Sturdy

I was thinking today about how it feels to pursue health and fitness for the joy of being healthy and fit (what a concept), versus pursuing it for the sake of being as light, lean, and small as possible, to impress others, or to feel worthy. It's a night and day difference. If you had told me years ago that I would quit the gym, quit dieting, and quit worrying about weight, I would absolutely have assumed that meant I quit being fit. I couldn't have fathomed exercising or eating nutritious foods just for fun, but guess what? It's MORE fun without the obsessive madness. I do whatever I like. I eat whatever sounds good. I feel fantastic and perform well. I'm not depleted from restriction and compulsive scale watching. I'm not thinking about food all day. I'm not exhausted and injured from sticking to a plan at all costs. I'm stronger and more flexible. Nothing hurts. I look forward to working out, and if I'm not looking forward to it that day, I don't do it. So crazy! There's no dread. Willpower and motivation are not required. My whole life doesn't revolve around my diet and workout schedule. And this is the really hilarious part, my results are better. Overdoing it while restricting my food made me hungry, tired, and defiant. There was a lot of reactive eating going on, getting sick a lot, getting hurt a lot, verrrry moody. True health is mental, physical, and spiritual. It's not a weight or a size.

I watched a couple of Tabitha Farrar videos called Neural Rewiring Compulsive Exercise and Sit the F#%K Down! They were awesome. She talked about how when we're in recovery, we may normalize our eating or restore our weight for a few weeks or months and think everything is fine. No problem if I go for a short run or replace some of those cookies with vegetables, but in the mind of someone recovering from an eating disorder, exercising and restricting food are very tightly linked to each other and the disorder. So, putting back exercise too soon or trying to eat "healthy" too soon can fire up that whole eating disorder neural network that had started to go dormant. Really shutting it down takes longer. The rewiring process needs time to become strong, months and years. The person who wrote in had taken two weeks off compulsive exercise and was super eager to start again. Thinking about that disordered neural network firing back up makes so much sense when I look back at how many times I thought, "I can't restrict and overtrain anymore!" and was all about moderation for a few days or weeks until I decided to read about some new workout plan or "optimize" something about my eating. Then, BAM! I was right back in the crazy. I've been eating whatever for quite a while now. That has helped tremendously, no templates, no habits, no principles, nothing. I quit worrying about it. Way back when, I did quit the gym and take it easy for a year. I think I got a grip on exercise way before I solved food. I crippled myself, more or less. So, that helped. LOL And, because the two are so tightly linked, not exercising is what helped calm down my food obsession to the point where I didn't feel compelled to follow diets anymore. The first inklings of happy eating came from breaking my leg. Which is ironic. You would think if I couldn't exercise I'd have been even more controlling of my food, but I just couldn't. I lost all desire. I was just trying to get through the day. I don't know how many times I tried to carry a plate of food on crutches, it all slid off onto the floor, and the dogs ate it. At some point I just sat down and let my husband bring me some of whatever he was eating. Nothing bad happened. That was an epiphany. Now that I’m not dieting, I have no desire to follow a rigid workout schedule. I still have the desire to move and be active, but that comes from being rested and fed, not from fear. It’s more of a desire to play, or to feel strong, or to try new things. But diet and exercise are no longer bound together as some kind of ultimate solution to life’s problems.

I've come to realize that workout duration isn't important at all and can be anything we choose. It's the other 23ish hours of the day that matter. Are we active, engaged, connected, rested, peaceful, joyful? Or is the workout "ideal" and everything else a train wreck? There have been plenty of times when my workout schedule was optimized to the max and my mood was terrible and my relationships strained. I was socially isolated and anxious, injuries piling up, exhaustion, insomnia, restriction and rebound eating battling it out. That was really not healthy or fun and didn't produce a great result. Now, jumping rope for 5 minutes and standing on my head may sound like a dumb and pointless workout, but those other 23+ hours are where the magic happens. I have so much more energy for life now compared to when I was only exercising for fat loss or to look a certain way. My "workout" was 5 minutes long, but I walked miles with the dog, mowed the yard, moved heavy furniture by myself, carried nine bags of groceries at once, went swimming, and did somersaults down a hill with the neighbor kids. When I was killing it for an hour in the gym, I'd spend the rest of the day lying motionless. So now, with my short, lame workouts, plenty of food and great sleep, my energy output and general fitness is a lot higher than when I was training hard and restricting my food. It's crazy to think about. I'm pretty confident that someone could do a little bit each day and get into great shape mentally and physically because of how it carries over into your thoughts and actions all day long.