This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.

• Why I’m doing this »
• It Really Is the Little Things that Matter »
• It’s Not Just About the Obstacles »
• Your Weight Isn’t Your Health »
• The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit »

In the interest of full disclosure, getting myself back to health wasn’t as straightforward or as easy as my last posts make it sound. I faced crises on the path—several, actually, at several points in the process. Maybe it would help to share one of those crises here.

The following is something I wrote two-and-half years ago, about a month after I’d started going to the gym on a regular basis. I’d spent the previous few years slowly reversing my inertia of inactivity and had finally reached a point that going to the gym for more serious exercise was something I genuinely wanted to do.

Even then, even with all my new motivation to get healthy, I still found myself close to giving up…

Continue reading “The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit” →

This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.

• Why I’m doing this »
• It Really Is the Little Things that Matter »
• It’s Not Just About the Obstacles »
• Your Weight Isn’t Your Health »
• The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit »

But what if nothing much changes in your life to make you care about improving your health?

You could just keep on as you are—which means that, eventually, you could end up with some kind of health scare. Better if it never gets that far.

I think there’s a way to build up to caring about your health without a scare and without major life changes—much like how I took many small steps to slowly change my inertia of inactivity, you can generate a momentum of caring. It starts with a necessary first step:

Stop making weight the goal.

Continue reading “Your Weight Isn’t Your Health” →

This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.

• Why I’m doing this »
• It Really Is the Little Things that Matter »
• It’s Not Just About the Obstacles »
• Your Weight Isn’t Your Health »
• The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit »

Getting rid of some of the obstacles that built up and stopped me from committing to exercise was an essential part of my path to better health, but it wasn’t the only factor. I need to talk about the elephant in the room:

Back in my late 20s and early 30s, when I was overweight and sedentary, my health simply didn’t matter all that much to me. I didn’t care about it.

It wasn’t just the cascade of obstacles that stopped me, it was the fact that getting healthier wasn’t important enough to me to bother overcoming them.

Continue reading “It’s Not Just About the Obstacles” →

This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.

• Why I’m doing this »
• It Really Is the Little Things that Matter »
• It’s Not Just About the Obstacles »
• Your Weight Isn’t Your Health »
• The Pernicious Appeal of Wanting to Quit »

I was heading up the stairs of the parking garage as I left work the other day. I prefer to take the stairs rather than ride the elevator, and I usually take the stairs two-at-a-time, not running up them but pretty fast. A coworker saw me and asked why I take the stairs that way. I responded that it’s an easy way for me to get a little bit of extra exercise into my day. They looked somewhat skeptical of this justification.

They’re right to be skeptical of that reasoning. In the grand scheme of things, assessed in terms of exercise, a couple flights of stairs taken two-at-a-time at a good clip doesn’t really accomplish much of anything. It doesn’t elevate my heart rate for more than a minute or so, it doesn’t burn that many extra calories, etc.

And yet, I’m convinced that taking stairs this way—and eschewing elevators and escalators when possible—makes all the difference in the world when it comes to my health and well-being.

Continue reading “It Really Is the Little Things that Matter” →