Imagine exercising because you enjoy how you feel doing it and how you feel afterwards. Imagine the thoughts running through your head as you endlessly pound the road being about how strong you feel and how much you are enjoying yourself, rather than how many calories you are burning or whether your thighs are getting thinner.
Once you get your head around the concept of nurturing yourself, rather than beating yourself into shape, you will be able to 1) enjoy your exercise more and 2) suffer less overuse injuries. After all, if the point is to get into as good of shape as possible, without regard to calories burned, being in tune with how your calves are feeling and whether a slight alteration in your stride will make them feel better will override thoughts of whether you are going faster than last time or are in the ultimate calorie burning zone. Your turn-around point (if you are doing an out and back run) will be determined by how you are feeling rather than how far you said you would go. You may feel great and go further or be feeling lousy once you get started and go for a shorter distance or walk instead of run. And (this is the important part), you will feel just as satisfied with yourself when you get home.
The only exercise I stuck with for a long period of time– running– had nothing to do with losing weight. I did it because I loved it. I have not been able to stick with anything else. I’m slowly working back into it.
This is something I’ve been working on a lot. Justin and I go out walking on a trail in the woods on the weekends and I *love* being out there. We walk out there for the pure JOY of walking in the woods and listening to the frog and the birds and the crickets and the wind through the trees and it’s WONDERFUL. We walked for almost 2 hours once and it was amazing. It’s not about speed or how far we go, although I do hope that we’re walking further and faster, but I’m not doing it to count the calories or anything. I’m doing it for the joy of being able to move and be outside.
And yoga has never been about the calorie burn for me, pretty obviously. It’s more about the peace of mind that I get through doing something mindfully, and the strength and flexibility are kind of a bonus.
Now, it’d be really super awesome if all this walking I’m doing these days would actually mean I’m losing weight, but so far, it’s not really working. I think I need to be doing more cardio work or something. And there are things I could do there that I really enjoy, but what I want to be doing is running, so I’m going to keep on walking until I can start doing that, I guess.
And maybe the exercise will never produce the weight loss. Maybe that will only be achieved by an altered way of eating. It seriously takes a lot of exercise to lose weight in a noticeable way. So often that exercise just causes us to eat just a little more, but enough to negate that exercise. Frustrating, but often true. So I’m glad to hear that your exercise is just for the joy of it. It may be you need to do it more than just on the weekends, too.
Oh, it’s more than just the weekends. It’s only at the trail on the weekends because it takes too long to get there and by the time I get home, it’s heading towards getting dark. The rest of the time, we walk around the neighborhood. 🙂