Packing Up the Pounds!

Nothing like a loooong vacation to help a person to relax. It's been awhile since I last wrote, and I wished I could say I was on vacation, but I was not. I've been living in a rather large, two-story house on a little over three acres since 2003. These last two years have been rough; two major surgeries and a few other life-altering events made me realize that it was time to downsize. I've moved a lot in my life - being a military brat prepared me well for packing and moving. But over the years, I've accumulated a lot, mostly because I've been upsizing each home for quite some time.

This time, however, I downsized by over 50% in house size and my yard looks like a postage stamp compared to the envelope I had grown accustomed to. I had a huge vegetable garden, a 400 foot long driveway, well over 100 oak trees, and countless number of mountain laurels. I fed the deer, the birds, the squirrels, and whatever else moved out there. So, I put the house on the market, thinking it would be at least a year before I sold it. I guess the universe knew how tired I was, so it sent buyers in two months. And that's when the "diet-from-hell" began.

Moving from a size 16 house to a size 6 cottage is like trying to fit a size 16 butt into a size 6 corset: very painful. I likened it to having to go on a starvation diet to lose 50 pounds in two months. Doable, but very painful and life-threatening, albeit only emotionally. This move was surely the hardest move I've ever had to endure, but it has been the most cathartic by far. This is what I learned:

• We don't pay attention to what we accumulate as long as we can stuff it somewhere. 
• We no longer "see" the stuff packed away and soon forget we have it.
• We never know how much we've packed on in our lives until something bad happens.

Packing up my house, knowing I would have no place to put a lot of my stuff, made me really, and I mean really, look at why I was hanging on to such things as a pattern for a poet's blouse I'd cut out but never sewed together, which I had for over 15 years, a twelve-place setting for dinnerware - when a six-place set was enough -  a collection of 100 plastic coin cups from Las Vegas - I walked to each and every casino on the strip collecting two cups from each casino - enough plastic plates, cups, forks, spoons, and knives for 75 people, and .... well, you get the picture. Let is suffice to say, I made about $1,200 on the yard sale and still have stuff left over.

What's my point, you ask? Well, I think we pack on body fat in the same manner; we simply don't pay attention to the scales, or the increase in clothing size, or the arthritis, or the loss of interest in physical activity UNTIL something bad happens: diabetes, gout, high-blood pressure, a heart-attack, or even cancer.

Body fat harbors the inflammatory hormone C-Reactive Protein, which is responsible for inflammatory diseases, such as the ones I listed above. And if that's not scary enough, guess what else excess body fat in linked to? Dementia! Yes, a study by the Center for Disease Control found that going into middle age with a body mass index of 25 or higher increases your chance of getting dementia by 35%! And if you go into middle age with a body mass index greater than 29, your chance of getting dementia increases to 74%.

Now is the time to look at what you are accumulating, not just in your home, but around your middle too. I've heard all the excuses for not losing weight. What if you, instead, looked at how you could lose weight? Always focus on the goal - never the obstacles.

"The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can't are both right."  Henry Ford

One small change today, can make a huge difference in your tomorrows.