27. Image 6

So something else has occurred to me about that point at which I decided to change, a factor that with all the big stuff I was thinking on slipped my mind until I was talking to another race volunteer at the barefoot 5k I attended last weekend. We had the awesome job of standing at the 2.5k mark and telling the people who wanted to run the 5 to go left and everyone else to hang a right. We also had to go to that point about 30 minutes before the race actually started, so we had time to talk.

Naturally, given the event, we talked about how and why we started using barefoot shoes. He had been a long time running and didn’t really use them much, but got back into running to drop 15 or 20 pounds he’d put on since college, which led to me explaining my own experience with barefoot running and weight loss. After a lot of back and fourth on the topic he mentioned something that jogged my memories on how I felt in my own skin when I was up at my heaviest. He was joking about how it must feel like I was suddenly without a winter coat, and it made me realize that I had felt something very close to just that.

People with my type of body have the ability to put weight on all over. You don’t really develop a gut, there isn’t any one part that gets super huge, you just sort of swell all over. It makes it easier to carry and ignore extra pounds. I got bigger and bigger, but I had never really had that idea that my gut was getting a little to big for comfort, or I really needed to address my love handles or moobs. I was swelling but everything remained proportionate and I was told I carried it well. It did in fact feel like I was carrying it well. Until it didn’t.

Around the time of my daughters birth there was a distinct change in how I felt in my own skin. This was not a mental feeling or some self conscious nonsense, this was purely physical. One morning I got up and noticed my body. That is a weird sentence, but I don’t know how else to say it. Prior to my feet hitting the ground that day I knew I was big, but never really felt like it was a burden to me. Once I hit that point though, I could never not notice that layers of fat I was hauling around.

It went from me feeling like me, to me feeling like I had a snow suit on 24 hours a day. Except this suite was weighting, and jiggled when I walked, pinched when I tied my shoes, and made moving through attics (part of my job) a nightmare. After a day or two of dealing with this new found self awareness I did something that will stick in my brain forever. I got home from work, stripped down to my underwear, stood in front of our full body mirror and jumped. I had thrown cinder blocks into lakes that make fewer ripples. While this alone didn’t tip me over the edge to make the changes, it certainly put a bit more weight on the fix it side of my decision scale.