Nobody tells you how hard self-acceptance is. It’s easy to believe you’re not good enough. It’s easy to believe someone else has all the answers and if you’re only good, if you’re only obedient, everything will be okay. You’ll be healthy, you won’t have to suffer the despair of sickness and you won’t be reminded of your own mortality. We all fear sickness. We are threatened with disease only to be controlled. But once you realise that nobody else can make your decisions for you – nobody else gets to tell you what to eat, how to move, how much to sleep, how hard to work – there’s no hiding from the fact that you’ve got to make these decisions for yourself.
And if the way you motivate yourself is by exploiting your own fears and insecurities, by bullying and ridiculing yourself, by calling yourself lazy and disgusting – where is that really going to get you? What sort of life are you building? Something the Dalai Lama said once about self-loathing, which I adored – is that the desire to experience less suffering, the desire for your situation to be better – even that is an expression of self-love. It’s a place to start.
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Don’t go back to the thing that hurt you. Exercise – it’s the same as choosing a partner – don’t stay with someone abusive, someone who always wants you to be different, someone who exploits your fears to make you stay with them, who tells you that you aren’t good enough, and that you should be thankful because if you didn’t have them, you’d die alone. Sometimes you’re better off alone. The way to combat these sorts of harmful relationships with exercise is the same as the way to combat these sorts of harmful relationships with people – I’m generalising like crazy, but as negativity begets itself, so does positivity. Choose methods that you enjoy, that make you feel good – not those that make you feel judged or inadequate. Invest in developing your own sense of self-worth, and as you do so, you’ll get better at choosing the thing that does not exploit you. What makes you feel judged and inadequate? Counting calories and measuring waistlines. Sure, it’ll keep you going to the gym if you’re wired that way - but at what cost? I’m interested in building character, not eroding it. What makes you feel good? Moving for joy and freedom. The pure physical expression of human emotion. Now how can you systematise that? I’m very strong. I can squat all the way to the ground with 115kg loaded up on my back, I can bench press equal to my own body’s weight, and I can belt out a casual couple of chin-ups any time of day. And I can run pretty fast, when the mood takes me. I’m no powerlifter or professional sprinter – not by a long shot, but I have nothing to be ashamed of. And here’s a novel thought: nobody has anything to be ashamed of. Sunday through Tuesday I was a bit sick. I still have some vestiges of a cold. And today, for the first time in a week, I trained. I did five sets of squats and five sets of bench press, and after twenty minutes I was totally shagged. I called it a day. All up, there wouldn’t have been much more than five minutes of actual work in the whole session. Seriously - squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, lunges, jump squats, skipping, burpees, mountain climbers, chin-ups, sprinting, rowing, kicking a bag, boxing drills - what's the difference? Body parts, intensity... If it's a full-body exercise, performed at intensity, strength and cardio become meaningless terms. Totally redundant.
Ever done a set of six heavy squats? Sprinted up a hill? The heart-pounding, leg burning, lung heaving results are almost identical. Strength and cardio don't really exist - they're at opposite ends of an intensity spectrum. Sure, you can walk and not really build your strength, or you can do isolated biceps curls and not really stimulate much of a cardiovascular response, but... Here's pretty much what it comes down to: if you want to develop strength and skills, full-body practical strength, train full-body movements at intensity. Rest for a generous while, then repeat until you're satisfied. If you want to develop your cardiovascular capacity, do the same things, with the shortest rest periods you can manage. That's all. It only comes down to rest periods. There's no reason why you should rest for a while or a moment - beyond what you feel like. Afterwards, you can always isolate a weaker muscle group, do some postural work, stretch, or go for a walk or a jog if you feel like your workout didn't quite capture what you were after. That's the role for isolation work in my book - after your main things, to bring up your weak points. And cardio too, if you haven't quite satisfied yourself, you can always go for a little jog or something. But this strength vs. cardio thing - I just don't buy it any more. Your body doesn't categorise - it knows work and rest, intensity and duration, but it doesn't care at all about our concepts for exercise. Y'know what's weird? When people look better in the before picture.
