Now it gets real

It’s Measurement Day!  Oh, joy.

It feels like this has really begun now.  I have my official starting point, and it wasn’t pretty, but it’s only the beginning.  The bright side: at least I’ve given myself a lot of room to improve so my “after” pictures will make me a shoe-in for the $25,000 prize.

The first part of this was body fat testing with calipers.  Mortifying as the thought was, I had to enlist the help of someone else to pinch and squeeze my fat.  So – my trainer Katy stepped up to the challenge.  It was a weirdly vulnerable experience; there’s nothing quite like not only being exposed, but having everything you want to change about yourself highlighted.  Katy did a great job at making me comfortable, though, and I knew that I could trust her with the task.

As for the numbers that came out of it, they didn’t mean a damn thing to me, to be honest.  I’ve never had caliper body fat testing done, so I have no idea what’s “good” or “bad”.  That was a good lesson — all of these measurements should be considered just data points.  No judgment should be assigned to them.

Then – tape measurements (or as they call them, “girth” measurements… can we make it sound any more unattractive?).  Since I’ve been doing this every month for a few years now, it wasn’t all that surprising.  The numbers weren’t good, but not it’s not like my expanding waist line snuck up on me.

And then — the part I really didn’t like — photos.  It’s not like I don’t know what I look like, but it was still a gut check (see what I did there?) to see it in full technicolor. It’s funny, because I didn’t intend it this way, but I have a very pissed off and miserable expression on my face in the photos — I could have been a stand-in for the grumpy cat meme floating around the internet.  And the picture from the back?  When did those back fat rolls appear?  Yikes.

The photos were humbling, for sure, but necessary.  And the good news is that this is the absolute worst it’ll ever be!  From here on out, nothing but improvement.  Isn’t that a nice thought?