I run not to get away, but to get through.
I run not to become out of breath, but to gain breath.
I run to be social and I run for solitude.
I run to connect and I run to disconnect.
I run not to avoid work, but to inspire work.
I run to feel empowered and I run to remind myself that I am still weak.
I run to meditate and I run to ruminate.
I run not to lose weight, but to gain balance.
I run because it is what I do.
Because I run, I can be who I am.
And that is why I run.
I run not to get away, but to get through.
I run not to become out of breath, but to gain breath.
I run to be social and I run for solitude.
I run to connect and I run to disconnect.
I run not to avoid work, but to inspire work.
I run to feel empowered and I run to remind myself that I am still weak.
I run to meditate and I run to ruminate.
I run not to lose weight, but to gain balance.
I run because it is what I do.
Because I run, I can be who I am.
And that is why I run.
We are all aware that exercise provides physical benefits, but we may not be as aware of the mental and emotional rewards that come with physical activity. Here are ten popular types of exercise and the benefits you can expect to receive.
Zumba is a Latin-dance based class that is fast-paced, fun, and accessible to all ages and fitness levels.
Physical Benefits: Zumba provides a cardiovascular workout as you are consistently moving for the hour long class. Many classes also incorporate some lower body strengthening moves.
Mental Benefits: Zumba is fun. I mean jump around like a little kid in your pajamas kind of fun. Go ahead, I dare you; try to make it through an entire class without laughing. Laughter and fun are enormously important elements of wellness. Zumba will help you get your giggle on.
Yoga focuses on moving the body into various poses and holding them for a period of time. Yoga classes can vary greatly, from the most gentle and relaxing to Power 2 hot classes.
Physical Benefits: Yoga helps to lengthen and stretch our tight muscles like nothing else. The more advanced flow classes also provide strengthening through holding more difficult poses.
Mental Benefits: Yoga teaches you how to soften and relax into discomfort. It helps you to focus your mind and be in the present moment. It help to calm anxiety and release anger. Quite frankly, yoga makes you happy and makes you a nicer person to be around.
Kettlebells were originally used as training tools in Russia, but luckily they made it across the border. They are simply heavy weights with handles that you move around in prescribed patterns.
Physical Benefits: Kettlebells offer cardiovascular and strength training in one. They are especially excellent for training the core, glutes, and hamstrings along with developing muscular endurance.
Emotional Benefits: Kettlebell training requires that everything flows from one move to the next. This helps the mind to flow as well, opening the dams between segments of your mind. If your thoughts are feeling stuck, try picking up a kettlebell. I bet your thoughts will be flowing like a river before you know it.
HIIT can take many forms (I have talked before about Tabata training – ouch!), but it is essentially intervals of very intense exercise followed by intervals of rest.
Physical Benefits: HIIT is excellent for shredding fat in a short period of time. It also helps to build your anaerobic capacity, which it useful whenever you need a quick burst of energy.
Mental Benefits: HIIT teaches you to breathe. Really breathe. Most of us walk around each day with our lungs only partly used. Try running sprints without ever taking a complete, full breath. It won’t happen. When you completely fill and empty your lungs, you release tension that you are holding in your mind.
Weight lifting can take many forms, but it is essentially contracting the muscles against some form of resistance.
Physical Benefits: Lifting weights helps to build muscle tissue which gives the body a pleasing shape, helps to maintain mobility, and helps to burn fat. Sounds like a win-win-win to me.
Mental Benefits: Weight lifting helps you to feel strong. Empowered. You may not be able to control everything in your life, but you can sure show that dumbbell who’s boss!
Right foot, left foot. Repeat.
Physical Benefits: Walking is an accessible exercise that, depending upon its intensity, can provide cardiovascular training and lower body conditioning. It is an easy, low impact way to help stave off weight gain.
Mental Benefits: Walking tells your brain that you’re making progress. There are times in life when we begin to feel overwhelmed with the daily grind. Go for walk and you’ll begin to see the place of today in the bigger picture.
See “walking,” only faster.
Physical Benefits: Running burns a lot of calories in a short time frame due to its intensity. It also gives you an excuse to wear itty-bitty shorts in public.
Mental Benefits: When you run, you have to find the rhythm between the body and the breath. This rhythm extends to the mind as it trains you to breathe deeper and slower when feeling bogged down or facing a challenging hill.
There are many types of races: 5K or 10K, running or biking, triathlon or adventure, they all put you in a competition against others or yourself.
Physical Benefits: Signing up for a race encourages you to train consistently, leading to improved benefits over periodic exercise.
