It’s been exactly four months since I shared the fact that I had lost inches around my waist. My focus since last autumn has been on eating food that is truly good for me and exercising more.
Sadly, I have not succeeded thus far in exercising more. If anything, I’ve exercised less. I used to play basketball two times a week – consistently. In 2011, for various reasons, I’ve rarely met that goal. Most of my time has been spent, as usual, sitting in my office chair working on Web sites.
Despite my failure to exercise, and even though I haven’t gotten sufficient sleep in decades, I have more energy then I’ve had in many, many years. I really feel great and I can fit comfortably in clothes that I wore in my late teens when I stopped growing taller.
I’ve never had an obsession with checking my weight on scales but a few days ago I hopped on my bathroom scale because I was wondering how much weight I had dumped. The answer: 20 lbs – TWENTY lbs! That’s more than 10% of what I had weighed and leaves me practically at my high school (mid-1980s) weight!
In the past 2-3 years, I began experiencing knee pain. I finally went to see a knee specialist about a year ago and, after x-raying my knees, he informed me that I’m losing cartilage in my knees and the pain I was from my bones rubbing together.
My doctor’s solution was for me to not play basketball as much and do more swimming and tennis. He also told me to do exercises to strengthen my thigh muscles. His bottom line was that I need to accept the fact that I’m getting older. I thank God for the information he provided and I thank Him that all I got was the information.
You see, the good knee doctor told me that a lot of his colleagues would have “scoped” my knees (essentially smoothing them so that they wouldn’t grind so much) — even though they would never choose to have the operation done to themselves under my circumstances! They do this to make their car payments. He said the procedure would need to be repeated in a couple of years and since I’m not a professional athlete trying to squeeze out a couple of more years of productivity, I should just accept my condition.
Why am I going on about my knees? Because getting rid of twenty pounds has also gotten rid of my knee pain! Six months ago, I could not do one squat comfortably and I had a hard time raising my right leg to do a kick. Now, I have no difficulty doing either!
Now, to really master my health, I need to get as serious about exercise as I have about eating. I’ll next write about the changes I’m making on that front.