Spinning My Wheels, Syncing My Breath

This will likely sound like the cliched lifetime movie I wrote in my last post. But I'm wrestling with numbers again. In terms of the "Project 28" itself as a weight-loss project, I feel like I'm spinning my wheels a little bit. I keep going back and forth with the same three pounds and I'm beginning to become discouraged.

I've seen other progress. I've never been much of a swimmer but when I started swimming laps in early Spring, I could barely get my body to do one--my coordination was off, my muscles weak, my breathing out of sync. Two days ago, getting in the pool for the first time since Chicago, I swam ten laps without stopping. I can't do the cool looking turn-around-thingy other people in the pool do but at least I am getting a momentum. Swimming is a lot different than any other exercise I've done. You can't listen to music. You can't read. You can't really do it socially (in the sense of carrying on a conversation). It's thirty minutes of nothing but me with my body. And in that way, it feels like a gift.

So I'm trying to focus on that right now and not get too caught up in the frustrations of losing weight. And I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I may never reach any sort of doctor-prescribed ideal. In fact, this whole project might just fail in the weight-loss category. And if it does, how am I going to deal with that? How am I going to insist, against the medical industry, that I am healthy? And what if, at the end of the project, I'm not healthy?