Good Animal
Getting dressed one morning shortly after my 40th birthday, I caught sight of someone’s naked body in the mirror—a beige, bloated dumpling.

Mine!

Then from nowhere, some long-forgotten words from Ralph Waldo Emerson popped into my mind: “First, be a good animal.” I took these words as a command, grasping intuitively that I’d never authentically lived in my own animal body. I sensed it had begun to die.
Quantum change
My midlife reincarnation from obese semi-egghead into serious citizen athlete happened swiftly and almost miraculously, falling into that category of behavior change University of New Mexico psychologist William Miller calls “quantum change.”

One morning I got up, had a flash of insight, realized I had to change and knew that I could change. Everything became possible from that moment on. Not easy, just possible.

I started walking every day. I read everything I could find about physiology, exercise science, metabolism, and nutrition. I bought a pair of running shoes and, one telephone pole at a time, slowly worked up to a mile, then two, and three. That first summer, I so distrusted my new-found motivation to change that I slept in my workout clothes (sometimes including my shoes) and headed out the door as soon as I rolled out of bed and gulped a glass of water, alternating walking days with running days.

I began lifting weights at the gym where my daughter Molly took gymnastics lessons. With male powerlifters and bodybuilders as my mentors, I acquired muscles and a capacity for deep concentration in the moment. The weight-training metaphor still resonates: Whatever force I resist shapes me.
Training and racing
That October, I lumbered through a 10K footrace. The following spring, I bought a bicycle. I started swimming in the pond behind my house. Six weeks later, I completed the Concord YMCA swim-run-bike triathlon, triumphantly powering my bike through the finish-line chute into a parking lot full of cheering people, braking ferociously, falling hard, and bouncing across the asphalt, still attached to my bicycle. Unabashed, I signed up to triathlon again. And again and again.

Training to race and racing itself kept me motivated. Unlike most of daily life, racing strips everything down to the simple, the concrete, the absolute: Go! at the gun and finish within a precise number of hours, minutes and seconds. I’d still be at it if osteoarthritis hadn’t shut me down. (The years since make up another chapter in my Good Animal story.)
More than losing weight
Within a year, I’d lost 35 percent of my bodyweight. Becoming super-fit changed every corner of my life for the better. Yes, I became leaner. But I also became more emotionally resilient and mentally acute, more productive, more creative. The world became more interesting. Everything seemed more possible.
What I learned
Ralph Waldo may have jump-started my transformation, but a host of other factors kept me at it. Below I’ve distilled some of the most important. They may or may not work for you.

I learned:
To think of myself as an athlete (training for life), rather than a fat person trying to get thin.
To have a few simple rules for eating: Eat as many green, red, and yellow vegetables and fruits as I can stuff down my gullet. Grow as much of my own food as possible. Eat only foods I love (after crossing the health-sabotaging choices from my list of favorites).
To identify the demons of sabotage and negotiate with them.
To distinguish the discomfort of hard effort from the pathology of pain, and to recognize hard effort as a life-affirming ally.
To put myself first. Fit and healthy, I have the energy and perspective to make and meet commitments to others.
That life will never give me the time. I have to find time and take it.
To build a lot of change-supporting context into my life: I bought some “high performance” clothing and gear and built my social life around people who would support the life changes I wanted to sustain. I found training partners for long runs and bike rides, joined a running club. I became a bike commuter. I learned to spend my vacation time in my vegetable garden and working up my firewood supply—productive enterprises that support health and self-reliance.
To find my best help from peers—my training partners and others invested in their own wellbeing. (What makes a good training partner? Someone about the same fitness level who always shows up.)
To seek out and stay close to people who’ve found a way to make and sustain healthy changes.
Most important, I learned I don’t have to change for life. The only healthy choice I’ll ever have to make is the one facing me now.

“First, be a good animal.”
As a parting word, I offer this from the late runner-cardiologist-writer, George Sheehan: The way to find who we are is through our bodies. The way to relive our life is to go back to the physical self we were before we lost our way. That tuned-in self that could listen with the third ear, was aware of the fourth dimension, and had a sixth sense about the forces around it. That tuned-in self that was sensitive and intuitive, and perceived what is no longer evident to our degenerating bodies.