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My blood pressure’s been creeping up and today I was told it’s time to start monitoring it more closely. I need to be tested again in three weeks and six weeks. I knew this day would come. My parents both have high blood pressure and my father has heart disease. I’ve been exercising less and eating more junk food, including a marked increase in alcohol, over the last few months. I’m living in a stressful environment.
But I’m 33 and weigh 115 pounds. I wasn’t expecting this news so soon.
Logically I know I need to eat less salt and fewer fats and drink less alcohol. I need to trade in my flip-flops for my neglected running shoes. I need to get back on the yoga mat. But I need help. I need direction. Some online searching led me to the Exercise.About.com 30-Day Fitness Challenge. It’s free, so it’s probably not stellar, but it could be as good as I make it.
I have limited resources. For the last year I’ve been living in Burundi, Central Africa, one of the poorest countries in the world. I’ll be here for about another year before moving on to another developing country. As Americans here we have it pretty good, but really that means we can afford more pineapple than anyone else. There are no health clubs, although there are a handful of small, private gyms that I could persuade owners to let me use if I wanted to. (I don’t really like exercise equipment though.) There are no Whole Foods stores; what grocery stores we do have, the products are expensive imports from Europe, United Arab Emirates, and China. There’s no such thing as non-fat yogurt; we’re lucky if the yogurt is actually that rather than milk that’s gone bad. We’re close to the equator, so the sun goes down at 6 o’clock every night. It’s not safe to be on foot after dark; all running, walking, and biking has to be done at the crack of dawn – which we know will be 6 o’clock every morning, year round.
I also have celiac disease, which means I can’t eat gluten, which means many of the whole grains that are part of a healthy diet are off limits to me.
I don’t want to be entirely negative before I even start on the challenge. One of the benefits of Burundi is cheap, fresh fruits and vegetables and fresh meat and fish (that’s not always cheap—and the selection of both meats and produce is limited). The weather is always nice so I can’t use it as an excuse to stay in bed—I have to use a lot of sunblock though. I was a long-distance runner in high school and college and last February I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I know I have the fitness in me somewhere; I just have to dust it off and polish it up in hopes of sustaining it. But see? Even some negative thoughts crept in to my positive attitude.
My Day One Checklist for the 30-Day Challenge was easy. It’s a list of preparations to make for the challenge itself. Check.
I’m not sure I’ll do every activity every day, but I’ll do something, using the challenge as a guide. My goals are to get my fitness routine back on track and lower my blood pressure.
I write about life in Africa at Where in the World Am I? and I blog gluten-free at What I Eat.