Weight

That’s right. I didn’t mean “wait.” It’s not that I have a problem with patience (well, I do … I’m just not working on that one today!). I have a problem with weight.

Two facts have fed into this problem …
1. I love to eat. I love to eat the wrong things. I love to eat too much. I love to eat too much of the wrong things. Issues, I’m telling you. Issues.
2. I don’t particularly care for physical activity. I can spend all day reading a book, doing Sudoku, surfing the internet, watching television or a movie … or just simply doing NOTHING.

Those things said, I need to figure out how to fix this. I need to want to eat less … and eat the right things. I need to want to move more.

As frightening as this sounds, I think I’m further along on the wanting to move more thing … See, in March 2011, I was introduced to indoor rowing. There’s a place here in town called Greenville Indoor Rowing (online at www.greenvilleindoorrowing.com if you can believe it!) that has a bunch of indoor rowing machines in a room and an absolutely brilliant guy running the place. A former NFL player, he’s in his 70s now and far more fit than I’ve, um, ever been … all because he’s been rowing for 25 or so years. Crazy.

Anyway, I really like this rowing thing. Enough that I’ve already rowed over 1,000,000 meters (that’s 640 miles for all of us living in the US that never really figured out that whole ridiculous metric system thing). Enough that we bought our own rowing machine for our house so we can row any time we want.

And that’s a good thing. Because I can now row any time I want. Which makes me happy.
But the eating thing? That’s a whole different story. I wish it were as easy to burn calories as it is to consume them. And why does everything that tastes good have so many damned calories? Frustrating.

Seriously. If I were an alcoholic, you wouldn’t put one drink in front of me three times a day and tell me that’s all I can have. If I were a druggie, you wouldn’t hand me heroin or crack or whatever three times a day. But as a food addict? I’m just screwed. I have to eat to live. I’m supposed to go to the refrigerator (or cabinet, or whatever) three times a day and make a controlled, logical, healthy decision as to what I’m going to eat. Awesome.

That’s it. I have to eat to live … not live to eat. I need to re-direct those “Hmmm, what’s to eat” thoughts into something healthy. So when I’m maybe a little bored, instead of looking for food, I need to make a different choice. When I’m maybe a little emotional (because I am, after all, female!), instead of looking to food, I need to make a different choice.

It’s going to take a while. Certainly not something I’m going to fix overnight. But I’m going to work on it. And just when I think I have it all figured out? I’m going to screw up and realize that I don’t even begin to have a handle on it.

But for now? For now, I’ll just take one day … hell, one meal! … at a time and see what I can make of this mess.