Do you remember last week’s picture of the lawn that wouldn’t die? This week the owners were like: Screw it. Let’s just pile a bunch of mulch on top of the tarp on top of the grass and see what happens. No, wait. Let’s add two large potted plants 12 feet apart, too.
It looks, as you can imagine, incredibly awesome.
My socks matched a fallen tree branch on Thursday, and for some reason this pleased me immensely. I am a simple person.
I walked my 200th walk on Friday in the late morning, which doesn’t seem like much of a milestone after reaching the 6-month mark just last month, but I’m giving it a mention nonetheless. I’ve established a set walking route the last few weeks. I haven’t walked the “Plant Doctor” route in a while now. The one I walk now is good because it’s flat and can be .67, 1.25, 2.25, or almost 4 miles long, depending on the twists and turns I take. No matter which way I go, though, I keep seeing this woman and her dog. I’m seeing a lot of regulars now, but this woman, in particular, shares my schedule. We seem to leave the house at the same time, and lately we’ve taken to giving heartier waves and smiles when we pass each other. She’s thin, about 10 years older than me, and in shape.
On Saturday I saw her again, but this time she had a friend. I waved as smiled as they walked by. Later, we crossed paths again and the woman crossed the street to talk to me. She wanted to know how much weight I had lost. “I was telling my friend how you’re out here every day, and that you’ve lost 30-40 pounds. So I was curious what the real number was.”
“Well, actually,” I said, “the real number is a whopping zero pounds. But with all the walking I’m doing, it’s possible things are moving around. I don’t know…” I felt a little dumpy next to these fit, thin women and felt like I was disappointing them (these strangers) with my zero-pound weight loss.
The woman looked genuinely surprised that I hadn’t lost any weight. Trust me, lady, I know the feeling. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Don’t worry, it will come off. I had the same thing happen to me when I first started. I walked every day and for four months nothing happened. Then, all of a sudden, everything started coming off at once. I lost over 50 pounds.”
I was shocked this tall, thin, and obviously fit woman ever had 50 pounds to lose. Then her even taller friend piped up and said, “Yeah, same here. When I lost 40 pounds I did it by walking every day. Well, except the day my dog had a stroke.”
“Um,” my regular walker said, “you also skipped that one 4th of July. We both got pretty drunk at Bill’s party.”
“I still walked.”
“You were in flip-flops. It was more of a shuffle.”
They made me laugh and were obviously trying to make me feel better, but I was focused on the fact that between the two of them these two very fit women had lost over 90 pounds.
I see on my walks runners and bicyclers and usually all I can think about is how much time I’ve wasted these years not exercising, or how much more in shape they are than me, or how I have such a long way to go through no one’s fault other than my own. Of course I wonder what they think of me.
Like most people, I forget the world doesn’t rotate around me and that my preconceived notions aren’t based on fact. I saw two fit older women and assumed they had been on the triathlon circuit since they were preschoolers and never once weighed an ounce over what the BMI charts commanded. I imagined they felt sorry for and/or amused by the fat mom in the black compression pants. I was wrong on both counts.
Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see at once how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it had floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you’d made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning.
? Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy
Wow. That had to make you feel good! All three of you are some darn inspirational.
I’ve really come to look forward to these Monday morning posts. As the end of school was nearing, I vowed I was going to do something physical every day. Take a yoga/pilates class, do a walk, do Wii fit–something. Didn’t happen. But I have hit 3-4 times a week. Thanks for helping me remember that something is better than nothing, and that slow progress is still progress.
I love both of those women and your Lemony quote!!! Hungover shuffling counts as walks if she said it did. :D What a great Monday morning post, Jules, and TWO HUNDRED DAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love this post. I dragged my ass 10 miles in a race a few months ago, and kept quiet pace with a group of cute ladies in their fifties, about whom I assumed the same thing. I talked to them at the end and they told me they had started running a few years ago and “it had changed their lives.” Talking to them gave me an immeasurable boost and a humbling reminder about assumptions.
Love the Lemony Snicket quote and the inspiration in your writings.
Thanks for the encouragement. I joined the Y July 1, and run/workout 5 days a week, and I’m expecting to see a big improvement and NOTHING. So yeah, it’s a good reminder that it’s only been 3 weeks. I guess my expectation to wake up and be my former, much thinner self isn’t very realistic . . .
P.S. I think walking 200 days in a row is AMAZING!!! Great job!
I’ve been running for about a year now. I was never athletic in school, I was ALWAYS one of the last kids to complete the mandatory mile “run” (hahaha, yeah right, talk about a shuffle), and never dreamed I would run voluntarily. When I first started and I was slow and felt awful a woman who was walking cheered me on and it meant the world to me. Now I’m still slow but running makes me feel fantastic and whenever I see anybody out, running, walking, biking, no matter what their athletic level I just think, “Yay! Look at us out here together! Good for us! We feel better mind and body because here we are out and moving!” And I wave and clap and smile like the loon I am and nearly every person waves and smiles back. And I love it. We’re a community, maybe high off our heads on endorphins, but I’ll take it. Even in the small 5K races I’ve done I’ve felt that same sense of community between runners and walkers. So that’s what I think, as a runner, when I see walkers out walking.
