A Simple Way to Lose Weight

A gal I work for bought all of her employees and me, her dutiful editor, Fitbits.

I’d never heard of the product before she mentioned it, so as Ellen was enthusiastically describing the wristband device, she directed me to the Fitbit site. She said it daily monitored the wearer’s steps, the amount of time engaged in exercise, and sleep patterns. The sleep monitoring feature hooked me, since I’ve had sleeping problems all my life. “Cool,” I edged in.

“If you’re competitive with yourself and others, it’s a great incentive to get in shape and lose weight,” Ellen said. However, when she added, “And we can all connect online to let others see how we’re doing on our goals,” I became skeptical, given privacy concerns and not wanting advertisers to stare through my computer’s camera at me scarfing down pizza. Nor did I want anyone capturing my data and proving I’d grown an inch around my chewed-pizza holder. Nothing makes me hungrier than not eating to lose weight.

But having lumped through this past winter of extremely low temperatures—one that felt like the longest and coldest in my 30 years in Colorado Springs, and during which time I missed many days of hiking but never my mouth—I’d found some weight I’d lost many years ago and wrapped it around my middle to keep warm. I’d also developed an eating style that mimicked that of Shiloh the dog’s.

Cringing at a flashback of recently trying to maneuver my marbled meat into my pants and hanging from the chinning bar to get them zipped and buttoned, I decided to accept Ellen’s generous offer. A week later, a gal pal down the street who also works for Ellen knocked on my door and handed me my new black Fitbit Flex.

Once the measuring instrument was charged, set up, and inserted into the smaller of two wristbands included in the package, I fastened the clasp (the most challenging step of the operation), and dashed off to church*—not for confession; it was Sunday.

The next morning, I inserted my Fitbit dongle into my MacBook Pro, synced the Flex, then checked my dashboard. Incredibly cool.

Graphs showed my activity levels, steps, number of active minutes, calories burned, and the number of times my gut slapped against my breasts when I jogged and jiggled. Most intriguing were the number of moments I’d slept and was restless or awake, graphically illustrating that my behavior is not because I’m blond. (The graph below isn’t typical of most nights.) Generally I’ve been restless 172 minutes, and my average sleep duration is 4 hours, 43 minutes, so I’m frantically focusing on sleeping.

Now for the best part!

Since all my Biosyntrx friends are keeping an unobtrusive eye on my stats, I decided to put the pressure on and set a weight-loss goal of 11 pounds. According to my very old bathroom scale that I’ve stored in the garage, far enough away from the temptation of weighing an excess load, I weighed 129. Not too bad for an old lady; however, not too good for slipping into my old clothing.

Almost every morning, I stumble into the garage where the scale rests, holding its breath, take off anything weighing an ounce or more, and set it on the counter. Then I jump onto the scale. In less than a week, I dropped three or four pounds. But this morning I couldn’t see nor focus on the dial’s verdict. The garage was dimly lit due to thick cloud cover outside and bad eyes inside, but it looked like the dial hovered around 125. Excitedly, I moved the scale two feet north, closer to the freezer, and hopped on again. (This is the best part.) I weighed 123 pounds!

I’ve come to the conclusion that magnetism is key. When you want to lose weight fast, move your body closer to the North Pole or the freezer, and the magnetism pulls the weight clean off you. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it, just as I am my stretchy pants.

* Broadmoor Community Church, United Church of Christ, aka Congregational

Getting Religion

I am a sinner and my girlfriend is parting company with her mate of 26 years, so it is as good a time as any to get religion.

As with most men, her husband preferred spending an hour at a home-improvement store rather than at church, and as with most sinners, I preferred hanging out with other sinners to assure myself I wasn’t alone. For me that meant going to a bar or to church, and on Sunday mornings, well, going to a bar seemed very Irish and I’m French, preferring wine or a less fermented variety.

My girlfriend, Anita, got a head start church searching and ventured solo the week before. Though she was not impressed with the church’s misplaced and alternative political viewpoint, she had an overall good feeling about the place.

By next Sunday when I jumped on board, we’d decided to wade into nearby fellowship waters. Our goal was to stay in our area of the city, as well as to find a small church in which we felt community and where leadership provided guidance for good living, upheld positive values, and maintained cohesiveness within the congregation.

