This diary is part of a continuing series on living with Asperger's Syndrome. If you wish to know about my diagnosis, you should start here.
Hello everyone. Sorry I've been away for a while, but I've been trying to think of a subject to write about, and considering I just got done exercising, I figured this would do nicely. I'll start below the orange noodle.
Things like exercise and weight loss have been very difficult for me, even when I was a wee lad of about 5 or six years old. I had always been the husky kid, and to be honest my appearance never bothered me much at all. Even the teasing was easy enough to deal with after a while, but when it came to exercise in general I could just never cut it. No matter what I did I couldn't get my weight down.
To put this into perspective, I'm someone who has both physical and cognitive disabilities so that can make some activities extremely difficult, especially since I can't move my left toes. That can make me look very clumsy as I tend to trip over things when I walk much more easily.
Anyway, things came to a head last year when I got married. By then I had weighed close to 240 pounds, and I couldn't figure out if it was diet or lack of exercise, but looking back, it was probably both. So I ended up doing the most unlikely thing: I bought a Wii Fit balance board with Wii Fit Plus. In the first few weeks I lost 20 pounds, so I stuck with it.
I also made a lot of changes to my diet, little stuff, mostly. I still eat some things like pizza but I cook everything myself. Up until that point we had lived out of our freezer, and that's not exactly healthy. In fact, that can really do a number on you if you aren't careful.
When it comes to diets, don't do anything drastic. Just make subtle changes, like instead of a frozen pizza, make one with some store bought ingredients. Or instead of regular fries with a burger, have sweet potato fries. Just changing how food is prepared can help big time and can save money with leftovers for lunch the next day.
Exercising can really be tough if you aren't comfortable. I first tried joining a local gym but that never went well for me. The thing I like most about Wii Fit is that I can do it in my living room by myself and never get bored with it. There's lots of variety when it comes to exercises and you can do a lot of different routines to boot.
To date, I've lost 40 pounds. It all comes down to finding what works, and on top of it, I'm below 200 pounds for the first time in 10 years. Here's to losing 40 more.
See you around,
Homer