So true!! I started exercising almost 2 years ago and have lost over 50lbs but it seemed to take forever in the beginning. I still don’t think of myself as fit but went on a ‘walk’ with friends lately that ended up being a 17km hike up and over hill after hill. I was surprised to find myself at the front of the group and feeling great at the end (we did end at a pub, this is England after all). Slow and steady really does win the race (although I am mostly still walking the allegorical race).
Congrats on your 200! An amazing milestone! And I love your photos.
Woohoo! Congrats, Jules!
Seems to me, it makes perfect sense that you don’t lose weight right away. You’re building lean body mass . . . so it takes awhile to show up on the scales. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
And, assumptions–heavens! I do tend to be quick to judge. God has a funny way of making me see the error of my ways . . . which is always a bit painful, since I don’t like to be wrong. :)
WHOOOOO!!!! 200 DAYS!!!!!
There are two things that I have to CONTINUALLY remind myself of, whether I’m at the gym, or reading about fitness accomplishments on blogs (*AHEM*!!!) or scrolling past amazing Workout-Of-The-Day posts on Facebook by my CrossFit-ing friends (“Bench pressed 405 today! Box jumped 7 feet!”):
1) Nobody came out of the womb wearing a tiny little wetsuit, sprinting for a tiny little triathlon bike (although…talk about a transition!). Everybody- EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON.- was where I am now, looking in from the outside, as a beginner. There is nothing shameful about NOT being where someone else currently is.
2) A year from now, you’ll wish you had started today (this one is floating all over the internet, I assume you’ve probably seen it too!). As a perfectionist, it’s all too easy for me to say “Oh, I’ll just wait to start that, until I can do it perfectly”…even though THAT MAKES NO SENSE. I will never get better at running by waiting until I’m better at running. I’ll never lift heavier weights if I just sit and wait to get stronger. I need to JUST START. The worst part is that every year I look back and regret all the things I didn’t start, or didn’t try, even though I wanted to. I know that this is true, yet I still fall victim to the illusion of perfection.
I know the feeling. When biking or hiking, I try really hard to focus on the positives – it makes me feel better, relieves stress, and gives me an excuse to be by myself. All it takes is one perfectly-coiffed, taut runner with her abs out for everyone to see to bring it all crashing down. But I keep going, and that’s the important part. :-)
Keep walking, and who cares if you lose butt-loads weight or not – as long as it helps you feel good, and get outside of your comfort zone, it’s well worth it!
exercise is really good for you. every step you take you’re making your legs, your heart healthier. don’t let the numbers take that away from you. but honestly, weight loss is largely due to intake. it’s a really rare case that any of us gains weight while eating below our basal caloric rate. so that means we’re sort of putting effort into gaining weight, you know? exercise is great for your body and when you’ve lost what you’d like it helps make you look the way you’d like with what you’ve got. but if it’s just weight loss, focus on what you’re eating and try to log your calories to see where you can improve nutrition and cut down on the other stuff. i’m in this too. trying to understand my body. we’re all in progress because we’re always changing. so still feel good about yourself and try to understand your body better. best of luck.
http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/
Love this. All of it!
Yeah! Day 200!
I want you to know you’ve inspired me to start walking every day. My motto is just walk. I can say all the sad stuff, cancer, yeah, cancer, but I’m not listening to that…. I’m walking and today is day 58!
So thanks Jules. Great post. Oh, I haven’t lost any weight either, so now I’m really motivated to keep going and lose the ahem , 10 lbs, no really way more than that.:)
Great job! I think it’s pretty obvious you must look and feel better if these women thought you had lost weight just by seeing you. As long as you are feeling better and getting healthier – that is what counts. The weight loss will come.
I’ve been trying to cycle at least 3 times a week and was getting really fed up because, as I have pointed out frequently to my husband “There’s no change AT ALL”. I’m not bothered by my weight as much as my shape. I think I was labouring under the assumption that being quite, um, wobbly? would mean that there would be a rapid change at the beginning. Not so.
He has been doing his best to be encouraging, but the final straw was when an old lady (with white hair and everything) overtook me cycling up a hill whilst making encouraging conversation with me. Talk about mortified. The day after I amused a motorist by shouting ‘I’m not dead yet!’ as a buzzard (carrion-eating UK bird of prey) circled overhead as I struggled up another hill.
I’ve hurt my back so I can’t cycle at the moment (ironically, my attempts at exercise were partly to strengthen my core muscles so I don’t hurt my back so often) but you’ve encouraged me to keep going when it’s better :-)