PS: You’re No Spring……

I am 51 which is not ancient by any means but I’m no spring chicken either.  Today, I ran, walked and I was planning on doing a Les Mills Body Combat workout when I stopped myself to remind myself that I am not as resilient as I used to be.  I get tired easier, my joints ache the day after a workout and things I used to do like spending all day outside working in the garden in the sun cannot happen.  I just can’t act the same because I’m not the same.  I want to do the workout but what if I hurt myself because I’m doing a two a day for no other reason than I feel like it.  That isn’t good nor smart discipline so I am not going to do it despite wanting to.  This is called maturity folks and besides that ….no one in the world cares if I’m 10 lbs lighter or not.  Act your age they say so here I am acting my age even though I’m not happy about it, I’ll do it.

Be Your Own …

I’m always thinking about what I didn’t do, didn’t eat, didn’t achieve.  Something that we need to remember when we get down on ourselves is that we may not have done everything we want but we certainly have done plenty!  Fitness is not only a choice, but it’s also a way of life.  It’s a journey that takes more than a month, more than four months to see the results we want.  There will be down days, bloated days, cheat days and additional and unexpected rest days but that is part of the journey.  Our job is to make it the best journey for ourselves and to try.  Try every day to do even just something.  Movement of some kind.  Some days we work hard and others we do some and call it a day.  That’s ok!  What we should not be doing is looking in the mirror in one bad moment and shaming ourselves.

We aren’t machines except in the fact that if you don’t oil a machine it won’t go.   As I found out nearly to a disastrous ending (but not), put too much oil in and it’s just as bad.  A story for another time.  If we don’t feed our bodies the right stuff in the right quantities, it won’t perform the way we want it to.  PERIOD!

Part of our journey is how we eat.  It’s part of the process of being a better person inside and out.  There are a million fad diets out there and it could take forever to read about all of them.  My suggestion is to do your homework and identify what you want out of your diet then pick a few and read about them then decide what works best for you.  It won’t be right the first time but you’ll tweak it until it is.  It’s all one big experiment and we are the guinea pigs! Don’t give up when at first you don’t succeed, get up and go again and again and again.  I’m tossing around the idea of cutting down on the meats and looking into adding some plant-based foods to my diet.  Not sure where it will lead but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and there’s some merit in the correlation that we as a society are as sickly and obese as we are because we consume too much sugar, too much meat and animal products that are chock full of chemicals and preservatives.  Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good cheeseburger, I’m just saying perhaps I can cut down and improve and see what happens.  Jury is out for now.