Getting Healthy, Together

I got blood work done for the first time since 2020 this week. The results, were thankfully, a huge improvement!

I was a nervous before I got the results, truth be told. I don’t lead the healthiest lifestyle; I sit all day for my job. I sit for most of my hobbies. Until the last couple of years, I really didn’t focus on what I ate or how much exercise I got. As long as I was under 300lbs, I felt I was… fine.

I wasn’t. I was heavy, depressed, and not treating my ADHD. I had high cholestorol, high triglycerides, and didn’t do anything about them.

Until recently.

Lisa (my wife) and I have been getting healthier. It started as her going back on Weight Watchers. I considered going back, too. Then, I remembered all the guilt and shame I felt when I wasn’t using it. I thought the source of those feelings was due to “wasting” money on an app I didn’t use. I fell into the same pattern with the free MyFitnessPal app, too: track for a handful of months, miss a day, and stop. Same guilt, same shame, even without wasting money.

So I came to the conclusion that micro-managing my food intake wasn’t working for me. I’ve since adopted a policy I call “Embracing my chaos”. It isn’t a framework for doing the right thing all the time. Instead of spending my energy trying to figure out exactly how to track my most recent meal, I spend that energy on conciously making better choices. It’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for me.

Then Lisa started going on walks.

Then I started going on walks.

I don’t know how it happened exactly (thanks, ADHD memory!). One day, we decided to go for a walk together around noon. Both kids are in school, and I’ve been working from home since COVID. I can’t believe we didn’t think of this sooner, to be honest. We walked a couple of miles, talked, and had a wonderful time. Then we kept doing it! Not every day, but as often as we could manage it. At least, until yesterday 😭

Yesterday was the last nice day we’re going to have in Chicagoland for a while. It was 75 and sunny. We walked 2.4 miles and had an awesome conversation. I was chatting with my Dadstiny dudes (shout out to Bill and Boston) about it, and how I’m sad we won’t get that time over the winter. The conversation and connecting we’ve been doing, I mean.

We all inhabit different roles in our day to day lives, but when you have young children, it can be difficult to inhabit a role other than “parent”. Those walks gave us the space to inhabit our non-parental roles and talk to each other about things we never get to talk about when the kids are around. All during a period of the day where we both have energy, too, which is even rarer. Normally our only extended conversation happens after the kids are in bed, and by then we’re so zonked from the events of the day we’re not much for in-depth conversation.

This has all been an unnecessarily verbose (get used to that) way of saying that I’m more in love with Lisa today than I’ve ever been before.

I still have high triglycerides… but they’re way, way lower than they were two years ago. As I continue to exercise, they’ll continue to get lower

My cholestorol is way down overall, too.

It feels good to feel good.