Having been born and raised in Iowa during a time when everything – and I mean everything – was fried in bacon grease, it’s kinda a wonder I wasn’t heavier as a child. I wasn’t insanely over-weight, mind you, but a definite chub-chub. As I grew older, and got interested in boys, I would “play” at losing weight. These attempts were largely futile because at that time I, as well as much of the country, lived under the mistaken belief that all you had to do to lose weight was stop eating. As a freshman in high school, I did manage to lose about twenty pounds. However, in order to do so, I didn’t eat more than a thousand calories a day and most times, far less. Something that extreme, at such a young age, had disaster written all over it. Fortunately, anorexia didn’t take hold, but unfortunately when I started eating normally again, my body horded the calories, making any future weight loss just that much harder. This is a phenomenon called Feast or Famine which I’ll discuss in a future post.
Kay. Fast-forward to my mid-twenties. I was working as a stagehand, living with my future husband and still a good twenty pounds heavier than I wanted to be. It was also about this time when I discovered a thirty minute fitness show on Lifetime called “It Figures” with Charlene Prickett. For whatever reason, I started working out with this show. Maybe it was Prickett’s down-to-earth attitude or maybe it was the fact I could actually DO the workouts. In either case, I was hooked. At first, I worked out maybe a couple of times a week. Soon I was up to Monday through Friday. Then I started taping the shows so I could work out on the weekends. I also began to watch what I ate, choosing fruits and vegetables over burgers and fries. I lost those nagging twenty pounds and got down to a dress size I hadn’t seen since my freshman year in high school. And I was healthy doing it. No starving. Talk about an epiphany. My entire attitude toward exercise and dieting evolved. I stopped “dieting” and started making healthy lifestyle changes. Ones that have stuck with me through the following quarter century or so.
So that’s my fitness journey in a nutshell. What about you? What are the fitness challenges you’ve experienced and/or conquered? I’d love for you to share. Post a response or email me at lynda@lyndabailey.net. Have a stellar Monday!
