Embracing the suck

I've been unemployed for two days. It's a profoundly weird experience.

One of my motivations in taking the buyout was the opportunity to start working out again.

I gained 30 pounds since the beginning of 2014, having spent the year+ since then eating my stress and then eating my grief.

I'm 53 years old and have never been in shape in my life. Whatever shape I started out with at the beginning of life, it's been downhill since then.  I've had a couple of times when I've worked out regularly and successfully for months at a time, as my Timehop app keeps reminding me, but I've always stopped way short of anything like being in shape.

I ache all the time. Sometimes the ache spills over into actual pain. I have a small frame, and my body wasn't built to handle the weight I'm carrying now. The discomfort in my knees and hips are constant reminders that I'm overweight and out of shape.

My nebulous public goals are to get strong and flexible. Yes, I have more specific goals than those, but they're for me.

One consequence of being unemployed is that I can't afford to eat out, so I'm using that to my advantage and starting to cook and eat like I used to before I met Jay.

One other consequence is that I have the time to do something about my body, to remake myself into someone who's not uncomfortable all the time.

It's going to suck, the heavy lift of daily exercise. But one thing I learned watching Jay die is how to embrace the suck.

So here I go, embracing the suck, knowing that as much as this process is going to suck for a long time, it'll be worse if I drop dead of a heart attack I could have prevented by simply getting my ever-widening ass in motion.

I'm using my Twitter feed to record my daily activities, so if you're curious what I'm doing, that's the place to see.