Do you listen to your body? Or do you only hear it when it's berating you?
Because it's easy to miss the quieter message if you're filtering everything through your low-self-esteem, poor-body-image filter. I, of course have a pretty powerful filter of that sort.
During a recent IM exchange with my hiking buddy we commiserated over the fact that we hadn't been hiking in several weeks and both felt fat and out of shape.Lucky her: she can blame it on new love (and one who happens to be a gourmet cook.) My only excuse is this computer.
She suggested we hit the Dish (a local hiking trail in the Palo Alto hills off Hiway 280.) Well, I nipped that in the bud. As I told her, the Dish is more hard-core than our usual Rancho San Antonio Open Preserve hike. It's longer. There's no shade. It's just a little harder. And I knew I would feel really demoralized to tackle that, and find it hard work, when I used to be in better shape and tackle it without so much effort. And it would likely make us both pretty sore, since we'd been slugs lately. So for once I listened to the advice of experts who say not to overdo it when getting back to exercise, to avoid burnout.
But I'm not always that on track...
See, for a while now I've had this little twinge in the top, middle of my right quadricep. Sure I felt it. I listened to my body. But all I heard it say was: "you loser, you haven't been exercising so your muscles hurt like little loser girly-muscles that they are."
Which, when you think about it, doesn't make sense, because if I hadn't been exercising, exactly what was happening to make the muscle hurt?
Finally the other day it hit me: See my desk is tucked into a corner of my dining room. I sit on a regular dining room chair squeezed in between my dining room table and my dining room window. Since it's just a normal chair, and doesn't swivel, when I want to get up from my desk I have to sort of plant my right foot facing outwards, then push off and twist my body around to sidle out in the space between my desk and the window.
The other day as I planted that foot I felt the familiar twinge, and all of a sudden I realized my muscle wasn't hurting because I was an out-of-shape loser slob...it was hurting because I had some really poor ergonomics going on.
Do I need to get back on the exercise plan? Absolutely.
But was my body trying to tell me something new and quite specific this time around? Yes it was. And my own negatve filter made it take way too long for me to hear it?
So, anyone else out there do this?
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