This post is about my weight and health. If this isn’t your jam or will send you to dark places, please skip it.
My parents and brother were always fit and trim. Mom was always moving, exercising, walking. Dad had a physical job and played rec softball. My brother was a very active, sporty kid. All three of them were/are very much into maintaining a good weight.
And then there’s me. If I didn’t see photos of my mom pregnant with me and didn’t bear resemblances to my parents, I’d think I was dropped into their home via a very groovy stork.
I was never athletic. I was always clumsy and slow, and running even short distances left me gasping for air. (To the point that I think one of my gym teachers over my 12 years of public education should have flagged it to a nurse.)
And struggled with my weight since I was about 25. I would go from 130lbs to 190 lbs, back down to 140lbs and up to 190lbs, back down to 150 lbs and back up to 190. You see the pattern. The first quarter of this blog’s entire existence is mostly a diet blog, where I’d enter that day’s weight at the beginning of an entry. My last big weight loss was around 2016. The years between 2017 and 2023 were, frankly, terrible and stressful and I gave up.
So here I am, six days after injuring my knee while merely walking on even, paved ground. And after six months of navigating pains in my feet that I blamed on any and all of the following: not wearing shoes regularly since March, 2020; wearing terrible heels for years when I was younger; arthritis; age.
I told myself somewhere (probably on this blog – like every honest journal it carries hopes and intentions that don’t always receive follow through) that I didn’t care about my weight as long as I was strong enough to carry it for the 30ish years I have left. And as I lie here nursing my knee in a split-story house I’m wondering if perhaps I’m not strong enough to carry this weight, and the solution is to increase strength AND decrease weight to find a point in the middle where things feel just right.
Many things taste better than being thin feels, but does being pain-free/energetic feel better than those things taste? Maybe so?
Or is this just the resurgence of the belief that has plagued me for over half of my life that I am the largest person in my immediate family and I need to “fix” it?
I don’t know what the answer is. I wish this body came with an instruction manual.
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