There are memories that come back when you least expect them. Not because someone reminds you of them. Nor because you find a photograph. They come back because, suddenly, one day you discover that you are no longer exactly the same person who lived them. This happened to me this third week. And the culprit has a name and surname: Pobladura de la Sierra, a small village in León, next to Astorga, where two of my best friends, Isa and David, have a house.
They have been together so many years that I no longer know where one ends and the other begins. They are one of those couples who not only share life, but also share what probably defines them the most: sports. They are two machines. And when I say two machines, I don’t mean those impossible gym bodies that seem to live on boiled chicken breast and brown rice. No. They eat. They enjoy. They have a beer. A wine. A drink when it’s time. They gorge on a Maragato stew if necessary. But then they burn absolutely everything off.
I am obese, diabetic, and addicted to work: this is the story of how I decided to save myself
- Writing: ESTHER MUCIENTES (Text)
- Writing: ALBERTO DI LOLLI (Photographs)Madrid
If one day they don’t go to the gym, they play paddle tennis. If they don’t play paddle tennis, they do paddle surf. If there is no board, they walk. And when I say walk, I mean really walk. Not that thing many of us do of going from the sofa to the fridge.
Three years ago my family and I went to spend a few days with them. I remember that trip perfectly because León has an extraordinary ability to make you happy. First with the landscape, then with the food, and finally with that calm that those of us who live permanently rushed have almost forgotten exists.
I already imagined the perfect plan. A terrace. A well-poured draft. Looking at Teleno. And letting the hours pass. Mistake. With Isa and David the beer draft always comes, but first you have to earn it.
On the last day David had a wonderful idea.
-Let’s go see an ancient Roman mine.
“Great,” I thought. Until we started walking. Today, seen in perspective, that route was almost ridiculous. It had no special difficulty. Some slopes, some dirt stretches. Nothing that a person minimally used to moving couldn’t do without messing up their hair. I was about to die. Well… not die. But convinced that I was going to. I was out of breath, my legs felt like I had two sacks of cement tied to my ankles, every hill seemed like Angliru, every hundred meters I needed to stop, every breath was a negotiation with my lungs. And the worse I was physically… the worse my mood got.
I got angry with David. With Isa. With my husband. With my children. With anyone who had anything to do with that hellish excursion. When we arrived at the viewpoint – spectacular, by the way – I was unable to enjoy the views. I just wanted to sit down. Pant. And think that I would never again let myself be fooled by a phrase that started with “it’s a very easy walk”.
For a long time I thought they were the culprits. Three weeks ago I understood that no. That the only ones trying to help me were precisely them, and that the person I should really have been angry with was myself. Because no one had brought me to that situation. It had been me. 15 years without taking care of my body. 15 years finding a new excuse every Monday. 15 years believing there would be time. Today I still get on the elliptical every morning to do those 30 minutes of cardio that Rubén Río religiously sends me. And, while I pedal, I close my eyes many times. I don’t think about losing weight. I don’t think about the scale. I don’t think about sizes. I think about Pobladura, about that path, about that viewpoint… And I imagine doing it again, but this time without getting angry, without feeling like I’m going to throw my liver out on the way. With a smile.
Because, for the first time in a very long time, I’m starting to believe I can do it. And it’s curious. Because just a few weeks ago my main goal was to lose weight. Not anymore. Now my main goal is to live experiences again that I had stopped considering because I assumed my body could no longer keep up. And, without realizing it, another dream appeared. One I have kept in a drawer for years: to do the Camino de Santiago from Sarria. I always wanted to do it and imagined doing it with my mother. Life didn’t allow it. And she left before we could even consider it. For a long time I thought that dream had also gone with her.
Until one day I told Rubén.
-You’re going to do it.
He didn’t hesitate for a second. That certainty disarmed me. Because he wasn’t speaking like someone trying to encourage you. He spoke like someone who knows exactly where you are today… and where you can get in a few months. And, curiously, that has probably been the greatest medicine of these three weeks. It hasn’t been the weights or the cardio; it has been the words.
