Back in December I got a very special Christmas gift from my husband, my uncle and my sister’s family. They gave me the opportunity to go skydiving. I was very excited, until I saw that the place where I was supposed to go had a weight limit. And I was over that limit.
Very depressing. But also very motivating. In early February I undertook a mission: lose weight in order to go skydiving before the gift certificate expired (on May 8). Slowly but surely, I began journaling all my food, and limiting my calories to about 1300-1500 a day. This is not that low – when I was on the medical weight loss study a few years ago I was asked to eat 1300 calories a day as part of the study.
Today is May 6 and I’ve lost 17.5 pounds thus far. Not only that, but I am now below the weight requirement to go skydiving. And so it is with great excitement that I will be getting up tomorrow morning, driving to a regional airport, strapping a parachute to my back, and jumping out of a plane at 14,000 feet in the air.
Am I nervous? No. Not one bit. I’ll let you know if that changes once I’m standing in the middle of the open side door on the plane looking down at the planet below. I predict my pulse will be racing at that point. But for now, I’m just excited.
And the 17.5 pound weight loss has inspired me to find another adventure to shoot for. I’m hoping to lose another 10 pounds by my 42nd birthday in mid-June. At that point I’ll either go ziplining or whitewater rafting. And so on I’ll go – making a reasonable weight loss goal, and going out on an adventure when the goal is met. Bungee jumping, rappelling, paragliding, hot air ballooning, scuba diving – there are no limits, basically.
But for now we concentrate on tomorrow. And spending 6 minutes in the sky, hurtling toward earth. Man, that’s going to be awesome.