Michela Buttignol
In 2015, I sold everything I owned to travel the world.
Already at an unhealthy weight for me, I believed traveling would help me get fit.
I realized I needed to stop traveling and change my life.
Photo:Michela Buttignol
I had a new dream: staying alive.
I wanted to be healthy.
My mother died when she was 57 years old, and here I was at age 46.
Was I nearing my final chapter, or could I change my future?
I decided I could.
My goal was to be healthier at 50 than I was at 40.
Heres how I got here:
1.
I live a walking lifestyle.
Like many others, I moved in the early months of the pandemic.
My feet take me to most places, but I supplement my lifestyle with a car-share membership and buses.
I stretch and do light qigong while watching TV, and Im fitter than Ive been in 15 years.
I dont drink caloriesor count calories, for that matter.
Not drinking calories means I dont fret about counting them either.
Smoothies might taste good, but they never satisfy my hunger.
I may eat lighter vegan meals one day and have a rib-eye steak the next.
Thats where the next point comes in.
I cook almost everything I eat.
When my nomad life ended, I dove into cooking.
I learned to make pasta in Rome, so when I came home, I made pasta from scratch.
I kneaded and shaped loaves of bread while stews simmered all day on my stove.
From there, I stumbled into a passion for scratch-made foodeverything fromyogurtand salsa to chili crisps and complex curries.
I am always watching cooking shows.
We werent all born with the gift of parents or family who appreciated the finer points of vegetable cookery.
I grew up in a 70s meat-and-potatoes home.
Eating boiled veggies wasthe wayto eat veggies.
While travel helped open my eyes to new vegetables and preparations, my real inspiration has been cooking shows.
It helped me think of meat as the side and vegetables as the star.
Afterward, I immediately had an identity crisis.Who have I become?Someone healthy, it turns out.
I started growing my own herbs.
For a few months each year, a fresh salad is always at my fingertips.
It feels fancy, but its so easy.
Im mindful about what I eat or drink after dinner.
Im not strict about an end-time for eating because life is beautifully inconsistent, and flexibility is important.
(I work from home, so I have that flexibility.)
I focus on feelings, not numbers.
The scale isnt my friend.
If I worried about the scale, Id have given up long ago!
That feeling is what success feels like.
There, I gave up on what was then the adventure of my lifetime.
Today, I have a new life.