There are people who know exactly what to say and then there’s Rubén, who not only knows what to say, but when to say it. Because one thing is to have a trainer, and quite another is to find someone who perfectly understands how your mind works. And my mind, believe me, is a complicated terrain.
If one day I’m tired, I want to quit. If the soreness is too much, I think maybe this wasn’t for me. If the scale doesn’t go down, I start convincing myself that no matter what I do, it doesn’t matter. And if something goes wrong, I have an extraordinary ability to be infinitely harsher on myself than anyone else on the face of the Earth.
Rubén detected all that practically from the first conversation. And I think that’s the difference between someone who knows about exercises and someone who knows about people. Because he hasn’t just taught me to move, he has taught me to listen to myself, to understand that not every day is the same, that you can’t always give 100%, and that doesn’t mean failure: it means being human.
This third week, something important also happened: Rubén came to Madrid with his wife. He lives in A Coruña, so until now all our relationship had been through messages, calls, audios, videos, and WhatsApp. And yet, after so many conversations, it felt like we had known each other for a very long time.
Taking advantage of the trip he came to see me at the newspaper. And we also took the opportunity to do some photos. By the way, I want to open a small parenthesis here. If anyone thinks training is hard, it’s because they have never had to do a photo session when they have spent their whole life trying to go unnoticed inside their own body. That is torture. Squats are leisure compared to facing a camera. Closing parenthesis.
The thing is, as soon as I saw Rubén the first thing I said to him was:
–You have changed my life.
Because yes. It may sound exaggerated, but when you have been fighting with your diabetes, with pain, with tiredness, and with the constant feeling that your body is always against you for 20 years, discovering that you can feel good again changes many things. And I’m not talking about weight, because I still haven’t lost practically anything. I repeat for the third consecutive week: I haven’t lost weight, but my pants are looser. But above all, my glucose levels continue to be near excellent. I haven’t had hyperglycemia again, nor hypoglycemia; insulin units have dropped a lot and any diabetic knows perfectly well what that means. For me, that is already a huge victory.
I told him and his response was exactly what I needed to hear, because he said something that honestly moved me: “That was my main goal”. For him, that was already a victory. And I understood why he insisted so much that health is above the scale. Because, as he explained to me from the beginning, many times we obsess over immediate results and forget that real changes happen long before they appear reflected in a number. Patience is one of the hardest parts of the process.
So I took the opportunity to tell him all my doubts.
I told him about the soreness: “It’s normal. It passes”. I told him about the weight: “You will lose it. The body also needs to adapt”. I told him that in the afternoons it’s much harder for me to train: “Then train in the mornings”. I told him that on rest days I miss the gym. And then he smiled: “That is the victory”.
And there I understood another thing. For years I thought exercise was about forcing yourself. Fighting with yourself. Suffering. Now, I’m starting to understand that true success is reaching the point where you want to come back, because it’s no longer a punishment. It’s part of you now.
He also corrected all the mistakes I was making, because it turns out that doing an exercise wrong doesn’t just mean doing it worse; it means you could be working the wrong muscles. Or even hurting yourself. And there I understood another thing he repeats a lot: technique matters. A lot. A poorly executed movement can end up causing injuries or making months of effort useless for what you really need to work on. But maybe the most important part of that conversation came when I told him something I have been thinking about for a long time. That maybe I started too late. He didn’t even let me finish the sentence: “It’s never too late”.
And I don’t know if in a year I will have done the Camino de Santiago, I don’t know if I will return to Pobladura and climb to that viewpoint smiling, I don’t know how many kilos I will lose, I don’t know how long it will take. The only thing I know is that just three weeks ago I thought none of those things were possible. Now they are.
And that is also a victory. Even though there is still a whole war to win. Because yes. Rubén had one last surprise for me: “We’re going to change the routine. We’re going to raise the level”. And, curiously, three weeks ago that phrase would have scared me a lot. Now I only think one thing: go ahead.
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