It begins today

As with many (if not all) changes or adjustments we 'should' make in our lives, the decision to be healthy has to come from within us. Well-wishing family members and friends can cajole, plead, admonish, lecture, badger, and make a total nuisance of themselves until they're blue in the face, but - as any inveterate smoker will tell you - we alone have to decide when it's time.

You know that feeling you get in your head, just a weird, fuzzy feeling behind your eyeballs that tells you that you are coming down with a cold, even before the first sneeze? Well, determining that this IS the time when we are going to make a change in our lives sort of feels like that.

You don't get this feeling on New Year's Eve when you rather sloppily tell your "ve-y besh fren" that you're going to stop drinking tomorrow; you don't get this feeling when someone guilts you into joining a gym, promising to be your "work-out buddy." You only get this feeling when it seems like an epiphany; this idea is brilliant! and you can't understand how it's never occurred to you before; when suddenly everywhere you look, there is corroborating evidence to support this "new idea." A web site you had never stumbled upon before, a billboard displaying the exact wording of the dazzling plan in your head, an email in your inbox from someone you haven't heard from in years, and they're asking you about this particular aspect of your life.

Well, today it happened. A perfect storm, a confluence of events that led me inexorably to the decision to start today. I won't bore you with the details of what led me to this spot at this particular time, but I will say that this decision is loudly punctuated by the screaming pain in my knee every time I stand up from my desk. I like to call it "my old football injury," which is partly true, but in actuality it is a function of carrying an extra person around all the time - and quite frankly, this extra person could stand to lose a few pounds, too. Yes, I weigh more than twice what I should. And when I say, "should," I don't mean what the so-called 'experts' say that I should weigh, I mean the weight at which I actually last felt like a healthy person, as far as I can remember, anyway.

So today, the first step is starting a journal of what I put into my mouth. And I have to say, it's fairly appalling. Because this is probably an important step in confronting my bad eating habits, I am going to lay bare my journal in this blog; I will write my food choices, good and bad; my mental and physical struggles, and I may even curse a few times (which means I would have to change the setting on this blog to 'adult content'). If this process is going to be of any use to any of my readers (if indeed there are any), then it would be counterproductive to lie by omission or hedge the truth in any way. So, here is my promise - and my warning: I will keep a true and accurate accounting of this process of lubing up the zipper on the fat suit. Thanks for joining me on this journey, and I will try to mix in enough fun and laughter to make it worth the trip!