a meaningful date

I’ve been thinking about my weight and my overall health, particularly in the context of all the counting I’m doing now for the 10K steps month and the bike commuting contest.

So yesterday I was playing around with numbers, and figuring out what weight would give me a healthy BMI, and how long it would take me to get there at what I hear is a reasonable rate of weight loss. (About a pound a week.)

That put me at the beginning of next February. Which made me think…

I could, if I was diligent (etc), have a healthy weight by the 25th anniversary of my father’s death: February 8, 2008.

He died of a heart attack, and when we were kids, the emphasis was on the influence of his smoking. And because of that, I have never touched a cigarette. No, never, not even once.

But he was also overweight — I don’t know how much — he wasn’t huge, but he was definitely overweight. As I get older, and consider my own long-term health, that factor comes to my mind more and more. So it seems like a good goal, a useful number to remind me why I want to do this.

Also, he would have been 70 next year, which I can barely imagine. I very rarely can imagine him older than 45; that too makes me sad, thinking that he missed all these years with us.

So I’m sharing this with y’all as a way of keeping myself honest, and because it struck me so strongly that I had to share. Wish me luck.