the notebook
Hi. I'm oak.
In which I fire up the engine in the biography convertible and take a spin around town.
I'm thirty. I'm married. I'm a web designer. I'm a new father.
My dad, a type 2 diabetic, just turned 60. He's already had one heart attack scare, and a triple bypass. His father lived into his 70s but had to overcome a stroke and bypass surgery to get there.
I am mired in the end result of 15 years of over-eating and no exercise. I'm not going to make excuses for either of these two things, but (and here's where I sound suspiciously like I'm making excuses) I hate to exercise.
I think you need one of two things to be a consistently active person: you either need to love what you're doing so much that it becomes an essential part of your life (I've heard runners describe running this way), or you have to be working towards something larger, like working out so you can be the best on the football field.
I've never had either of these advantages working in my favor: exercise takes time and effort and you don't see results right away, so it's terribly easy to just hang it up and go read a book. Also, I've never been good enough at any sport to make practices worth the effort. My abortive attempt to play soccer in seventh grade taught me in a real hurry that if you suck, you practice just as much as everyone else, you just play a lot less.
Oh, and I like to eat. A lot.
Wind the clock fifteen years or so, and I find myself at thirty. Thinning hair, large and expanding waist line. My check ups consistently come back "healthy," but I'm not dumb. I'm 6' 2", 280. The highest weight I can be at and not qualify as officially "obese" is 218.
Before people had ever heard the word "Lipitor," it was customary to say that the best way to avoid heart disease was exercise, eat right and have good genes. By this standard, if nothing changes I am screwed.
Clearly, if my son is going to enjoy the benefits of a father who can run and pitch and play HORSE and continue to draw breath, I have to impose the same discipline on my body that I do on my design work (I did the graphic design work for this site upon which you're reading these words, in fact).
I am meticulous and obsessive about Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign. I hate wasted potential and I have no respect for designers who cut corners or people who design to the bare minimum and expect the world to fall at their feet. I see no reason why I can't translate this attitude toward work into the discipline necessary to reign in my rapidly expanding waist line.
