Walking With Bob

Be a two percenter

About 70 percent of Americans are overweight. About 30 percent of them are obese or medically obese.  Every year since high school I had a New Year’s Resolution to get “un fat.”  For 76 years I moved from overweight to medically obese. I was an expert in diets. I wrote “Give Up the Fat the Diet Fat to Fit Kit,” traveled the country giving seminars and selling the book.  Finally, I took the book off the market and quit the seminars. I got fat again.

Being a quitter was my way of life until age 76. Something happened. Not sure exactly how or why it happened, but it sure happened.

I was standing knee high in the Gulf of Mexico, after my daily afternoon nap and started talking to myself. “If I keep on eating and drinking like I am right now and If I keep spending the bucks for magic diets, pills, doctors, and weird foods, and herbs, where will I be in five years?” “I will be dead.” I said to myself.

In that minute the words came out loud and clear, “I WILL WALK.”

June 12, 2006 I stared walking every day. At first, maybe five minutes at a slow pace, and then sometimes over four miles at faster than twenty minutes a mile pace. I have not missed a day. That includes two days in intensive care with busted ribs and a punctured lung. My choice of lifestyle on that day in September 2006 started as a chore, then a routine and now a way of life.

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