I forgot how good it is to exercise. And yeah you'll always have a fitness nut telling you, "you better exercise because you gotta stay in shape", or whatever it is they tell you. And honestly, over the past 4.5 years that I've been more or less taking better care of myself, I've learned that sometimes you just don't want to exercise. And that it is so easy to slip back into a sedentary lifestyle, because you just don't need to worry about setting time aside to work out, whether or not that includes weights and/or cardio. I've been tracking my calories (approximately because I don't weigh every single thing I eat, plus there's always going to be some level of a discrepancy), for the past 1,694 days (~4 years, 7 months, and 24 days) and for a good portion of that time I would do different things to help better my health.
There would also be stretches of time where I don't do much more than track my calories. And I survived through it and I think considering everything, I'm still pretty well off. My weight has gone up and down and way up in comparison, but that's also because my goals, my methods, my intentions, and my knowledge has changed. At first, I dropped from 180 pounds (I don't know what body fat percentage, and I never really knew), down to 155-160. I was bone thin. Then I put on some weight, some muscle, some fat, and I've been bouncing around between 184 and 200 for the past several months.
What encouraged me today was in part the emotional distress I've been in since last week, and also that I weighed in today at 200.1 lbs. I realized that my lack of exercise, aside from push ups most days of the week, led to a weight gain that was probably more significantly fat than muscle, although I wouldn't put it past me to say some muscle growth happened since I recently started doing 100 push ups (or more, as much as 250) throughout the day on the days I did push ups.
I want to get myself back into a better shape, as I've noticed my belly is starting to get a bit fluffier than I want it to be. I do still see some muscle underneath it all, so I got to make sure I maintain if not work on that, but overall, I think I'm not doing terrible. In fact, I just have some rough edges that I can polish up and make myself feel really confident and really good about myself again.
So all in all, I don't really know how long I will keep this all going, hopefully indefinitely since I have at least another 3-4 weeks of social distancing, so no aikido and no gym. I hope to find exercises that work the areas I want, and the energy to press on to better myself and give myself some self care and self love because that's what I need right now. I need to work on me for me and then maybe the world will finally line up. It was once lining up for me, got scrambled throughout the course of 2020, but now it's time to work towards a realignment, even if I have to force it. Make things as good as possible for myself, and then let everything else fall into place.
Time for my own ascension to greatness, wherever that takes me since everyone's path is different.
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