Yesterday a memory from two and a half years ago surfaced. I had just decided to join LA Fitness and do personal training to get myself reintroduced to giving a damn about my physical health. Before I’d started the actual training they’d given me this list of foods I should eat before I worked out and then after . . . it included half cups of oatmeal and three eggs before. I remember grocery shopping and buying broccoli and grilled chicken to eat after. Which, I’m sorry, is just a hella lot of food and such to consume for 25 minutes of weight lifting.
On my second day of personal training I’d tried to eat what I could of the breakfast — it was not three eggs because excuse me that is too much food at six in the morning — and dragged myself to the gym.
Team, it was so difficult. My body wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. I hadn’t worked the muscles this way in years. At one point the trainer had me do running planks on the Bosu ball and I thought I would die. When I got back to my apartment I threw up. Then crawled back in bed. Because I’d just thrown up. Because I was sad about it all and sometimes you need to crawl back into bed.
I kept doing that personal training for a year — mostly because I signed a contract, but also because it got me out of bed. Though I stopped eating anything beforehand (personal choice, I just wasn’t hungry right when I woke up) and it took me the better part of that year to start being mindful of what I was eating too.
But I was remembering all of this yesterday, thinking with some disbelief, that I understand my body so much better now. I didn’t, on that day, have any real awareness or connection to what my body needed. I didn’t know if it needed food or water or to move or to stay still. I felt like I was making these decisions in a vacuum in my mind. I was working out for my body and my mind alike and I wouldn’t have known it at the time but they were not communicating very well.
To be clear, I’m not saying the lesson here is to repeat what I did with my own fitness and health journey. I am saying that I’m feeling grateful for the connectedness I feel lately with my body and mind. Even though they still war with each other on runs, when I was sitting out on my balcony, massaging my leg muscles and drinking water I was grounded in myself. And grateful that after I climbed in bed years ago, I climbed back out and kept showing up for myself to get to this point.
With Love,
Natalie