Every time I see an article about losing weight, it asserts that one cannot lose weight by exercise alone. And yet the only times in my life when I have lost a significant amount of weight, it was due to exercise.
This wasn’t ever a planned program, just the side effect of a significant increase in exercise. The first couple of times, I lost weight because I was suddenly doing a lot more walking.
That happened when I started college and lived on campus without a car at the University of Texas (the original one, in Austin), which was a large campus. The summer afterwards I also worked at the state capitol and walked to work as well as around campus.
My second year in law school, my financial aid didn’t come through, so I loaded trucks for four hours for UPS every morning before school. I dropped a lot of weight and got into good shape despite the fact that I stopped for donuts for breakfast on the way to work and drank Coke from the machine while I was there. And then often got biscuits and gravy from the cafeteria when I went to school.
(That may sound great, but I also recall I never got enough sleep that year and also had several colds. The exercise was great, but the lifestyle wasn’t.) Continue reading “Weighty Matters”…