It's actually not weird, because people are pretty, but what's weird is how we perceive ourselves. How we think we need to be different, and how obsessed we become when we're focused on changing ourselves for the new year or whatever. Seriously, I feel like I see it all the time. Someone's posted before and after pictures of their fat-loss progress, and they look cuter, happier, and kinda more vibrant in the poorly coloured and grainy 'before' pic. And I'm not kidding, I'm not making this up, and it makes me feel a little uncomfortable to write about what I think's attractive (because, y'know, it really has nothing to do with what I generally like to talk about - and your worth as a human has nothing to do with what some stranger thinks about how you look, but we do seem to get caught up in the being validated by strangers thing), but there was this one before pic, and she looked cute, and after the diet, she looked haggard. I have nothing against thin, and nothing against fat, and I know that the way you look doesn't actually reflect what's going on inside, but I wonder at the steps people take in the name of 'health', and more and more I feel like I'm seeing the harmful results of dieting in like, bold capital letters. Metaphorical bold capital letters, but they're big and obvious nonetheless. But this kindof scratches the surface with all that's wrong about judging someone based on the way they look. How can you make assumptions about someone's health? Really? There's a reason diagnostic measures are so difficult, and even ones based on observation of the body, like you see in Chinese medicine - it requires a helluva lot of training to get it right. _ So, my blog is now a year old! Happy Birthday, blog! To mark the occasion, I think I’m going to do twelve cartwheels, one for each month, and maybe seventy-one push-ups, one for each article I’ve written. I hope you’re picking up on the theme – exercise is not a punishment. It is not something you can do to neutralise bad karma, and its inclusion in – or exclusion from – your life does not reflect on you as a person. It is something to be engaged with in whatever way you like – strength training is my thing, hence my choices. I did not choose a twelve kilometre run, or seventy holes of golf, or a one hour bike ride. To move freely (by which I simply mean – on your terms, whether structured or no, impulsively or whimsically, with labour or attention or absentmindedness) is to celebrate life. Also, I bought a new pair of shoes! Huzzah! _ I recently wrote a piece about my experiences in martial arts (you can read it here), and writing the article naturally led to a few points on Zen, which have since been playing in my mind. When we think of Zen, we think of monks raking stones, or simple ascetic practices, or chanting, sometimes beatings, meditation, obscure sayings, and the practice and discipline of martial arts. My all-time favourite definition of Zen was written by Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Zen Keys: “the world of Zen is the world of pure experience without concepts”. This is where training the body serves us purely – there’s nothing special about martial arts, or gardening, or any single physical activity – all activities can lead us closer to a state of Zen-like awareness (especially exercising at intensity), because all activities have the capacity to bring us to an ultimate experience of the unnameable, free from concepts. _ The thing that gets me with fitness is basically this – we prize weight loss so highly, it’s revered as if it’s the pinnacle of sporting excellence – it doesn’t matter how fast you can run, how high you can jump, how strong you are – you know – actual athletic development is seen as secondary to changing the way you look – and through all of this, the most amazing physical feat we can achieve – our own personal development – our success as an individual is measured by our ability to conform to the beauty standard?!?!
The anarchist in me is horrified by the fitness industry! Dieting in my mind perfectly equates to subjugating the masses. You want a docile population? Encourage them not to eat. Make it a status symbol to be so tired and hungry you can’t even think straight any more. I don't want to waste my life, thinking that success at living means pandering to that shit. _ What is it you want? Is it to be healthy? Then why talk about weight? Is it to be loved? Then why go to the gym? We seem to pursue things that are contrary to our goals, or simply not aligned with them, in the vague hope of... I’m not sure what... If it’s vibrant health you desire, let go of the weight-focused approach, and work for your health. If you’re not sure what that means, then it might be research time. What illness or dysfunction are you hoping to resolve? What can you do, specifically, to address your concerns? If it’s athletic development you want, let go of image obsessions. It’s not looking more like an athlete that will help you to run faster. If you want to look different, is training what you need to be doing? Or is it something else? Get a new pair of jeans. Are you seeking acceptance? Re-evaluate your goals. _ It’s the job of cravings to keep us alive when we fail to feed ourselves. There’s this weird idea that permeates our culture that if you’re eating plentifully, you’re eating too much, but if you’re not eating enough, that’s okay because you’re just dieting. Why not acknowledge that dieting equates to not eating enough? Why is it okay to fail to feed ourselves? To just ‘not be hungry’ at lunchtime? To have tea or coffee because we’re afraid if we eat, we’ll get fatter? It’s strange that we think not eating enough is the right thing to do. We don’t even think of it as not eating enough – we call it healthy choices, but ‘healthy choices’ actually means something different than ‘eating less’. We think it’s the disciplined thing to do, it’s morally superior, it’s good for us, we think indulgence is a sign of weakness, not of care. And to eat plentifully – we think that means we’re undisciplined, lazy, decadent, corrupt; that we pander to the demands of a body we do not respect, we do not appreciate or love. We think that because we want to be thinner, we don’t have the right to eat what we want, when we want it. We think being fat means there’s no such thing as ‘not eating enough’. And so we try to hide food from ourselves. If we want to lose weight, we’re loathe to sit down to table, to have a meal – the guilt’s too much. Because we don’t deserve to eat – we’re too fat – we have to restrict. So what do we do? Eat on the run, snack here and there, get food in however we can, without having to admit to ourselves that we are, in fact, eating. Without having to admit that we do actually deserve to eat what we want, when we want, in amounts that satisfy us. Without allowing us the freedom to enjoy our food. |