Sweating Up a Storm

My feet hurt. For many years, I've gotten intense pain in the soles of my feet when I'm rollerblading, playing beach volleyball, kickboxing, standing for a long time in pretty shoes, or squatting.

I toughed it out, stopping to stretch my soles over a coke can like I was taught in ballet class years ago. But I wasn't having cramps. My arches were falling and my tough gal routine was not helping them at all.

So about 5-1/2 years ago, I pretty much stopped doing those things that hurt. I did not, however, stop eating. And since inline hockey and kickboxing were my major forms of exercise, and my life was getting increasingly sedentary and stressful, it's no surprise that I started to gain weight.

5-1/2 years ago, I got married. Soon thereafter, my sister had her brain tumor crisis. Then I started a stressful - but fun! - new job. We got a dog. Bought a house. And Paul left to work in Michigan for 10 months, home only on weekends. I kept eating. And not exercising. Everything hurt my feet. And I was too busy, anyway.

For the last 5-1/2 years, I've gained more than 10 pounds per year.

I'm a big believer in exercise over diet. Eating's just too darn fun to quit. Lots of people pledge to lose weight, but get sidetracked along the way. I always felt that I'd start losing weight as soon as I was really ready, and that I'd be successful. It turns out that I wasn't wrong.

In early January of this year, I started doing the South Beach Diet. No sugar, no white starches (white potatoes, white rice, white bread, white pasta, etc.). I knew that it would hurt for a while: Kriegers fries! Yummy sweet baked goods! Easy Mac! Bagel Bites! But eventually it got to the point where being me, and being fat, was even more painful. And the thought of a year on a diet was less painful than the thought of years ahead of me as I was.

My increased weight was affecting my energy. It wasn't helping my poor feet. My blood pressure was still good, but it was higher. I wasn't falling pregnant easily. I wasn't feeling very sexy, either. I knew that I was not being healthy. I missed my strong, healthy body. I decided that it was time to get it back.

South Beach wasn't the immediate miracle for me that it's supposed to be. The weight didn't trip over itself in its hurry to leap from my body in Phase I, as it was supposed to. After a couple of weeks, I transitioned to the more comfortable Phase II, and I began to exercise. I have a cross-trainer in the basement and I worked my way through Sex and the City on DVD.

As I'd hoped, exercise was the golden bullet. I started seeing great results. So I relaxed the diet a tiny bit - once a month I'm allowed a meal out that's not entirely within the diet, though I'm still not bingeing. And I increased the exercise. 20 minute workouts became 30 minute workouts became 45 minute workouts most nights of the week. An episode of Gilmore Girls is 45 minutes including the credits, and I'm zooming through Season I on DVD.

In well under 3 months I've lost more than 30 pounds.

I carried a heavy bag around today, and it occurred to me that just weeks ago, I was carrying that much extra weight with me everywhere I went. Amazing.

I still have about 40 pounds that I'd like to lose, and things are going very well. I'm going to keep doing a general South Beach-like diet until I have retrained my body to stop at enough and not crave the binge. The more I exercise, the more I see that line clearly. I'm loving the way the exercise makes me feel, though I still find the act itself boring and the sweat distasteful.

And the silver lining to the whole not-pregnant thing is that every month I test negative, that's one more month I have to concentrate on getting back into shape before I have to start moderating my diet and exercise to safely incubate a small life.