Reclaiming My Inner-athlete

Once I was an athlete. I was a swimmer, a runner, a soccer player. I rode my bike two miles each way to school everyday, and then to swim practice. I swam four hours a day year round. I ran ten miles a day in training for cross-country track. I went to summer basketball camp, and played on a neighborhood soccer team.

Even then, I thought I was fat, because I weighed 160 pounds (at 5'9") when all my friends, my sisters and my step-mother weighed less.

I wore a size 8. I had one tiny handful of fat on my belly if I laid on my side. When I laid on my back, my stomach was completely flat. I wore a size 36B bra. I wear a 46D now.

I hated my body. But I loved what it could do. I loved to push myself and I loved that feeling of exhaustion that comes from using your body. Feeling all my muscles, knowing they've been worked. That was something I loved, once upon a time.

Now exercise hurts so much, I avoid it. When I walk, my hands get this weird swollen feeling, and I get a pain in my right leg. My back hurts. My heart hurts, too, because I am so very, very concious of my body when I exercise.

I can only swim two lengths of an Olympic-sized pool without feeling like I'm going to drown. When I was seventeen I swam twenty lengths as warm-up.

I can only walk 30 minutes at 3 miles an hour before my body hurts so much I'm in tears. When I was seventeen I ran ten miles five days a week.

What have I done to myself?

I'll never be seventeen again. But damn it, I don't have to feel like 100. I can have my energy back. I can enjoy moving and using my body again.

I can get back to the point where I loved riding my Beach Cruiser, and where swimming was a challenge, not a near-death experience. I can remember how much I love basketball and how running used to make me feel like I was flying.

I've been concentrating on making sure that I cut 500 calories a day from my diet. I'm not dieting. I'm just trying to eat more healthfully. And the cutting 500 calories a day thing is working well. I'm actually cutting much more than 500.

I've spent the last year convinced that I had some sort of thyroid dysfunction that was making it impossible for me to lose weight.

Then I went on Calorie King and started keeping track of my calories.

Seems simplistic...a lower-calorie approach to weight loss? No carb or fat counting? No celebrity endorsements?

But I realized that while I was whining, I was eating...nearly 4000 calories a day.

Cutting down to 2000 was HELL for the first two weeks. I was eating half what I ate before. It felt like torture.

I don't feel tortured anymore.