A fear of the gym

Let me start by saying that I am smart and funny with a talent for textile art such as yarn and other fibers.  However, my self-esteem when it comes to what I look like is in the negative number range.  Well, in order to start a walking program, a person has to find a place to walk.  There is a beautiful facility right near where I work.  The only problem is that there seems to be only thin/healthy people who use this facility.  Going there with all of these "fit" people makes me anxious.  So, unfortunately, for right now, the gym is not an option.  However, right outside my building at work is a nice long, flat street.  Now, that's a perfect fit!  So, on Wednesday, I hit the start button on my new watch and walked 5 minutes out and then 5 minutes back.  It felt great!    Day 1 accomplished. 

On Thursday, I was not at work, and the rest of my schedule got the best of me so I did not walk.  Friday morning, I arrived at work a bit early, so I again hit the start button on the watch and set out on the exact path as Wednesday.  To my great surprise, what took me 10 minutes on Wednesday only took 8.5 minutes on Friday.  I got back to the building and found that I had to keep walking to make it to my 10 minutes.  For me, this is an excellent sign of things to come.  Maybe it helped that the second walk was in the morning rather than at lunchtime, but I see it as incentive to walk again and walk more.

The first step

I now have my book - yeah!   (Written by Sarah Lorge Butler, Michele Stanten, and Leslie Bonci).  The introduction says two very important things for me.  First, if a person has been sedimentary they should begin by walking 10 minutes a day for the first five days.  Second, it is very important to schedule your walk time.  Both of these apply to me!  Even though I spend my day running taking care of work, and home, and family, I definitely classify myself as sedimentary.  This same set of situations also applies to the part about scheduling time to walk.  As an aside, I like the way the book tells you to walk five out of the seven days during the week.  I am sure this is done so that mentally you can feel that while you are accomplishing something, you still get a break.  Which, again, really works for me.  So I have scheduled my first walk.  Where I am walking is another story for another post.

The journey begins...

This is me – 4 ft 10 in tall and 150 pounds!  I am smiling in this photo because it is a very happy occasion, but looking at this photo makes me grimace.  Sure, I have lots of excuses, but none of them are very good explanations for how this happened.  But this week I had a life-changing moment that I have decided to use as my springboard for getting fit and healthy.  I finished the last project for my Masters degree.  I have always told people that once I finish my degree I will have time to read the books that I want to read, not the ones that I have to read.  So, I bought a book that, after looking at this photo, I really want to read – and live – “Walk you Butt Off.”  And so this journey begins with the first step!