When you have been morbidly obese most of your life, and you are starting the journey towards WLS or maybe you’re a fresh post-op, one of the heaviest things on your mind is exercise. (forgive the pun or no, I’m sticking with it!)

I’m eleven months out and my regular exercise includes bout 35-40 minutes of a walking/jogging combo. Typically a rotation of 3-4 minutes of walking followed by 1-2 minutes of jogging.

That’s huge. (yea, another size pun…)

Slight detour here; In paintball, there’s two basic types. Woods-ball where you play out in the woods, sort of the grown up version of capture the flag, or there’s “arena” based play with inflatable bunkers in a small enclosed area. This second type is often called “speed-ball” by players because where woods based games can last for hours, speed-ball games are generally over in minutes.

When I was 350+, when me and my large buddies were talking with others we would often comment how we just play woods-ball, that we’re not built for speed-ball. Heck, the last summer before surgery I hardly played at all because just walking out to the woods to play would leave me practically gasping for air.

So I’m still in a bit of shock to realize that my regular exercise includes RUNNING! I mean.. c’mon… running?!?!

Yea.

But you know what, a year ago, even though I was down about 50 pounds from my heaviest, I wasn’t running. I was walking, walking and more walking. But even that started out in small, short durations.

You have to remember that, just like when it comes to measuring weight lost, this is not a race.

We’ll use waking as an example, (keeping with the foot and race thing we have going here…) but this can apply to any sort of exercise. Pick a reasonable starting point… it could be as basic as walking to the corner of your block and back, or maybe spending 2 minutes on the treadmill.

Make sure it’s something you can handle, listen to your body, it knows what it can handle, we just have to get better about listening to it.

Now stick with that starting point for a couple days… then see if you can do it one better. Maybe instead of a few minutes once a day you shoot for getting on that treadmill twice in one day. Then, start going from 2 minutes to… 2.5… or extend that trip to the end of the block to include going across the street and back.

The point of this is to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, extend the distance, extend the time, increase the speed of the treadmill. It doesn’t have to be drastic, just try to keep bumping it up in some way or another.

When I first started walking the track at my gym (I was pre-op at the time), It took me nearly two minutes per lap. Six months later, just before surgery, I had that down to an average of about 70 seconds per lap.

Now, once you have surgery you sort of start back at ground zero. That first walk once I got home from surgery was maybe 50yards. But before long I was making it around the block – though that first time I had to stop and rest a number of times.

So again, the big thing is to start reasonable and just make gradual increases from there… and you will do it… you will make a difference. And this can apply to any exercise you do, be it biking, swimming, or even working with weights.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

– Confucius