I Broke Through A Major Barrier Last Night

Chris Powell, right. From his ABC TV show.

In the TV reality show Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition, trainer Chris Powell shouts the following words to doubting clients trying to workout: "Every time you think you can't do something, I'm going to prove to you that you can!"

This is something that is happening internally with me as well. I have had numerous misconceptions in what people in general are capable of and what I am capable of. Time after time I prove myself wrong by accomplishing what I thought was impossible.

I've encountered many obese people who haven't exercised a day in their life and have countless misconceptions about fitness. Yet I should know better. I had gone through a fitness phase when I was 30 years old. I went from obese and sedentary to thin and fit. I lived and breathed exercise for two or three years. It was ingrained in me even years after I stopped. So how could I have so many misconceptions about myself now and what was possible?

Well, I didn't know everything back when I was thirty. I still don't, of course, but what I do know now is that almost anything is possible with the human body.

Our bodies adapt to whatever it is we're doing. If we walk for fifteen minutes it builds muscle in our lower body thinking that we will need to walk again tomorrow (possibly to catch a sabre-toothed tiger for dinner.) If we let our bodies sit on the couch all day, our bodies think they no longer need muscle mass and will let it waste away. Soon it's a struggle to have the strength just to make it to the fridge.

I started in April by walking my three year old daughter to her preschool just a block away. It took me seven minutes there, seven minutes back, I was soaked in sweat and exhausted. I used the hour and a half just to rest up so I could pick her up at the end of her class. This happened just twice a week. Then I was asked to add some more walking on a day or two that my daughter didn't go to class.

By then, I was getting used to it and I started doing twenty minutes a night including nights when she went to school in the day time. Things began to change in me. I stopped feeling helpless. I stopped feeling hopeless. My body began to get stronger, more capable. I began to dream about riding bikes and jogging, but I saw those goals as either impossible or goals that would take months or years of hard work to achieve.

If you read my blog, you know the rest of the story. And last night I jogged for twenty minutes straight outside. This is a very important achievement for me because it matches what I did when I was the fittest I've been in my life, fifteen years ago. But I did it last night carrying an extra 150 pound weight on my back.

My body, you see, adapted. I added small increments of time to my jogging (making sure I had off days to rest and recover) and my body got stronger and stronger, preparing for the next time I jogged. I now have legs of steel.

When I first met with my exercise counsellor at the end of June, I told her I was trying 30 second intervals of jogging to spice up my walks and that my goal was to one day this winter be able to jog for 10 minutes once or twice a week. I can remember thinking, "Ten minutes would be nice, that would be good enough if I could only get there."

Now I think that I'll never run 5K in my life and I'll certainly never run a half marathon (21+ KM). But I know it's not impossible if I ever want to do it. It would take the same methods I used to get where I am today: slowly increase the length of my exercise and have patience as my body adapts.

And speaking of misconceptions, my wife, who is a pretty smart person, asked me after my ground-breaking workout last how my heart rate did after such a long run. I could have circumnavigated the globe and my heart rate wouldn't have changed. I've got a pace I jog at and my heart rate goes up to that level and stays there for however long I jog. That's the way it works.

It's like a running car parked in the driveway. The RPMs are normally at 1000 when you're idling but you when you press the pedal it goes up to 2000. Some people see exercise as a car going up the hill with the pedal to the metal. By the top of the hill there's steam coming out of the radiator. If you go slow, your breathing is deeper but not out of breath and you feel pretty much the same at the end of your jog as you do at the beginning, just a little more fatigued (but as invigorated as anything you can experience.)

If you're like me, or worse, you can think of a hundred reasons why you can't exercise and all the things you can't do. You'll have to just bowl these misconceptions over one pin at a time as they come up until you have a full understanding of the reality of what you are capable of.

I believe exercise is the cure for obesity. That's not to say it alone is the cure for excess body fat. As of now, I no longer feel obese yet I'm a full 100 pounds over the current clinical definition for obesity (BMI) for a man of my height. I'm more capable than a lot of thin people my age and I'm only going to get better and better.

Being thin isn't going to make you happy, it isn't going to fix everything's that wrong with you, but empowering yourself with fitness can sure go a long way to cure what ails you, regardless of what the scale says. And hey, it's going to take me years to lose all this excess weight if I so chose to go that route, but getting fit only took a few months with tremendous benefits coming within weeks.