So I'm fat. Pudgy. Overweight. Chunky. Whatever. Has the issue reached such an extreme that I can no longer walk for even five minutes without getting out of breath? No. But the point is that for my own health I need to lose some weight.
The problem is motivation. The notion of "health" is sort of an abstract concept at my age. 22-year-olds, even ones who can't complete a mile within 15 minutes, don't die of fat. So the fact that I understand on a rational and objective level that I need to decrease my girth to something healthier just doesn't do it for me. And being able to dress in cuter clothing is hardly a motivator for me since I've never been particularly interested in clothing. I could have the body of a supermodel and I'd still dress like a haredi hobo--no, I don't mean like urban homeless chic or whatever that trend is called, I mean legit gross. Nor does the idea of being able to attract guys have any appeal for me, since I'd rather be the fattest woman on the planet and die of Twinkie poisoning than be with someone whose love for me is contingent on my being within a certain weight range. As for comments from my mother about my weight as motivation to lose weight, well, sometimes I wonder if I'm choosing to be fat just out of spite.
The problem is that I'm not a rational girl/lady/woman who carefully weighs (is there a pun in there?) her options and with a complete lack of emotion decides to go with the one with the most items in the column labeled "PROS." No, instead I am motivated by fiction and my whims. And, most of all, I am motivated by Doctor Who.
This Memorial Day Weekend has turned into a bit of a Fat Elvis Weekend for me. I've gotten out a bit, taken the dogs for walks and met up with old friends in town for the holiday, but mostly I've been staying inside moping and just generally having myself a Fat Elvis Weekend. And, if you don't know already, that means that the Doctor Who box sets are out.
So I've spent hours this weekend watching the Doctor's companions run around. Donna Noble running up stairs, Sarah Jane Smith running down corridors, and Amy Pond just generally running around in hot pants. And as I sat there watching these fictional women get an intergalactic cardio workout, I realized that I'm not capable of doing what they do. If I were a companion of the Doctor, I wouldn't even be able to keep it up until the first commercial break, and if it were in the UK (no commercials) I'd be well and truly fucked. And yet these characters did it every Saturday for 45 minutes at a time.
Basically when it comes down to it, much like I failed every fitness test my schools threw at me, I would probably also fail the informal Doctor Who fitness test. Like the old joke about how I can survive a bear chasing after us as long as I'm faster than you, the Doctor and Co. would only have to outrun me when being pursued by a Cyberman. Whereas most companions are famous for getting captured (repeatedly), five minutes into my first episode I'd probably manage to get myself eaten because I couldn't outrun some hideous creature that the Doctor was too much of a pussy to kill.
I'm just too out of shape to be a companion of the Doctor. And here's where I have to interrupt myself and remind anyone reading this that I recognize fully and completely that Doctor Who isn't real, that Time Lords don't exist, and that I'm never going to travel the universe accompanied by a madman with a box. I recognize that these are simply fantasies. But that's exactly my problem. My weight is now destroying even my fantasies.
So here's what I intend to do about it: Every day for 45 minutes (the length of a regular episode) I will participate in some kind of sweat-inducing exercise. We're going to go by BBC standards here and say that this 45 minute period of exercise cannot be broken up into smaller segments. In the beginning it will probably just have to be 45 minutes a day of brisk walking since, as this whole rambling mess has been saying all along, I'm not ready to outrun (in my head) crazy old people possessed by aliens or an army of Daleks just yet. But I'm sure if I keep it up I'll get there eventually.
And when the Doctor invites me along I'll be ready.
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