Weight, diet and body image

After years and years of being overweight i made a decision. I gave up trying to diet.

I have tried weight watchers, Jenny Craig, going it alone.....all of these things worked in varying degrees of success but never long term, and never to the degree I was looking for.

So I gave up diets, and set a brand spanking new goal....to run.

There had always been some appeal to the thought of coming home from a shit day at work and running out my frustrations. Hey that's what they do in the movies, and whenever you see someone running it almost always looks so easy. Catalyst to this descision was an incident where I was at a park about 500m from home and it started to rain, I ran home to get out raincoats and was basically written off for the rest of the day, sore, tired and struggling to breathe.

What I didn't understand when I started the first steps of this amazing journey was what it meant to run. The definition of a runner is someone who runs...right?

What I do understand now is that i was caught in a viscous cycle of bad choices, and half-hearted justifications. I did no exercise because I was too tired. I was too tired because I did no exercise. I ate too much and junk because "Im sure it doesn't make that much of a difference" and "I'm too tired to make the effort" and round and round we go.

So how do we break the cycle. It's actually quite simple. Self discipline.nyou need to be prepared to make a change and commit to it. Also set achievable goals. If I has said, I'm going to run and completely change my diet, all at the same time there is no way I would have succeeded. Instead. I broke the goals in two. I decided to run first and completed the c25k 9 weeks, which the last run was a 5k event in the yarra valley. After that I focused on running for longer until I was able to run for 5 hours in the marathon. With the long running comes speed, my 5k time looks pretty sweet at the moment.

But now it's come time to get serious about what goes in. I am at the point where my running has stopped being effective in weight loss. And I need to drop some weight to be a better runner.....sounds like a viscous cycle again.

But in the last week. I have taken steps to break out again and get my diet sorted out. It turns out that all the diet programs have taught me a few things about nutrition, for example I know that eating more raw veg is the key...and after 1 week I'm already seeing benefits of having a green salad and a can of tuna for lunch on a daily basis.

Thenother side to this is that after a dramatic change to my body over the last 14 months, having lost 18kg. That is the way I perceive myself. It's such a complex issue I don't know where to start. In my mind I am still the 106kg behemoth hat I used to be. I don't like it when my clothes cling to me, I feel like I occupy to much space on the train, I just imagine the old me everywhere. I guess this is the cost of being so lazy for so long or is this the way my body and psyche is keeping me focused on eating right and keeping on running.

I am really starting to appreciate why people have body image issues.

What I have discovered is that breaking out of cycles is very rewarding and the amount of effort required to maintain change diminishes as the rewards from the change stack up.

So what does it really mean to be a runner. I have discovered I can do things that require an enormous amount of energy. I have discovered true clear mindedness. I have almost boundless energy and most importantly I know what it's like to sleep because you have burnt the days allocation of energy.

People like to see the pain, the joint issues, the rolled ankles, the blisters and the photos of exhaustion as bad things. For me running has bought so much to my life I really don't know the person I would be without it. It has filled a gap I never knew existed (probably because it was full of maccas wrappers) and given me a source of hard but achievable goals.