Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

Things have been rough during the past two months or so, but no matter what, generally speaking, they are still much better than they were one and even two years ago (yes, in the winter of 2005/2006, I can’t say I was exactly doing very well in terms of health and weight management). I realized that yesterday, when facing the doctor appointed to our company for the annual physical exam. We get ours every two years where I work, but it used to be every year, and this is anyway mandatory in France. You have to get one when you start working for whatever company, then the others once a year.

Of course, every person who has or has had weight problems probably knows/remembers that a physical tends to be an annoying moment, because sooner or later comes the usual suggestion of losing weight.

Yesterday, what I got was the contrary. Talk about a surprise, and something I’m not used to.

The first time I saw this doctor was in November 2004. I was 74 kgs at the time, not very far from what would be my heighest weight, and “not in a very good shape” was the least you could say about me at the time. There’s not much you can gain by keeping your bottom on a chair all day long, after all. Yesterday, she weighed me at 60 kgs (still with jeans on and right after lunch, so I’m not surprised this isn’t the weight I’m used to see these days on my scales). And she said that it was now time to stop losing and start maintaining. Not in a demeaning way, that is–more along the lines of (not knowing yet what I had done to get there) making sure that I wouldn’t yo-yo with what I had already achieved. Then we talked, and I’m really glad that I did what I did in a sensible way and not thanks to some crash-diet, because I could be honest and open with her without risking being berated about my health. It was nice, to be able to do that without constantly fearing some lesson about how obesity would put me at risk for illnesses and all that jazz. As if none of us knew that anyway.

Speaking of health, my resting heart rate is down to 57 and my blood pressure to 120/70 (normally, it tended to be closer to 130/80–very normal, but see, I’m not so used to numbers going down in my case, especially not the diastolic BP one). The effects of exercising, very likely, even though I’m more a weight-training person than a cardio addict (I do cardio only because I know I need it to keep the extra pounds at bay, or, in the case of biking, because it’s a convenient way of going from point A to point B; my favourite activities remain resistance-centered ones no matter what).

Now, if with such pleasant surprises, I’m not even more motivated to pounce on the newborn bingeing tendency and send it back to the realm of King Oblivion, I don’t know what it takes!

Tags: health