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My mother screwed up. Almost all parents do. It's part of the job description. When parents are perfect, we never move out and trust me, that's worse. In particular, my mother gave me an impossible set of criteria to me. I wasn't to crawl around in the dirt. I wasn't to put holes in the knees or elbows of my clothes. I wasn't to leave the yard (or later the street, always more restricted than everyone else on our block). Yet somehow, I was expected to go out and play. One wonders what she thought that might involve.
If you are largely sedentary, going out to play is a mysterious and difficult experience. Do it anyway. If you are fit, the struggle may be to overcome depression, or other mental inertia that discourages you from acting. If you have been sedentary for a long time, or were never very fit to begin with, your struggle will be with the physical capacities of your body. Either way, you may have to work up to it by degrees. If you are laying down, sit up. If you are sitting, stand up. If you are standing, take a few steps. If you are able to move around your house, leave it. Start small. Do the same new thing for a few days and then add to it slowly. Don't expect to double your effort easily.
If the struggle to move is fitness related, resist the temptation to force yourself to do more every day. Overexertion in an exercise novice greatly increases the likelihood of injury.
Your goal should be to breathe more deeply, to feel a little warm, a little tingly. If you find yourself short of breath, take a break. If you have been sedentary, max workouts are dangerous -- you are at risk for injuries in an unfamiliar and more strenuous activity. If you are fit, the key is to create a sustainable pattern. If you exhaust yourself too thoroughly, you may be reluctant to go out and play again the next day.
After you've been walking for a while, you will find yourself able to walk further, faster. You will feel less tired, more energetic at the end of a walk. Do not be deceived. Keep this low key until you've been doing it for a few months. The goal is sustainability. Our culture encourages a bimodal distribution of exercise throughout the population: we have animals and couch potatoes and precious little in the trough between those peaks. But that middle ground is the safest, most sustainable place to be.
Before moving beyond walking, incorporate some form of exercise which increases your awareness of your body. This might be stretching, isometrics, yoga, Pilates, etc. Ideally, you should be able to do this at home, once or a few times a week, a few minutes at a time. Either through books or videos, or with the assistance of a trainer, coach or instructor, find slow, conscious movements that will increase your awareness of your whole body, so you will be able to avoid injury in whatever activities you engage in during the course of a week.
If after a few months you decide you really like this whole exercise gig, feel free to expand your repertoire. Try out for a team. Go to the pool. Check out a gym. Expect injury or illness to knock you off your feet at some point. You'll get back into it the same way you got off the couch the first time: starting slowly, sitting up, standing up, walking a few steps. Expect that a few of the new sports or activities you try will bore the crap out of you, be beyond your current level of fitness or otherwise be inappropriate for you. Don't force yourself to finish anything. Learn to assess a new sport or activity quickly for appropriateness and, if it seems right for you but not right now, learn to leave gracefully so you can try it again later. If a friend characterizes you as a quitter for this approach, either correct them or reduce contact and intimacy. If they persist, dump them. The quality of your life, and your life itself, depend upon maintaining a healthy and appropriate degree of physical activity. Your emotional and mental state, and your life itself, depend upon finding joy in physical activity. People who persist in making that hard for you are really bad to be around. Don't do it.
If you are still fit, but have found it difficult to motivate yourself to go outside and play, you will almost certainly need to create a pattern that is hard not to sustain. The struggle for you will be the overwhelming temptation to give up. A sympathetic exercise partner may help, but try to find someone whose feedback takes into consideration your overall mental and emotional state. You need someone with enough empathy to know when is the right time for TLC, when is the right time to encourage you to take a break or a day off, and when is the right time for drill sergeant abuse to get you going again. Try to find something you can do at about the same time, most days. Especially if it is in the morning, it can create a motivation to start the day. If it is in the evening, it can provide emotional distance from work which makes it difficult to sleep at night. If it helps you to know that others are expecting you, take a class where people might miss you and call if they don't see you for a few days.
If you are still fit, or have been fit, but have been sidelined by one or more injuries, or have physical limitations, such as asthma, or other disabilities, your exercise program must recognize and respect your constraints. You need to avoid people who make it difficult for you to do so. Ideally, you will find someone, or a book, or something that helps you learn how to best work within and around your constraints to become as fit as possible. In the case of injury, maintain contact with your physical therapist, or sports medicine professional, or find a new one to get ongoing advice and assistance from. Try new activities, with caution at first, of course, in an effort to vary your repertoire. Expect this process of discovery and recovery to be a difficult and emotionally strenuous one, especially if, before your injury, you performed at a very high level. It is hard to be a novice. I think it is even harder to be a novice again. Always remember: the most important part of establishing an exercise pattern is restarting after a break, whether taken purposefully or otherwise.
