It's there, inside each of us waiting for us to tap into it. I saw this commercial, Find Your Greatness by Nike during the recent Summer Olympics hosted in London, UK. I love it and thought it went well with my topic of choice today. My Reasons WHY.
I've recently been asked why I do this. "If God wanted us all skinny, He would have made us that way." That made me revisit my "WHY"s. I'm not concerned with skinny, I'm not even aiming for a smaller pant size. I'm aiming for healthy. I thought I'd share with you my reasons why.
This is Nathan. He is 12 years old. He's from London, Ohio. Greatness is not beyond his reach, nor is it for any of us.
I am the veteran of more than my fair share of knee surgeries, right and left knees. The summer I was 27 I had graduated from walking with crutches non-weight bearing to beginning to bear weight on my left leg and walking with crutches. By the autumn of the year I had curb kicked my crutches and was walking with a cane. I had talks with my orthopedic surgeon about losing weight, I had hit 208 and I refused to get on a scale again. I hated where I was, I felt horrible. Carrying around that extra weight felt horrible, imagine hopping around on one leg (a leg that had already had 2 knee surgeries itself) with that kind of weight and no option to put the other foot down. He said that loosing weight would be good, the less I carried the less my knees would hurt, I had the knees of an 80 year old. He offered no magic bullet. I worked hard at my rehab and was ahead of my healing curve, even according the workman's comp doctor. Two surgeries and almost 2 years off from work and I got back. I had lots of weight to loose and little knowledge about it, I thought if I just limited my calories and was physical I would manage. Fast forward a few years to my lowest weight since then, 165. But that followed a severe bought of pneumonia that kept me out of work 6 weeks and almost put me in the hospital. Two rounds of powerful antibiotics, because after the first round I was still sick. My immune system was attacking my endocrine system and ignoring the infection. People told me I looked terrible and I was severely winded climbing just one flight of stairs when I finally went back to work, illness be darned 'cuz I was getting cabin fever. I was working as a steamfitter on a local 500 MW powerhouse project at the time, filling in as foreman when our boss was out. My welder partner took good care of me, keeping a bucket for me to sit on and rest. Slowly the weight crept back on.
The next few years were tough ones, our family is aging and with age comes a host of health problems. My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and lost 13" of her intestines to the baseball sized tumor. My father was forced into retirement by back surgery (after over 30 years in the trades as a plumber/welldriller and then pipefitter). He would need 2 surgeries to get to the point where he could walk across his back yard without pain or having to sit down and rest. My mother would suffer another intestinal blockage, an adhesion from the surgery that removed part of her intestines had strangulated her colon. Then a hernia surgery to place mesh in where all those incisions had ruined her abdominal wall. There is a history of diabetes in the family, hypothyroidism, high cholesterol. My husband was on meds for high cholesterol, too. Then testing his blood because he was hypoglycemic. We started changing our diets.
Then the other shoe dropped. While working away from home he suffered a "horrendously bleeding diverticulum", the doctor's words, not ours. He lost 1/3 of his blood in 45 minutes. They struggled to get an IV started in each arm because his veins were collapsing. The last thing he remembers from the emergency room before waking in ICU was being asked if he wanted to be resuscitated. Our diets needed to change again. I was already on Shakeology, trying still to manage my weight and I was loosing some, slowly. I felt better and I got him started on it, too for it's low glycemic index. He now had to worry about fiber in his diet. He dropped from 230 to 185 with just the changes in diet. I was diagnosed with PCOS (Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome). That meant I needed to loose the weight before I became insulin resistant, but loosing weight would be difficult. I've read that for a PCOS woman to loose 1 pound in a week is like a woman without PCOS loosing 2 or 3 in the same week. Not easy. But I had to and 40 is just around the corner.
When my mother had 2 weeks left of chemotherapy their house burned down, a very cold early January morning. I will never forget that call, my childhood home was in flames. I will never forget seeing those flames roaring 40 feet above the roof, the firemen doing their best while the water pool froze over. The fire started at approximately 5:30 am, the firemen fought it until 4:30 pm that day. The 3 most important things in that house got out: Ma, Pa and their dog, Riley. The kitty, Gizmo, perished. I realized the rest is just stuff, replaceable. While I had them at the hospital being treated for smoke inhalation, we made the decision that they would stay with me and my husband until they had rebuilt. I became the caretaker of the family and reinforced that role with every passing surgery. How would I take care of them if I wasn't taking care of myself?
This selfish little thing called loosing weight is an indulgent thing for me, getting healthy is for me, but my family will reap the benefits. My grandson will have a gramma who isn't afraid to take pictures with him because she hates how she looks. My son, when he gets home from deployment in Afghanistan, will have a mom who will take pictures with him. I'm tired of hiding, I'm tired of hurting. My family needs me and this is how I will ensure that I can be there for them when they need me, capable of handling everything they need me to handle. My big brother once said "you have the big shoulders in the family, every one turns to you when they need someone to talk to because you can handle it". I'm doing this to ensure that my shoulder is there for them any time they need it, for years to come.
Those are some of my reasons why, all for health and none for vanity, though I like loosing the muffin tops, too!
