Exercise?? Are you sure?

Recently I've been feeling the urge to exercise again. I stopped exercising when I entered treatment for my eating disorder. Exercise for someone who has an eating disorder tends to not be such a healthy thing. That person either exercises to an extreme or when they do exercise it's "never enough". I feel into the latter. I always felt like I had to do more than what I did. Even if I had just completed a 45 minute run I never felt like I had done enough to get rid of enough calories to justify what I had eaten that day.

But recently I have felt the urge to start incorporating exercise and/or activity back into my life. Before this I haven't wanted to go near exercise. I was too afraid that it would trigger me back into a relapse of restricting. So I've done a lot of thinking about who really wants me to start getting exercise again. (Ed can be tricky, ya know, he works in very clever ways.) I wanted to be sure that it was I who wanted to get the activity and not one of Ed's ways to get me to go back to him.

I've had to do some soul searching to figure this out. I asked myself, "Why is it that I'm starting to feel this need to exercise? Is it because I want to lose weight?" If the answer turned out to be yes, then I knew I wouldn't be ready to start exercising again. Funny thing though, after giving this question a lot of thought I realized that my answer to the question was no. I don't want to lose weight. I don't even know what I weigh anymore. Which is a huge change for me, as I used to weigh myself 2-5 times a day. It's refreshing though, not weighing myself. I'm not tied down to an inanimate object "telling" me I'm not good enough. Instead I rely on knowing I am good enough just as I am and treating myself with respect.

Which brings me back to the issue that started this post in the first place. Exercise. I knew that this urge to exercise wasn't coming from Ed telling me I "needed to lose weight" but where was it coming from? It dawned on me one day when I was watching my dogs play in the back yard. We were very involved in a game of fetch. My dogs adore fetch. If possible they would play fetch until they dropped from exhaustion. As I played with them I saw the unbridled joy they were having. They were running around crazy happy, after a ball, getting lots of great activity and do you think for one second they were thinking about how they looked? Hell no! All they were thinking about was "ball!"

I had a realization that afternoon. I want to exercise and get activity because it's fun. I want to exercise because I want to be able to use this healthy body I have as a vessel to help me enjoy the activities that I love to do, such as walking, dancing, hiking, kayaking and so on. I have fun when I do all those things and with those things comes activity and exercise. Right then and there I "got it". I don't have to stress about going to the gym and run on a treadmill like a hamster. I don't have to embark on some 3 mile run to get activity. (I absolutely hate running, by the way, and yet forced myself, in secret, to do this for years because I could burn so much more of the food I'd just eaten.) Instead, I can think of a fun activity that I want to do and that is the exercise that will fill the urge I've been feeling.

I'm looking forward to this spring and summer. I'm so excited to have more energy this year so that Casey and I can get out there and do more of the things we love doing. We'll be taking the pups for more walks. We'll be taking more bike rides downtown. We'll be taking the kayaks out more on the river. We'll be doing more yard work together. I know this, as long as I'm enjoying what ever exercise I'm participating in at that moment I think this exercise thing and I are going to get along just fine.