Here’s something else they don’t tell you when you’re putting on weight faster than you can ever strip it down.
Your days of relative carefree comfort are pretty much over.
Especially when summer rolls around.
While it’s perfectly fine to stay inside the majority of the time when the Central Valley’s heat wave descends upon us – my wife, ironically, likes to keep the air conditioning and the heater at the same temperature year-round – it’s quite another when you’re forced outside to do anything other than sit in the shade and drink iced tea.
Now, we’re not quite there yet at this point in the season. It’s dreary and rainy outside right now, and will be for at least the next week. And it’ll be months before the scorch of summer finally rolls across this great valley and all of us long for the cold and wet that we dreaded while it was here.
But I dread it for another reason – I sweat.
Now I don’t know quite when this phenomenon became apparent to me. I was an athlete – albeit a not very good one – so it wasn’t uncommon for me to run in full football gear or sweat in the weight room or out on the track. It was pretty much standard fare.
But somewhere along the way I discovered that my body just likes to cool itself down, and social anxiety in certain situations coupled with that made things not exactly the most pleasant when out amongst friends – let alone work acquaintances.
Now most of the time this doesn’t affect me. But the more I stop and think about it, the more I realize that it affects my life even more than I’d like to admit. I’ve adapted my entire life around being “comfortable” when my comfort or the general lack thereof has almost always been linked to my weight.
The heavier I got, the more uncomfortable I became.
I mean, if you’ve ever been in my car in the summertime you’ll notice – despite the fact that the air conditioner is always blowing at a balmy 58 degrees – that I keep a stash of white undershirts in the backseat or in the trunk. That is not just because I forgot to put away my laundry. It’s because regardless, at some point during the day, I’m going to sweat through the one that I have on and end up digging into the supply so that I don’t come off as “that” guy when I walk into a meeting or stop by to visit with friends.
These are all things I used to not worry about. As a high school student – and in the years immediately after – I prowled around the South Manteca countryside even when the mercury soared past the century mark. Out at the end of ridiculously hot dirt roads we would ride with the windows down – no air conditioning – like we were the kings of the world.
I can’t do that anymore. Even in the wintertime I have to run the air conditioner. My wife will ask me after several trips up-and-down the stairs, “why are you sweating?”
Well, the answer is obvious.
And while it has been getting better, slowly, it’s still something that I’ll be dealing with for quite some time.
There are a lot of things that people don’t tell you when you start putting on weight.
The fact that you’re going to sweat profusely should be one of them, and it’s one of the things that I’m hoping these simple lifestyle changes will make a thing of the past.