Squidginess: chronic or reversible?

I am not a fit person; I never have been. Oh, I was a slip of a thing in my youth, but scrawn does not really equal fitness. Never quite reaching six feet, I was a wispy 143 pounds when I started college, where I managed to gain sixteen pounds by the end of my first semester, twenty-three pounds by the time we broke for summer. I enjoyed the mandatory Phys Ed course, especially my first experience with weight training. By the end of two months I was able to bench-press 95 pounds (more than half my body weight, mind you), and felt more physically confident than ever before in my young life.

But it was not a routine I was capable of maintaining. I kept sporadically active throughout the rest of college, particularly enjoying intense games of racquetball with a few good friends. Regularly scheduled physical endeavors never lasted for long, however. Why? My explanation is that, growing up a country boy, there was never any need for me to seek out physical activity; the whole day was full of it, from throwing hay bales to milking goats to the mile-long walk to the mailbox and back (seriously). And when I wasn't doing chores around the farm, I was excavating pits in the grove with a shovel or breaking large rocks into hand specimens with a sledgehammer for my collection. Why would I need to exercise? When would I have the time, or the energy?

Unfortunately this was not a mindset I could easily shrug off when my lifestyle changed dramatically to an urban existence. By the time I had graduated and worked in retail for half a decade (including at least a year where my work lunches consisted of two doughnuts and a quart of chocolate milk) my waistline had expanded several inches, and my face was so round that I have difficulty recognizing myself in photos from that period. Then the Boy was born, the fiscal belt for our household was excruciatingly tightened, and to save the money spent on bus fare I began walking the two and a half miles to work each day, and frequently walking back home as well at the end of my shift. Combined with a dramatic reduction in calories (not only where the doughnuts out of the question, but food in general took on something resembling scarcity), this summer of privation was characterized by one colleague as the "Frog Daddy Less Input, More Output Plan", and the pounds literally fell away. On the eve of our son's birth I weighed myself in the hospital at two hundred twelve pounds avoirdupois (or fifteen stone two, for our British readers). By August I was a more familiar one hundred seventy pounds, a drop of more than forty pounds in just seven months without any real effort, just force of circumstance.

Life has eased a great deal, and having learned no real lessons apparently, I have gradually swelled to a more generous girth than I find entirely pleasant or practical. This time, I really want to push myself to actually build up healthy habits of both eating and activity. I am starting with daily push-ups, trying to build up to a solid number of steady, confident reps. I have plans to start stretching extensively twice a day, in addition to my pedestrian commute each day (about three miles round trip). And more vegetables, less meat, nothing fried in my diet. It is a slow, sporadic process, but I have real hope that I can gradually push myself to become, if not a brand new me, at the very least a me I can take out in public again.