This Week’s and Last Week’s Accountability Report
Today I want to do two things. I want to look ahead, and I want to look behind. I want to look ahead to where I am going, and I want to look back to where I’ve been.
Where I want to go:
I have a picture of myself from when I was 27 years old. It’s a very random picture that was taken by a girl I was dating at that time. In the picture, I am rolling out a piecrust on a kitchen counter wearing nothing but my underwear. I am very thin and the muscles in my shoulders, arms, and abdomen are surprisingly defined.
If I’m perfectly honest with myself, which, I rarely am, this is how I want to look again. This is the body I want to get back to. This is where I am heading; toward a lean, muscular, and well-defined body.
At 174 cm and a weight that currently fluctuates between 77 and 79 kg, I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t worry about my weight and how I look. There are plenty of people out there who are much more overweight than I am, and who are much less physically fit than I am, but still, when I’m perfectly honest with myself, I don’t want to be overweight, not even a little, and I don’t want to be out of shape.
Which brings me back to where I was a year ago.
Where I have been:
Last June, I was seeing a physical therapist once a week. During our sessions, he would loosen my shoulder joint, realign the vertebrae in my neck, and try to work the knots out of the muscles in my upper back. Despite all, or most of his efforts, three months after starting physical therapy, I could still barely put my own shirt on in the morning and had a very limited range of motion with my left arm.
When my shoulder began bothering me half a year before I began going to physical therapy, it started with a period of deep, sharp, shooting pains in the joint that were followed by a steadily growing stiffness. These shoulder problems were accompanied by tendonitis-like symptoms in my left knee and intense, shooting pains in my left hip as well. For some reason, the entire left side of my body seemed to be falling apart. Additionally, I found that doing things like bending over to tie my shoes or pick up my children’s toys was becoming uncomfortable, not just because of the stiffness in my body, but also because my steadily growing stomach was getting in the way. I felt uncomfortable, and when I had to bend over or reach for things, I felt like my stomach was pushing against my organs, forcing the air out of my lungs.
During this time, I didn’t exercise. I couldn’t really, because it was too painful, and that was frightening.
I’m really not sure what the cause of these ailments was, and I don’t why or how they cleared up. Over time, they just seem to have run their course. My shoulder slowly stopped being frozen and riddled with pain. My hip, at some point, stopped throbbing. The tendons on the outside of my knee eventually relaxed. And more recently, my stomach, thanks to the exercise I have been doing, has stopped getting squished between my thighs and my spine.
The Right Direction
I can’t say that my recovery from most of the afflictions I mentioned above was the result of the exercise that I have been doing over the past six months, because it wasn’t. My physical condition just naturally improved, and then I began exercising. Nevertheless, the difference that I see and feel in myself today compared to the self that I saw and felt only a year ago is drastic. And it is encouraging.
I don’t exactly know how I’m going to return to the figure that I had when I was 27 years old. I don’t know if it is even possible to do so, but I’m going to use that image of myself as a landmark, and I’m going to just keep moving forward, one step at a time, heading in that direction.
If there is one thing that I have learned from the past six months, it’s this: Doing something for as little as ten minutes a day, on a daily basis, produces big results. All it takes to get started is a little bit of motivation. After that, all it takes to keep going is enough discipline to repeat doing what you are doing until it becomes a habit.
This Week’s Accountability Report
Exercise:
Week 25: Seven out of seven days: (Though one day was only a couple sets of push-ups and situps.)
Week 26: Seven out of seven days: (One of these exercise sessions was more of a walk than an anything else.)
Weight:
Week 25: 77.8 kg: No real change here.
Week 26: 77.4 kg: I did manage to get down to 77 kg this week for three consecutive days. That’s a new low for me.