Hopes of a future thin person

Today I had a good exercising morning.   I did the stretching portion of the balance ball dvd and then did a Weights for Dummies dvd.   I think they are both good for relative beginners who are fairly far along in their weight loss and simple exercise and are ready to try to increase or at least vary their workout.

I am much more fit than I was a year ago.   I feel like I’m fit – I go up stairs without breathing hard, I can go faster and longer on the treadmills and ellipticals etc., I can actually do the ab crunches and other things on these tapes.

But on Friday, I tried to run at the gym.   I did 20 minutes at the fastest pace I’ve gone yet on the split treadmill, which is my favorite workout machine.   Then I did about a 5 minute walking warm up on a regular treadmill, increasing speed to the high threes – about 3.7 or 3.8 before the speed was too high for me to walk.   Then I started to run, increasing the speed to 4 and then the low 4s – 4.1, 4.2 – as I tried to find a comfortable speed.    My goal was to run for 5 minutes and then slow down and walk for the last 5 minutes.

I only made it for about 3 – 3.5 minutes before I really had to stop running. 

On the bright side, that is the first 3 minutes of running I’ve done in over 10 years and I physically could not have run more than a few steps last year.

On the, well, cloudy but with a chance to become patchy sunlight side, the last time I lost weight, I could actually run for half an hour or more, I could go outside and go jogging, I jogged in San Francisco down to the Embarcadero and back to wherever I started from.  Yeah, that would be more impressive if I could remember where I started from, but still – jogging.  In San Francisco.  Me.    That was absolutely the high watermark of my weightloss and fitness.   I weighed 125 by the end of that trip. 

So, that tells me that I am right that I am not done yet.   Many plastic surgeons, n fact all of them, have suggested that I don’t need to lose more weight – that it’s not worth it.   I think that shows an underlying bias – that they don’t see me as having the potential to actually be a fit person of a healthy or thin weight.  They don’t see me as someone for whom attractiveness and normalcy is a realistic goal.  They don’t see me as worth it.   For now, I’m not ready to write myself off like that.   I have worked too hard.   I can lose another 25 pounds of fat, become stronger and fitter and then, when I have all the extra skin removed, I will be the person my body was meant to be.

The alternative, if I stop now, is that I will be 20-30 pounds overweight at the end.   That’s the kind of weight where your doctor tells you to lose weight every time you go.   It’s right on the borderline of obesity.   Why would I want to stop there???