Walkman

After I ate breakfast and showered this morning, I set my wet and naked body (sorry for the unnecessary erotica!) on the bathroom scale. It is a digital scale that measures to the nearest 1/10 pound. According to this morning’s measurement, I weigh 18.6 pounds less than I did at my mid-December doctor’s appointment. That’s encouraging, because during the week between Christmas and New Year’s (and probably for a few days afterward), I wasn’t very disciplined at all, and up until two days ago, I hadn’t tried adding exercise to my routine. All I did was boost my fiber intake—which on a typical day is now around 30 or more grams per day—and watch my saturated fats. I was encouraged to watch my carbs, too, but I haven’t been as concerned with that. I tracked them for a while, but generally, the kinds of foods that would throw off my carbs were also the kinds of things that would throw off my saturated fats—most notably, baked treats and sweets. Of course, I eliminated regular soda from my diet, which itself probably reduced my average daily carb intake by the hundreds. Other than that, I look at carbs only secondarily, to break ties between which brands of tortillas and bread I should buy, for example.

As noted above, I did start exercising two days ago. Nothing major. I’m going for walks, and right now, I don’t even plan to go for walks on days when I go to school because I walk around a bit on campus anyway. I’m open to increasing this, but for now, I figure this can only help matters. Thus far, then, I’ve only gone on two official walks. That hardly warrants any commentary on my part, but I enjoyed them. And I think I will enjoy them. This morning, it was crisp and cool and a bit gray from the early morning rain. It’s nice to get out there and just walk, enjoying the scenery but also being able to be so in tune with one’s own thoughts. Having an iPod is wonderful for this. (You can’t help but turn introspective when you’ve got music playing right inside your ear canals, blocking out much of the noise from the outside world.) Many years ago, I used to walk on a treadmill and use a Discman. That was clunky, awkward, and the Discman was prone to skip as you would walk. Needless to say, iPods are a tremendous improvement. I love it. And it’s so much easier to exercise when you’ve got John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire” blasting away in your eardrums. (I just wish I had had a banana yellow sweatband and some electric blue running shorts to make me feel even more inspired.) I can imagine myself wanting to go on daily walks for the rest of my life. The major hurdle, of course, is going to be weather. In a very short time, it will be disastrously hot around here, even early in the morning. What a way to ruin a good thing.

I guess that’s all I have to say. I thought there would be more to it, but apparently not. Okay, then.