Mental Benefits: I recommend signing up for a race that takes you just to the edge of your ability when you are facing a challenge in your life. Whereas most of life’s challenges are messy and may take years to resolve, a race is over in a matter of minutes or hours, yet it gives you the critical feeling of victory over a challenge. There is nothing so sweet as crossing that finish line.
Crossfit has taken the world by storm. It is a group exercise class that consists of a Workout of the Day (WOD) that incorporates strength and cardiovascular moves.
Physical Benefits: Crossfit certainly lives up to its name. If you can stick with it, it will make you leaner, fitter, and stronger.
Mental Benefits: Perhaps the best part of Crossfit is the community. Everyone is so supportive of everyone else. Be prepared for applause and “atta boys” or “girls” when you complete that first pull-up. If you need to know that others have you back, try visiting a Crossfit gym.
Bootcamp classes are usually held outside and combine plyometric moves along with body weight exercises and a variety of drills.
Physical Benefits: You will be sore all over. These classes don’t leave a muscle untouched or a sweat gland un-emptied.
Mental Benefits: Bootcamp teaches you to push through those “I can’ts” that our minds love to throw up in defense of effort. It gives you the mental discipline to work through your problems and see them to the end.
For the most physical and mental benefit, choose more than one type of exercise. By cross training, you will learn to utilize and synergize your entire boy and mind.
A new study suggests that consuming intensely flavored, such as pungent cheeses or spicy foods can help you eat less. This principle is true with any sort of intensity, whether it be diet, exercise, or emotional in nature. By definition, something that is intense is strong, pushing itself to the forefront of your consciousness. This makes it hard to ignore and brings forth mindfulness of the action, something which may not occur with more sedate stimuli. Intensity also cannot be maintained for long, which can be used for your benefit. Here are some suggestions on how to use intensity to improve your well-being:
Diet: Think of ways to pump up the flavor in your dishes. Add spices, hot sauce, olives, or strong cheeses in small amounts to bring forth stronger, more noticeable flavor. This makes it much harder to overindulge; just think about the difference between eating milk chocolate and dark chocolate, the latter being much more intense. I used to be the queen of bland food, but I have found the joys of small nibbles of big flavor.
Exercise: Try interval training. Personally, I find that I get much better fat-burning results from a 20 minute sprinting session, Tabata sprints, or kettlebell intervals than I do from hour long steady-state runs. Think about how you can pump up the intensity in your own workouts either by limiting rest time or working harder.
Emotions: Sometimes we try to avoid feeling an emotion intensely and we end up feeling a low level of it for a long time. There is nothing wrong with letting yourself feel strongly, and you will probably feel better for it. (Note: Anger is one emotion that may need to be doled out or carefully expressed to avoid harming yourself or others). I know I often feel purges and refreshed after an intense cry, whereas if I avoid the cathartic tears, I just end up feeling “blue” for several days.
Even though intensity can be uncomfortable, it will make you leaner, stronger, and more balanced in the end.
One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is a message board/ virtual support group for those following an extremely low carb diet (many of them are cycling between high and low calorie (<500) days as well). I initially signed on so that I find some new recipes or hear about new products, as I eat relatively low carb. What I found was something else entirely.
In reading the posts the last several weeks, a few patterns became immediately apparent.
First, no one seemed to be a long-timer. Everyone was new to the low carb, calorie restricted world or they talked about how they tried it in the past, regained the weight, and now are back for a second (or third, or fourth…) go-round. It was obvious that this way of eating could not be sustained for long. Eventually, their willpower won over and they reverted back to their typical diet (which, in most cases I would assume is the Standard American Diet, often abbreviated S.A.D.). This would lead to the weight being regained in a short time frame, often with additional pounds piling on.
I also noticed how harsh people were on themselves. It seems this diet is doomed to fail, yet people internalized their failures. These negative emotions in turn seemed to make them feel like they are not worth a healthy lifestyle or a healthy weight. Instead of the Up-Day, Down-Day of calories they are trying to follow, it seems as though most cycle through “good” days (not “cheating”) and “bad” days (rampant “cheating”).
Finally, exercise is not only seen as an optional component of the plan, it is often discouraged. Exercise can make you gain weight. In the form of muscle. That’s a good thing, but only if you are looking at a picture larger than the bathroom scale. I would also assume that it is rather difficult to muster up the energy to move at all, much less vigorously, when you’re subsisting on fewer than 500 calories a day.
When I read comments from people like the above, it makes me sad. I wish that they would realize their worth and fuel their bodies with real foods in appropriate amounts, rather then alternate between starvation and binging, pride and shame, and self-control and self-hate.
As I have said before, what we choose to eat is a deeply personal matter, but, please, show your body that you care.
Lessons From the End of a Marriage 