What's Good For You?
Why can’t the things that are good for you like walking, eating well and not overindulging; be easy to do and things that we seem to enjoy the most that are bad for us like watching television, eating out and toxic relationships be more difficult to obtain and achieve?
There are some folks who already have the exercise gene in them who thrive on sweating and can get out and move at the drop of a hat. Not me, I’m the kind of woman who will get an annual membership at the local gym 5 miles away and only visit there two times in the year.
Instead of worrying about how I got this way I decided to put myself on a mission to revise the status quo. I was on my own personal journey to not just do exercise every morning but to also change the way my mind perceives exercise. I was going to figure out a way to make exercise something that I looked forward to doing. First, I tried hypnosis where I listened to CD’s before going to sleep at night and on the way to work. It was a total waste of money. As were the other brilliant ideas I had of buying cool home equipment that I didn’t know how to use and took up space in my bedroom.
The answer came to me quite accidentally. I was putting on fluid in dialysis and every time I went to treatment my blood pressure dropped and more fluid was staying on my body. For anyone that is a dangerous situation. With the circumstances present I now had a life-threatening reason to come up with a plan to get this fluid off of me. I tried not drinking water and I quickly got dehydrated. I tried more dialysis treatments and my blood pressure plummeted. I tried a brisk walk to the corner and my back hurt so bad I couldn’t even think of doing THAT again. As you can see I was trying everything except the easiest thing in the world. My mind had convinced me that it was the most unpleasant thing ever: Exercise.
Full of fluid and frustrated I woke up one morning and laid out my mat, kicked my son’s dog out of the living room and used my Amazon Firestick to find a free and easy morning stretch routine for seniors. Fifteen minutes later I was feeling like my muscles were happy and I wanted to challenge myself a little more so I drank some water and completed another thirty minutes of passive stretching on my own with a quick walk around the cul-de-sac and more stretching to wind down. To tell you the truth, I felt like I could go to dialysis right then and pull all the fluid off but that is the thing about putting exercise in the right place in your mind, you have to be patient. Everything you want to happen is not going to happen overnight.
I was not surprised when I went to treatment that most of the extra fluid that I had been carrying around for the past two weeks came off with ease and no side effects. I was hooked. Stretching was my thing. Putting on some oldies and passively stretching my dormant muscles back to life was all that I needed to do. While concentrating on the muscles I was stretching with deep breathing and listening to my muscles. After treatment I wanted to go home and get on my mat and stretch some more. But what my body needed was protein and fluid. My body had done its work and now I had to feed it by getting my electrolytes balanced. You don’t have to be on dialysis to know this.
It's in my mind now that all I had to do is listen. Your body is always talking to you. We may not always know the language but it’s just like when you have a new baby. The baby can’t talk but you try different things to find out what they need: bottle, a diaper change, a bath and oil massage, food or a lullaby. Your body is the same. Right now, I discovered that my body needed some good and simple stretching and a little sweating and now that I know, I am hooked. I am looking forward to it. I want to stretch and see the amazing results the next time I work a muscle further without any pain. After stretching like that you have to give those muscles a break, so one day on and one day off. Don’t rush into it. I might make it to the gym sometime this year but if I don’t, I’m not worried about it because me and my body got something going on here and what we got going on is working for me.
What’s good for you? Stretching while on the phone? Running up and down the stairs during commercials? Try anything and maybe you will discover the simplest thing could crack the code to your exercise dilemma.
