborhood. I’m not happy about this, and I’m not going to pretend that I am. But I’ve got to find ways to make it tolerable.

Already, I’ve found my mind wandering away from the task itself. On one nearby street, the Japanese magnolias have been a particularly beautiful bright-red this year. The kids and I have had the idea to deliver some Christmas goodies to the Fire House No. 7, which we pass on each go-round. We also have taken the time be a little judgy about who doesn’t clean up their yard adequately, who allows their leaves to clog up street drains, and which houses need repair work.

The quandary, for me, remains: how to make exercise tolerable. I’ll be damned if I’ll ever join a gym and have some latter-day Richard Simmons shout at me about how I need to do more! What some people consider motivation baffles me utterly. I also won’t be joining a men’s league team – soccer or basketball – because I don’t want to be beholden to that commitment, having to show up at this time and at this place . . . I just want not to be fat. That’s all.

Filed under: Critical Thinking Tagged: Walking, wandering, wondering