When we arrived for the 10:45 service, there wasn’t a car in the huge parking lot. This I took as a sign. Church hadn’t been a part of my life since my love and I split in 2006. Maybe, I thought, God had different plans for me, like communing at an Irish pub, though I’d probably have to move to Chicago to find an open bar on a Sunday morning. The sign on the church’s door read: Join us for our annual Labor Day picnic in Bear Creek Park.

Because we were all dressed up and needed somewhere to go, I exclaimed, “Let’s go to my old church!”

We arrived at Calvary after the other thousand congregants had and parked a distance from the new structure. In this new building that had risen since the fires of my relationship hell, ever more people needing the love and dynamism of Pastor Al swarmed to hear him preach. He makes people’s hands, voices, and hair rise. I love this guy. And I like that the congregation isn’t dominantly white. Yes, Pastor Al can put the fear of God into a soul, and my friend said she was one of them.

The Sunday next, we waded back into nearby fellowship waters. This time, September 11, the parking lot was full, as was the sanctuary with first-service attendees. Arriving early is my modus operandi, whether to a party or church. That way I can observe those coming in and, in this case, coming out. It’s education. As we walked out the door after the unchurchlike service, we glanced at each other knowingly. Next?

My neighbors for years encouraged me to attend a vibrant, open-minded downtown church. Though both neighbors were members of other downtown churches, they knew my spirited nature. Three times I had walked this church’s labyrinth, a structure indicating the church’s deeper walk with the mysterious. On September 18, Anita and I thoroughly enjoyed the Congregational church, their engaging, approachable pastor, and their music, particularly the handbell choir. Still fanning embers of tradition, such as singing from hymnals and having a choir, their members seemed very involved in contributing their time and talents to the communities, microcosmically and macrocosmically. Anita and I both felt it was a viable contender in our quest.

The following Sunday we headed north a few blocks to an extremely unprejudiced, unbiased, nondiscriminatory, liberal church.

The following Sunday, the first in November, the sisters took tradition a step further and visited a Methodist church. Anita’s neighbor joined us on this expedition because she was, in fact all of us were, raised with Midwest Methodist teachings. Time stood still in this space. The congregation was primarily white of hair, limited of hearing, and slow in communicating, except for a boy who slickly grabbed a plastic container of communion juice and downed it on his way to Sunday school. That’s the spirit! This kid I could relate to. In his wit, the pastor assured us, our communion time would also come.

Throughout our grand adventure, I learned that some churches say A-men and others say Ah-men. Nothing about women. They all say the Lord’s Prayer too, with variations on sins, trespasses, and transgressions. Why they all pointed their fingers at me I’ll never know.

Other neighbors are members of the Episcopal church, or the Western branch of the Church of England. I’d only been to this church a couple of times for a wedding, maybe a funeral—same thing, so I looked it up in my iBook’s Oxford dictionary. “Church of England: the English branch of the Western Christian Church, which combines Catholic and Protestant traditions, rejects the pope's authority, and has the monarch as its titular head.”

Rejecting the pope’s authority sounded good, and I love monarchs, even planted milkweed to attract them, but what’s this about a titular head?!

Neither Anita nor I had any proclivity to figuring out when Catholics sit, stand, kneel, or fall prostate, or is that prostrate, on the marble, yet this Episcopal church fell very close to Catholic ground. The people were the most welcoming, gracious, and all sang like the Vienna Boys’ Choir, even the choir itself, singing from the heavens behind us.

By this time we realized that all churches these days have Communion on the first Sunday of each month. Each serves its version of bread and wine, but this was the second Sunday of the month and the priest was wiping the cup. I turned around and asked the kind, educated man behind us if Communion is a weekly event, and he replied, “You can have Communion here three times a day.” Great!

As we were leaving the chapel’s beautiful property, vast and elaborate as it is, we averted our attention onward. My friend and neighbor had invited us to attend an evening service at her huge Presbyterian church, so Anita and I prepared to accept. We weighed our options: try a Lutheran church if one exists in Colorado Springs, look online for any small Bible-based churches nearby, or go to the first one she visited, where I’d only been for a wedding. And that is what we did.

Three gals, Anita, my neighbor across the street, and I were enveloped by handbell music when we walked into the sanctuary. In a gentle, flowing service, I felt peace, acceptance, and the presence of real love. The pastor talked about forgiveness in a way I’d never heard, wrapping his talk eloquently around Joseph’s story, using integral parts as meat and leaving some details for dessert. Lovely.

Had I been healthy, I would have been there with my friends the following Sunday, but I shall be there the next—and likely the one hereafter. Amen.

African sky © 2002 Bob Groat