You must start by walking and hiking, and only gradually increase intensity of your workout.

Just signing up for gym, and trying to lift like everyone else, will only increase your chances of giving up on weight loss.

Lifting similar weights but with less repetitions is a mistake, once at the gym, you have to start with lightest weights.

And then slowly build up the duration of your exercise, from minutes to hours.

Once you are lifting for an hour or two, then you increase your weights and only by two pounds at a time.

This may mean wrist weights and ankle weights, before moving up to the next machine setting.

If you find yourself not being able to lift for entire minutes, or stuck in a plateau.

That means your weights are too heavy, and they are forcing your body to stop too soon, and it won’t adapt.

But gym is not where you start, you start by walking.

We are all capable to great strength, and great endurance, but gradually.

You can’t start your workout, by hoping to jog by those who built up their endurance.

And not just because you can’t catch up, but because you will trick yourself into thinking they are better.

They are not better, they just gradually, increased, the intensity of their workouts.

So you walk, and guess what, you can’t just walk on a sidewalk.

You can’t just walk in circles, that is boring, and may make you give up.

It will take, a couple of week of rain, followed by a month of heavy snow, and a hurting knee, a blister, and you will stop walking.

Giving up as a large person, means giving up half of your life.

You don’t get to have boring workouts, you have to go hiking.

You need to learn to tell your aching knees and hurting back, and growling stomach to shut the f*ck up, and keep on walking.

Gradually, increasing your distance, while being enchanted, by all that surrounds you.

You see, not only must you start gradually, you need hiking and adventure.

One day you visit used crap stores, another you walk by the ocean or lake shore.

But you constantly gradually, build up your endurance.

As you walk longer, your body will consume more fat.

And I am sorry to say this, but because you are large, you will have to live differently.

You have no choice, but to keep challenging your body, well into your 80’s.

You walk, you hike, you kayak, you shuffle your feet, you slowly jog, and become a slow runner, and dance at the gym with dumbbells in hand.

All those years of fat, gave you great strength and muscle.

So, become a gym rat, get even more muscular, and keep on walking, keep on hiking.

And you keep lifting, and flexing, and dancing, you keep building up your endurance.

And as you grow healthier, you section hike the good parts of the Appalachian Trail…

And then … The Pacific Crest Trail, and The Continental Divide Trail.

Always listening to narrated books, because it is not just the body but the mind as well.

And once it is in you, you hike all three, you hike the Triple Crown, and maybe even become an ultra-marathon runner.

If you feel helpless, and want to start your journey right now, get up and get rid of your kitchen appliances.

In the next few days get some used training equipment, and turn it into a fitness zone.

Next time you are hungry, take a walk.

And if you want to eat something nice, make it a sausage over an open fire, during a beautiful hike.

And then, later in life, you do what you do best, save lives, become a trainer, a Trail Guide, a Triple Crown Teacher.

Or just stand, as the inspiration that you are.