Well, that headline isn’t exactly true. My GP didn’t write a prescription, she just told me I had to exercise and get some endorphins. This is because she’s letting me come off the antidepressants. Yay! I know the meditation is helping but I’m delighted to report that yesterday I got on the treadmill.

It did take me most of the day to “get around” to getting on the tready. I told myself I wasn’t allowed to have lunch until after I’d been on it, so lunch didn’t happen till after 4. Oh well. At least I got there. I tried something different with the interval training, going from my version of a run (which isn’t very fast), staying at the same speed, but adding weights and then adding an incline. Then going back to a fast walk and doing it all again 3 more times. It’s only a 20 minute set but I did feel real good afterwards and I was warmed up in the afternoon which was a good thing, because it was a very cold day. It meant I could put off switching on the heater for another hour and save a bit more money and I hope a bit more global warming.

I have felt so good about listening to Jon’s CD every night. Some nights I feel so tired and I think “can I be bothered?” but I do it anyway because I know how much it’s helping me. I just want to add a bit here from his book. It’s about what he calls “emotional obesity”:

Even the simplest and most effortless approach to weightloss will fail if you have emotional obesity. Someone could say to you, ‘All you need to do is lift your little finger once a day for 30 days straight in order to lose weight’, but if you’re in the grip of emotional obesity you’ll find some ‘reason’ why it wasn’t possible to complete the program. You’ll ‘forget’ or you ‘won’t have time’ or ‘other things just got in the way’. You’ll sabotage your weightloss effort because at some level the need to be fat serves a vitally important survival function in your life.

In the various jobs I’ve had, I’ve met people who are a bit in love with their ignorance. They won’t learn, they don’t want to learn, they aren’t interested in learning. Someone else can do it for them. I recognise this in myself when I have looked for the magic weightloss pill, when every time they’ve talked about weightloss on TV I’ve stopped whatever I was doing and stood there, hoping to learn the secret of thin. Ultimately I had to take a good hard look at what I was doing wrong and realise that I’ll do anything to lose weight except change.

But now I am changing. Okay. Yeah, I’m at that age when the word “change” means a whole lot of hormonal stuff too, but why shouldn’t I make that work for me?

I’m in a state of change, and I’m using it for good, not evil.

Bringing me back to the whole frog and metamorphosis story.

And insects, of course. I’ve always wondered what happens inside a chrysalis. Does the caterpillar just change, same as a taddy metamorphs into a frog, or does it turn into a sort of DNA soup that starts off caterpillar, goes to mush and then becomes butterfly?

You always get the “before” picture and the “after” picture but you never get to see what goes on “during”.