Fixing my flawed relationship with fitness
My phone’s photo gallery for the past decade (and more) is filled with “before” photos in hopes of an impending dramatic transformation. Years fell off the calendar but that hope still remained. Each before photo only marginally different from the previous one.
There would be different strategies applied, albeit with rising doses of skepticism. Conditioned by the world of instant gratification, the window of visible progress becoming narrower with each impatient strategy. Maybe I should lift weights or perhaps run more? Watching a tonne of “sugar is the devil” documentaries might help fight those cravings. Reading all those books on productivity can be applied here I guess! So that I can whip out the Kanban board and scrum my way through keeping desires at bay.
I kept food logs and progressive overload journals. Systematically tried to weed out toxic food groups, counted macros, identified muscle groups in the body and how to train till failure without wanting to throw a dumbbell on the guy who says “no pain no gain”. All these habits went surprisingly hand in hand. A choir in unison. Clockwork.
And then comes that day. The icing on the doughnut stares back at you. The frost on the bottle of a chilled beer. Carbs in all their holy and unholy forms unite. The urge to loosen that button and let go. The knees start shaking cause you know whats coming next. The dam about to break. The deluge from the prophecy written the moment you started working out. Willpower is a muscle they say. And here I’ve been training it till failure.
This cycle ebbs and flows through the years. On a macro scale the needle only moves by a bit. It is frustrating but you brush it off with a trite “such is life”. We adapt to certain “failures” quickly. Evolutionary advantage perhaps. So that we don’t spend the rest of your life mulling over all the things gone wrong.
But an underlying tenet of my reasoning felt flawed. All my ideas of how I looked and what I felt were resting on a bedrock of shame. Shame accrued over time subconsciously through those unreasonable social media body standards. The passive snide remarks from relatives/peers on “looking like having let go”. The fit folk who invisible to their own privileges preach the “If I can do it, anyone can” maxim.
All of it puts you in the middle of this giant red circle of being the #1 suspect for self sabotage. The fault has to be from within, propelled by the illusion that we all operate on a level playing field.
It’s this feeling of shame that becomes the hardest to shake off. And weirdly requires a lot of unlearning of how we build our own narratives.
Every transformation video on Youtube shows their past selves as something that needed to be destroyed. That the new found abs somehow come with a bonus pack of personality. I know all of this sounds very ranty, and partially it’s directed at an entire industry that predates on that feeling of shame to make money. Like how posts on “how to burn belly fat” still spring up with endless SEO vigor despite centuries of evidence on how things don’t work that way.
We’re all scientists dabbling with the variables here and there to see the effects on our fitness and routines. There are a lot of general laws which may govern a large part of us, but it’s the nuances that require some tailoring.
Over time I’ve taken notes of some of these aspects. Not to be that guy on the internet giving unsolicited fitness advice, but these are some foundational ideas seem to be helping me.
Shame cannot be a motivator. As effective as negative feelings seem be to light a proverbial fire under my ass, it’s done more more harm in the longer run. Cause my idea of self image is always revolving around an inadequacy, which turns out, is super draining. And more likely to cause binge episodes in retaliation.
I find it easier to fast than to restrict certain food types. Keeping restrictive diets doesn’t work for me. The knowledge that I can’t have something at times adds that forbidden food sweetness logic in my brain. Intermittent fasting that way seems relatively better (maybe not for those around to experience me “hangry”).
Results cannot be solely based on measurements. Most periods of fitness in the past have hit long plateaus after peaking. I still battle the feeling often, but try to find small gains in other nuanced progressions. Like feeling better while wearing certain clothes. Or being able to do just a few more pushups than before. Small wins.
Motivation is a result of the environment. Work stress is the fastest deflator of motivation to work out. Keeping strictly timed work out routines are one way of combatting the lack of motivation.
Fun has to be a component somewhere. Most fitness activities seem to be a mix of: things you love doing, things that you are building towards liking by getting better at, things that you despise but are meant to be good for you (I’m looking at you burpees 🤬). The first part is where the fun component lies and is indispensable since it leads to greater ability to sustain a habit.
Having enthusiastic/driven people around you. We are all good natured parasitic beings mooching off good and bad habits from our peers, aren’t we?
Of course this is an ever growing list of observations, which could only be distilled to this level at this point. And that’s the whole point of this exercise, to evolve as we learn more. Nothing is set in stone. Except Moses’ tablets perhaps.