If your disability or injury can be helped by appropriate activity, focus part of your exercise pattern on improving your health status, specifically with respect to your particular constraints. Another part of your exercise pattern should, to the extent of your abilities, improve your cardiovascular health and, in the interests of avoiding osteoporosis, be weight bearing. But always remember that part of your exercise pattern should be fun, whatever that means for you.
Sitting up, standing up, walking around, any kind of physical activity requires food and water. Stay hydrated. Eat appropriately and regularly. Pay attention to physical cravings. Pregnant women can't ignore theirs. You shouldn't either. Experiment with new foods so your cravings will have good data to communicate with you through. Trust your body to tell you what you need.
If you find that you eat to avoid feeling pain in your life, try reading When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair by Geneen Roth, or one of her other books. In general, eat what you crave, eat more than one thing, drink water before and during meals and eat at a slow to moderate pace. Take breaks and give your body a chance to tell you when you are full.
If you find that you forget to eat, or that food has very low appeal to you, remember that appetite requires attention. If you repeatedly ignore your body's attempts to get you to eat, it will eventually reduce the requests for food (read: reduce metabolism) and may instead try to conserve energy in other ways. I recall a proverb, "Food is sleep". If you haven't enough to eat, sleeping uses less calories than any other way to pass time. If you find yourself sleeping more than usual, and have very little energy, consider the possibility that you need to eat more often, and perhaps more at each meal. An empty refrigerator and a poorly supplied or maintained kitchen can make food preparation a major hassle. Consider what you like, and what you have available for you. Try to stock up a few days ahead, and build into your daily schedule at least an hour three times a day for meal selection, preparation and consumption. Before that hour, think a little about what you might like to eat. While prepared foods and energy bars seem like a quick way to get some calories, try to cook at least a few meals a week. The process may help you redevelop the connection between your conscious mind and your cravings.
If you haven't been to the doctor for a while, now is a good time for a checkup. Get tested for STDs, even if you haven't had sex in months or years. How nice to do this once when you know what the results will be. It will help establish a pattern that will keep you going when you have less confidence to carry you through. Get your cholesterol checked. Consider updating your immunizations. Go to the dentist. Start brushing and flossing regularly or get one of those machines to make that easier for you.
If you are on medication, review it with your health care provider. Reduce or get off what you can and take what you do need consistently, at the same time each day. Continue to monitor what you need (and don't need) as you get into better shape. If some of your medications have side effects which make you reluctant to take them, talk to your health care provider about alternative medications, reducing the dosage or what you might try non-medically instead. If your health care provider does not want to work with you on this, do some research on your own, and try to find a more cooperative health care providers. I used to suggest taking newer medications, but I have since learned that many newer medications do not work any better than older medications and may have unknown side effects.
You will discover several changes in your life as a result of better fitness, more regular eating patterns, better hygiene and less/more consistently taken medication. You will worry less, because you will have already taken care of a lot of things that people and the media nag about. Exercise and appropriate nutrition generally contribute strongly to mental and emotional stability. You may find yourself able to make difficult decisions more efficiently. You will still feel sad and frustrated or angry when life takes a bad turn, but your overall mood will be more buoyant in the face of setbacks and obstacles.
Some people will attempt to escalate expectations. There's a certain breed of asshole out there which figures that if you're walking you should be running and if you're running should be lifting weights and if you're lifting weights you should -- well, you get the idea. Ditto for health and hygiene. If you're eating three squares a day instead of grazing, you shouldn't be eating red meat. If you've given up red meat for chicken, you should be a vegetarian. Vegetarians should be vegans and no one should be eating fat. Or carbs. Or proteins. Or they should all be eating more soy isolates. Or whatever. Do not get sucked into this. The easiest way to avoid getting sucked into this is to reduce or eliminate contact with those people. Tell them why, give them a third chance then cut them off, even if it's your mother. You can still talk to her, just make sure you put the phone down if she gets going on what You Really Should Be Doing.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated January 16, 2006