Weight loss motivator: Pick exercises you love

I have a confession that may not surprise you: I hated high school gym classes.  Since I was already a fat kid, I was of course seldom able to compete with other kids in most of the team-type sports that were the favorite gym activities back then.  We were a pretty “successful” football, basketball and baseball school (nobody who spoke only English played soccer back then, or even knew what it was).  So if you were the kind of kid who was always “picked last” on anybody’s team (or worse, if you were the “sympathy pick), sports, and so gym, weren’t gonna be your cup of tea.

On the other hand, I loved Phys. Ed. in college.  Instead of catering to the twenty or so boys (and never girls — they were supposed to be either cheerleaders or librarians back in 1970, remember?) who were football team material, in college the assumption was that only a rare few of us would have even a short-lived career as a college athlete.  Rather, the focus was on introducing us to physical activities that we might actually  enjoy, that we might actually keep on doing throughout our lives.  So archery, golf, volleyball, badminton, racquetball, handball, and other such sports were the curriculum.  And I had a lot of fun.

One of the complications of being in the weight loss game is the fact that you are always getting a ton of contradictory advice on what you should be doing. (And recall, this is mostly from thin people, who may lack some important perspectives on the usefulness of their advice.)  In the area of exercise, the current “consensus” seems to be that you should do aerobics, but not too much.  Some people say 20 minutes’ worth.  Or else 40.  Or else intervals (a minute of heart-splitting intensity followed by a minute of nursing-home drool stroll, and repeat…)  I’ve read experts who say that you can not absolutely can not lose weight if you “overdo” aerobics — that anything over 40 minutes’ worth a day will actually interfere with your progress.  Then there are those who say you need to plan to spend serious time — an hour or more a day — exercising.  (One of my best friends lost about sixty pounds and went from being a rather large woman to a virtual supermodel by getting a state of the art treadmill then using it for about 75 minutes of intense work a day.  She’s now an intensive cross country cyclist and doing great with that.)

Others now say it’s weights that do it.  Not aerobics, weights.  Meanwhile, my doc recently volunteered that “of course, the trick is aerobics.”

From a psychological point of view, there are two problems with these contradictory newsfeeds.  First, they bat your head all over creation.  What exactly are you supposed to do, really?  It’s then that you realize that basically, nobody knows for sure.  Experts are at war, and everybody else is trying to market something to you.  (“Buy my book and also my high protein drink…” etc.)

Twerps!

Before going further, I want to clear something up.  This is not the first time I’ve had a “big weight loss” project.  It’s not a brand new discovery that this kind of goal takes a lot of time and investment and is just super hard.  In fact, I’ve generally had at least some kind of project to get or stay healthy and lose weight.  I’ve immersed myself in biking, martial arts, walking, running, and gyms before.  I’ve recorded my food intake in paper and digital diaries for extended periods of time.  Most of the time, over my whole adulthood, there has been at least some kind of “project” running.  I am not a newbie.

I say this in part because it’s important to state at the outset that of course, this is a huge, time-consuming problem, and not an easy one to solve.  If there’s a “new element” this time, it’s in my committing a vastly larger amount of time and effort to the project than I’ve done before — I’m finished with the “all you have to do is this little bit on the treadmill” philosophy. And I’d also like to think that I’ve learned a lot over the years about stuff that works and things that don’t.

But I also say it because it brings up, again, the problem of our “critics.”

If you grew up heavy, you learned a lot about your critics, and also about how thoroughly rotten people can be sometimes.  Little overweight kids are nearly always exposed to the jeers and name-calling and even downright bullying of other kids.  And of course, kids take all that name-calling inside — it informs their self-images.