Fit By ___

Being a large human, I’m often mistaken as being tough and near bullet proof. People actually assume that I’m not scared of things and that I shouldn’t be messed with. This will be great as my daughters grow up… a little intimidation is a good thing for teenage boys to be aware of… but this blog isn’t about raising daughters, it’s about this journey of fitness.

It’s easy… we all have a facade… a certain way that we want to be seen. We all have this culturally ingrained desire to make our lives look great and perfect from the outside. We post pictures of our adventures and we talk about the great meals we eat. We filter pictures to make ourselves look better and we take multiple pictures so that we can find one that will look the best… we desire a great perception. We desire for everyone to ultimately wish they were us… that they had a life like ours. We don’t the screaming match we had with our kids that started in the car and continued all the way down the hiking trail until the saw the scenic overlook and took a picture that makes us look like the perfect family. We choose not to post about how married couples sometimes sit at dinner and can’t talk to each other because of unspoken hurts that they each carry… but we post a picture of our amazing meal and talk about a date night without kids. We want everyone to know that we have the most perfect marriage… when on the inside, we are dying.

Inside each one of us large humans, maybe just under the surface or way under the fat, we have the image and the feeling of who we might one day be, physically. Some of us might even see this person when we look in the mirror because we refuse to accept our reality. I think if we really dug in and really explored our feelings, we would find that our dreams and reality are in conflict. That the person we envision or feel like we should be is way different than the reality of our lives. The reality is that all of our fear, emotions, and anxieties are mostly brought about because of our weight, appearance, and self-deprecation. The reality is that our weight is killing us. Nothing good comes from carrying around so much weight on our bodies. We become more prone to injury, illness, and disease. We won’t live as long and leave our loved ones with nothing but debt from medical bills that we potentially might incur because of our choices. Those last few sentences were tough to write. Those words hurt me, even as I type them. Am I alone in this?

In the inside, I am broken, fearful, anxiety-ridden, self-deprecating, and have been so down with depression that I have completely hated myself. 10 weeks into this new journey I have been learning more and more about loving myself and loving what I see in the mirror, depression is nearly non-existent, and joy has been coming into my life. Honestly, I’ve faked it so long that I couldn’t tell if it was real of not… but this new joy is different and real. That’s something I didn’t expect. There was a guy that was once encouraged to ‘fake till you make it’, and that may have been my reality. I’m glad that 10 weeks in, I’m experiencing the joy of self. I’m trying to live into this new reality.

I still catch glimpses of myself in mirrors and hate the way I look, so don’t read this and think something is wrong if you go back and forth from joy and hate. It might be normal or the inner battle of culture vs. self.  Either way, in the midst of this battle, know that joy comes… that if you keep working the plan and don’t quit, you will find out new and unexpected things along the way… like joy.

Keep Going!