Beets Are Like Exercise
When I was little, I learned that my mother loved beets, so it became my mission to train myself to love them too. Whenever beets were available (usually at a salad bar), I would put some on my plate and very purposefully think, "I'm glad they have beets. I love beets!" even though I didn't love beets. At the table, I would put a forkful of the vegetable into my mouth and again, deliberately think, "Mmm! These beets are so good," through my grimace. This is how I attempted to compel myself into enjoying beets.
Early Days of Exercise
I've never loved exercise. Honestly, I've never really even liked it.
As an overweight child, PE was more the stage upon which to showcase my lack of physical ability, grace, dexterity, and skill than a time to relax my mind and stretch my body. I spent much of it making myself as small as possible and sneakily letting my peers cut me in line to run bases in kickball. (It was humiliating when my thinner classmates offered to let me kick while they ran the bases for me, though they meant well.)
In fourth grade, for some reason, the idea of playing volleyball was so enticing to me that I begged and was allowed to join a team along with some of my classmates. This team was a park-based team that would play four sports— volleyball, basketball, soccer, and baseball— spending a certain amount of time on each before moving on to the next one.
Volleyball was my favorite and I found that I wasn't horrible at it. I liked that it involved standing mostly in one spot and shimmying a few paces side-to-side or forward and backwards and bopping a ball into the air.
Basketball wasn't horrible, but I never got too invested. I remember staying mostly in the middle of the court so that I wouldn't have to run across as far when the ball switched teams. I was tall for my age, so I enjoyed shooting baskets and felt I was pretty good at that.
Soccer was horrible. Probably due to my large size and my lack of effort playing basketball, I was made the goalie. Again, I wasn't very invested. Certainly not invested enough to risk getting hit with the ball in order to win. I realized that I was made goalie in part because of my size and any request to not be goalie was soundly ignored. I became bitter.
By the time baseball rolled around, I'd dropped out.
Weightloss Wishes
But, even before my short stint in sports, I'd been walking. I'd always been fat and my parents always wanted to help me lose weight, so my mother and I started walking when I was about seven. I have clear memories of my mother and I chanting multiplication tables as we walked sometimes up to two miles, often in the dark.
I'd tried a number of times throughout my early life to lose weight. Exercise naturally fit into any of the plans I made. I had a few gym memberships and my parents even once got my brother and me a personal trainer. I never much liked any of that. The personal trainer felt judgemental and often just had us walk. The gym was miserable mostly because it meant waking up around 4:00 to work out before school. (Getting sleep was already very hard for a teenager with access to the early internet.)
Most of these experiences made exercise seem like a punishment. Then I tumbled fast into the Fat Acceptance movement, where I'd languish for ten years... But more on that in other posts.
Learning to Love the Burn
After a stay at the hospital in late 2018, I was forced to reevaluate much of my life, exercise included.
Walking became a way to prolong my life and that was practically my only form of exercise for three years. Three days a week, then four, then five, then seven. Then came weight-lifting routines to strengthen my changing body. Yoga and stretches and bodyweight exercises to become more limber. Finally, jogging to push myself beyond what I ever thought I could do.
Last Saturday, preparing for a late-morning jog in the summer heat, I realized that I was excited for it. I stood there, looking out my bedroom window at the sun-soaked street, and let that new feeling and the recognition of that new feeling sink in. I had never been excited to exercise. Really excited.
I had felt inklings of such feelings before: "I think I'll take a walk, that would be nice," or "If I go here I could walk in the park and I would like that," but I never felt the excitement for exercise that made me want to be doing it as soon as possible. I'd never craved it.
I nearly cried when I realized what I was feeling.
It took four years of exercising near daily, persistence, doing it because it's good for me, four years of saying "this is great" while I grimaced, for my brain to finally get a taste for exercise. It's amazing.
The phrase goes, "You don't know what you're missing," and that was certainly true for me. I'd never had the desire to move my body more than necessary so I never realized how good it could feel.
The best part is, I didn't really have to "learn" to love the burn. Like when I taught myself to like beets, all I had to do was keep giving myself little tastes of whatever I desired to enjoy and my brain eventually caught on.
It's so easy! Well, not easy. But all it took was persistence and time. Take a bite of beets. Go for a walk. Eventually, you'll look forward to both... at least, I hope you will. It feels good.