I Like to Walk Because I Can

I started walking three times a week with my neighbor. The same one from before, Latina Karen. I don’t mind spending time with her. I hope I am rubbing off on her. She is complaining about life less, at least in front of me. Maybe the experience of hanging out with me, who is trying to better themselves, instead of just the people in the vecindad who seem determined to hate everything around them, is helping.

I wish we had started sooner, we’ve only been talking about it since before my mother left. Before it was too hot, then it was too cold. Now it’s raining, but not all day, so there is really no excuse because the temperatures during the day are fresh and good for getting exercise. It’s only been a week, but I’m already down almost 10 pounds. Which for me is significant. Not the amount of weight, but the fact that I am losing weight at all.

I am, one could say, built for famine. My body when starved refused to budge on the weight it was hanging onto. At least in the past. Before I went to a doctor while I was living in Atlanta, which really helped to get the underlying conditions preventing me from losing weight taken care of.

I was talking with another neighbor, one that I met since we are now on the council together, and she was telling me about her mother. She passed a while ago, but she was 96 and still doing well despite having diabetes by the time she was older. But for an elderly person, who as she described, was not really doing the job to manage their condition, she lived to a ripe old age. Like her mother wasn’t eating a prescribed diet, she was just eating regular Guatemalan food.

I didn’t say it at the time, damned language barrier, but I was thinking that this goes a long way to verify something I have believed for a while now. That food in the United States was affecting me in adverse ways. Using food as a coping mechanism aside, I have pretty healthy food preferences. At least I do when I am not stressed or emotionally distraught. However, reflecting back on the years when I ballooned in weight and how quickly it came on, I know that what I was eating was 100% the problem.

I have watched documentaries on this, and read several articles and books. All of it adds up to this: the American diet is killing everyone in the name of profit. Sadly, the only way to combat this generalized attack is to pay more for the expensive good food which hasn’t been genetically modified within an inch of life, or processed to the point it no longer resembles food. Or, as I did, move to another country and eat better as a regular thing.

Why is it so hard? It shouldn’t have to be this way. I mean, do I miss the ease with which I could access many of my favorite junk foods or fast foods? Sometimes. Do I miss what it was doing to my body? Not one bit.

And maybe it’s because I am getting older. Maybe it is because I have a fear of death, whatever it is, I want the time that I have left to be carefree and with all my faculties intact. There is so much more that I still want to do. I don’t want these years remaining (or whatever time I get) to be done under duress, or limited. Hell, I freak the fuck out when my knee starts to hurt a little, like what the hell? Not now! I can’t have these pains. When it goes away I am filled with so much relief cause I can’t even.

Like I told my neighbor, and my mother: I like to walk because I can. I see people who can’t and I will not take these fully functioning legs for granted. For as long as they continue to carry me.