Let’s Do This Thing.

At lunch today Amelia and Marlene dutifully chose salads over clam chowder. The last piece of bread sat in the basket. 

“Look, I’m totally eating that,” I said, and snatched it up. It was just going to sit there because most women are too polite to take the last piece of anything. Especially women who don’t want to eat too many calories.

I held it in my fingers and sighed, “No, that’s mean. I’ll share it with you guys if you want.” Neither of them wanted. In fact the idea that they’d want a third of a piece of bread the size of piano key probably just perplexed them. But I would have wanted that third.

I have always made it a point that my friends know I’m not afraid of being fatter than them. We don’t have to pretend I’m not. I’m not offended that I didn’t get invited to Zumba classes; it would have been torment. And they don’t have to cut themselves off and be embarrassed if they accidentally start complaining about their cellulite. It’s ok (though futile) to hate your cellulite, I guess. Each person needs to feel right in their own skin. I do, for the most part. More than most people would think I have the right too.

My wardrobe is boss. (Wooo Torrid!) My body comforts and cares for my children, pleasures my husband and myself. My body is me. We’ve been through a lot together. I couldn’t hate it any more than I could my own kids. (They’re pretty damn unwieldy, too). Plus I’m just weird enough to feel like stylishly worn fat is one more thing that makes me special, and lord knows I love being special.

Thanks for changing the game, Torrid.

But hell’s bells. Here I am. 

I have to start exercising. I have to start moving. 

The truth is I hurt. My back hurts when I load the dishwasher. I’m tired. I spend half of each day in a drowse, as if my blood starves for the oxygen that would propel it at the proper pace of life.

I have always walked slow and clunky, partly from messed up hips as a baby and partly from just being a graceless clod. The excess weight has deepened my pace into an underwater stomp, slow and labored.

When summer comes my friends are going to want to start walking again, pushing their kids in strollers around town to parks and yogurt shops, talking effortlessly all the while. I can’t keep up with them now. It hurts to walk more than two blocks. 

I don’t dislike exercise, at least not the walking, biking, or playing kind. It’s hard to do, but I like it. But how to actually get out that door, y’know? How to invite more inconvenience in my life when I’m already so intent on staying still that I won’t get up to change the cords so the TV plays DVDs instead of Nintendo. (My Netflix sits for weeks because of that.) How to embrace the pain that will come. 

 How to take that first step. How have you done it?