The work stairwell stopped being a negotiation this week

2026-10-09 20:23

Lost 42 pounds two years ago, regained 19 after a rough stretch, and I’m back on my prescription plus the boring stuff: protein at breakfast, a walk after lunch, bedtime alarm. The scale is creeping down, but that’s not the thing I keep thinking about.

Our office elevator has been out, so everyone’s using the third-floor stairs. Last spring I had to stop on the landing, fake a phone check, and let my heart rate settle.

Today I carried my laptop bag and a coffee up without pausing. A coworker was talking to me at the top and I answered in a normal voice.

It’s such a small thing, but it felt like proof that my body is coming back to me. I’m not declaring victory. I just want to remember this one.

What random non-scale moment has hit you harder than you expected?

2026-10-14 09:15

Oh man, the elevator-out stairwell era. Ours died for six weeks in February and honestly the stairs did more for my head than my hips did.

Concrete thing that helped: I kept a dumb little note on my phone, just a dot for every trip up, and by week two I could see the 3pm slump trip was the one doing the real work — I'd get back to my desk able to actually finish the afternoon instead of staring at spreadsheets. Weird side effect, you learn everyone's sneaker squeak and who's been avoiding you since the holiday party.

But you left me hanging — what did last spring you do on that landing? Good memory or rough one? Because that's the part I keep chewing on too.

2026-10-15 23:46

The end of the negotiation is the real progress. I started a dumb tracker: one tally mark on my desk calendar for every stair climb I did without standing at the bottom rationalizing. Not calories, not minutes. Hit 14 last month.

Scale was flat-ish, but my after-lunch walk stopped feeling like punishment and more like momentum. Curious—what’s the non-scale thing you’re actually watching now?

For me it was not being winded by the third floor, and I didn’t notice until week three.