What changed wasn't my weight

My weight moved eight kilos in two years, which sounds impressive and is the least interesting part of it.

What changed is that I can carry two bags of shopping up the hill from the car park without stopping. That I stopped making excuses about the stairs at work. That I can get off the floor without using my hands, which at fifty-two is apparently a milestone.

None of that was in my goals. My goal was a number. The report I got every quarter had the number in it, and it also had a short list of what my coach had noticed: the shopping, the stairs, the floor thing.

Reading those back at the next review was the first time I understood that the number was the shadow and the list was the thing.

I've since told my coach to keep writing the list. It's the part I care about, and it's the part no machine generates — the machine gives you the figure and the coach gives you the Tuesday.

The other effect is social. I now describe my progress in ways other fifty-two-year-olds recognize instantly, which is a better conversation than the one about kilos.

MOJOWAY's pages hold both: the measured number and the coach's plain-language observation of what it did to someone's week.