As I write this, I’ve just come back from a nice little bike ride around my neighbourhood. I got sweaty, went fast, climbed a few little hills, descended a few little hills, waited my turn at traffic lights and 4-way stops (you’re welcome), and nearly got hit by two different drivers who were each doing something illegal.
Ah, exercise in North America. So glamorous, so safe, so encouraged.
Anyway, cycling is the second sport I have picked up since I accidentally discovered that I enjoy INTENSITY and GOING FAST. It is the second sport I have picked up since I accidentally discovered that I don’t care if I’m the only fat person at the group ride, I’M HERE TO RIDE. It is the second sport I have picked up since I accidentally discovered that exercise, when you remove all the crusty old baggage about it being a Moral Obligation and a Means to Weight Loss (it usually isn’t, and focusing on that ruins the fun), is something I not only need in some abstract sense, but something I crave in a very visceral, very obvious way.
It makes me feel better physically, it both excites me and calms me down, it cheers me up, it puts a bright spot of play into my day, and it emotionally regulates me in a way that not even therapy could. It’s also just pure joy, pure pleasure, pure fun. I think that gets lost when we live in a culture that alienates us from movement and from our own bodies.
As a kid, I never thought of myself as “athletic” because I did not participate in any formal sports, but looking back, there were signs. I loved tumbling in the yard, playing on the playground, throwing a ball around, bouncing on a trampoline, riding a bike or skateboard, and all kinds of games. I did not enjoy things I found boring: lap swimming, ballet, baseball, football, running a mile or whatever we were assigned to do in gym class, but I still found ways to run around and exhaust myself by having fun, at least until my mid-teens.
By then, so many pressures around body image had developed that made me too self-conscious to use my body for any physical activity, especially in public, and I became not only hopelessly neurotic about my weight and appearance, but also dolefully depressed. No wonder.
As a young adult, I only engaged in exercise for the purpose of trying to lose weight, and frankly, it sucked. There were moments of joy, which surprised me, and moments of discovering some hidden strength or natural ability, which also surprised me, but all of these were overshadowed by The Agenda to burn calories and lose weight. Which meant that, even for activities that I enjoyed, like karate or riding a bike, I applied myself to them with a rigidity and drivenness that precluded all flexibility, all self-compassion, and all joy. And when the diet fell apart, as it inevitably would, so did my relationship with exercise.
I spent the next decade or so only engaging in incidental movement, essentially giving myself permission to not do any intentional exercise. (I once mentioned that on here, and a few commenters were SO MAD about that.) I was lucky to live in a city with decent public transit, and I don’t drive, which meant that I got a fair bit of walking in, which kept me strong and mobile even when I had no desire to do it. This was uncomfortable at times, but because it had nothing to do with trying to lose weight, it was psychologically neutral. I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I didn’t always hate it either. The most I could muster was a mild resentment.
About seven years in, I started not just taking transit and walking partway to work, but walking all the way to work, a mile each way. For the first time, I noticed that I enjoyed the physical sensations of getting my heart revved up, feeling a bit warm and even sweaty, and the exhilaration of breathing hard. I was only able to start enjoying these sensations once I’d practiced, repeatedly, taking away the reflexive judgment I’d learned to attach to them, like believing that breathing hard meant I was “unfit” and something was wrong with me, or that showing any kind of exertion in public must be a mortifying event because I was fat and everyone would notice. Some people did notice, and did comment that I was sweating, and I was able to calmly explain that I’d been walking briskly. On purpose. For exercise. This was very effective at both silencing them and making them look a bit silly, which I admit, I enjoyed.
Instead of feeling bad, I reminded myself (over and over) that of course your heart rate goes up when you exercise, and that’s what it’s supposed to do, and of course you feel warmer as you move faster, and of course you sweat to cool yourself down, and of course you breathe harder to get oxygen into your bloodstream and to your cells, because that’s what exercise is supposed to do. No matter how much or little exertion it takes to get these sensations, getting to them is basically the point. You can also choose to go slow and not push it, and just enjoy fresh air and stretching your legs, of course, but on days when you want to push a little harder or faster to challenge yourself, your body showing signs of exertion is exactly what should happen. Feeling challenged is literally the only way to increase your fitness. It does not mean something is “wrong” with you.
A few years after that, I started working from home and no longer had to walk much at all. I went through a phase of grief and sat down a lot, and I lost some mobility (and also gained some weight.) The urge to panic was strong, but I held fast to my values, and asked myself what I was truly worried about. Was it really the weight gain, or something else?
In thinking it over, it was mostly fear about the loss of strength and mobility, since I knew my life would get harder. I thought about it some more, and realized the best way for me* to improve my mobility was to…use it. To practice walking. To practice walking in sand, or up hills, or even up my arch-nemesis, stairs. Maybe I’d lose the weight I’d gained and maybe I wouldn’t, but either way, I would be more mobile and less afraid. So I bought some comfy walking clothes, and for the first time since childhood, I attempted to go for walks purely for recreation. I had to remind myself over and over not to monitor my heart rate, not to shoot for any “fat burning zone,” and not to count the minutes or create elaborate fitness routines in my head, but to focus instead on my internal sensations, on doing whatever felt good that day, on the trees, the sky, the dogs, the fresh air and the scenery around me. I did that enough that I started to get faster and feel better, even before my weight did anything. Eventually, over the next five years, it gradually settled back into my old (fat) baseline, without me forcing it to do anything at all.
*this is not true for everyone; see: CFS/ME, certain chronic pain or autoimmune conditions that you can’t exercise your way out of, and which require medical treatment first
I continued walking, for fun, for mental health (because at some point, my therapist pointed out how great it feels to walk when angry, to get all those stompy feelings out, which was an amazing revelation to me), and to enjoy the scenery, and even to enjoy the warm, sweaty exertion of it. I had a solid walking habit between 2011-2018, and I took a walk around lunchtime basically every day.
I always offered myself the chance to go, without forcing myself to go, usually by putting on my shoes and coat and stepping outside for some reason, to take out the recycling or just to check the weather. Then I got to decide whether I felt like going for a walk that day or not. I had full permission to turn around and come back inside if I wasn’t feeling it, but usually I was feeling it.
I started to anticipate my lunch break like a wiggly dog looks forward to the park. Each day, I had permission to walk briefly, for maybe five minutes around the block, to walk slow or fast, or not at all, or to walk farther, for a bigger neighbourhood loop that took 45-60 minutes, if I wanted to. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I walked for five minutes. Each time, I felt good afterward. If I took a rest day and went back inside, I felt good about that, too. I practiced making the right choice for that day. I was flexible.
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