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Every Rabbit Wants to Be a Hare
Oct. 20th, 2009 03:01 pmIt's my idea that rabbits tend towards husky frames. If you look at pictures of most pet bunnies, you'll see they tend to be soft, furry, rounded balls of fluff. Even wild rabbits tend to be small but powerfully built. Hares, on the other hand, are long, skinny, lithe. They're built for speed, and they don't nearly look as cuddly as their rabbity cousins. They're lean and fast.
It's also my idea that rabbits secretly envy the physique of hares. Whereas a hare can eat whatever it wants, rabbits have to mind their calories carefully or else food goes straight to their hips and then they'll be even fatter. It's not fair, but hares are decidedly ectomorphic. We rabbits? Stuck being endomorphs.
It's not that I hate my body. I merely dislike it. There's a pretty decent shape hiding under all of the fat deposits, and I'm determined to excavate it. I want the flat stomach. I want the toned muscle. I'm not ashamed to admit that. Even if it makes me feel kind of shallow and indoctrinated into the whole Californian fitness-crazy mindset.
I've been flirting with the idea of healthy living ever since I came here, but the latest wake-up call came earlier this year. As part of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
toob's Year of No Regrets, we took part in the Bay to Breakers race, a 12 k race that takes you on a pretty hilly course through some beautiful parts of San Francisco. We were invited to take part with malinandrolo, and it was really awesome to test out how far I've come with regards to stamina and such.
All in all, I didn't do too bad: I finished the race in one hour and 41 minutes. On one hand, it's not bad for a first attempt. On the other, that's nearly 14 minutes a mile. That's a bit less than 5 miles an hour, which even for a casual jogger is a little slow. I was doing pretty good for a second there, but on the first hill I sputtered to a slow walk and didn't really recover after that. Ever since then I've been hyper-aware of how winded I get going up stairs, how much strain it is to bend over my stomach to tie my own shoes, that sort of thing. Worst of all, pants and shirts that fit me a year ago are getting...snug, to be kind to myself. Nothing freaks me out more than realizing that the same pants I fit in a year ago are threatening to burst around my girth now.
This is all a part of getting older, I understand. Your metabolism slows down. You can't get away with eating candy for dinner any more. You need proper sleep and actual vitamins and minerals and protein and stuff. You can't trust your body to burn off fat. Instead of craving only sugar, your body's tastes diversify. I, for one, am glad and grateful for this march of progress, but at the same time I'm having a devil of a time learning how to be consistently comfortable with it.
I realized this fact well after my body started displaying evidence of it. So now I'm a bit behind with regards to taking the proper care. I'd wager I have about thirty pounds of excess fat here, and none of the actual dieting discipline to get rid of it. Getting it has proven to be a long, slow climb.
That doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. Candy bars are a much less frequent occurrence than they used to be. I have cravings for actual fruit and vegetables now. And I rarely have cheeseburgers. However, for every minor victory, there's the usual host of problems. I can't consistently exercise to save my life. I'm still far too in love with pastries and cookies (my current love: apple and cheese croissants from Specialty's). And my desire to develop new habits still frequently outpaces my actual ability to develop new habits.
The general concept of weight loss is so, so simple. Spend more Calories than you eat. Voila! The practice of it, however, is astonishingly hard. It's a lot like Zen that way: be right here. OK! Wait...how do I do that?
There's no secret to weight loss and physical fitness, I'm beginning to see. It's just a matter of being dedicated to eating things that are best for your body to use, and use your body the way it's meant to be use. Run, jump, kick, lift. The only thing making it hard is the way we've developed our society to be as sedentary as possible. It's not easy to find 'real' food to eat, and it's not easy to exercise your body for any good length of time every day. Finding a job that requires sitting eight hours, within a five-minute drive of McDonald's? *That's* easy.
If you're not paying attention, it's easy to keep the same habits that got you through your early adulthood long after they've stopped working for you. Keeping up with the way your body shifts over time requires you to stop, pay attention, make a conscious effort to change and stick to that change with dedication. I know this, but I'm still learning how to do it.
So, hopefully, you won't mind the occasional post or two about learning this stuff -- how to eat well and use my body, how the world around you makes that difficult to do, how to find ways to make that easy again. I'll keep the exercise filter for raw stats and trends, just because I need to have my numbers geek side addressed somehow. But theory and practice stuff, I'll try to keep up at least once a week.
It's also my idea that rabbits secretly envy the physique of hares. Whereas a hare can eat whatever it wants, rabbits have to mind their calories carefully or else food goes straight to their hips and then they'll be even fatter. It's not fair, but hares are decidedly ectomorphic. We rabbits? Stuck being endomorphs.
It's not that I hate my body. I merely dislike it. There's a pretty decent shape hiding under all of the fat deposits, and I'm determined to excavate it. I want the flat stomach. I want the toned muscle. I'm not ashamed to admit that. Even if it makes me feel kind of shallow and indoctrinated into the whole Californian fitness-crazy mindset.
I've been flirting with the idea of healthy living ever since I came here, but the latest wake-up call came earlier this year. As part of
toob's Year of No Regrets, we took part in the Bay to Breakers race, a 12 k race that takes you on a pretty hilly course through some beautiful parts of San Francisco. We were invited to take part with malinandrolo, and it was really awesome to test out how far I've come with regards to stamina and such.All in all, I didn't do too bad: I finished the race in one hour and 41 minutes. On one hand, it's not bad for a first attempt. On the other, that's nearly 14 minutes a mile. That's a bit less than 5 miles an hour, which even for a casual jogger is a little slow. I was doing pretty good for a second there, but on the first hill I sputtered to a slow walk and didn't really recover after that. Ever since then I've been hyper-aware of how winded I get going up stairs, how much strain it is to bend over my stomach to tie my own shoes, that sort of thing. Worst of all, pants and shirts that fit me a year ago are getting...snug, to be kind to myself. Nothing freaks me out more than realizing that the same pants I fit in a year ago are threatening to burst around my girth now.
This is all a part of getting older, I understand. Your metabolism slows down. You can't get away with eating candy for dinner any more. You need proper sleep and actual vitamins and minerals and protein and stuff. You can't trust your body to burn off fat. Instead of craving only sugar, your body's tastes diversify. I, for one, am glad and grateful for this march of progress, but at the same time I'm having a devil of a time learning how to be consistently comfortable with it.
I realized this fact well after my body started displaying evidence of it. So now I'm a bit behind with regards to taking the proper care. I'd wager I have about thirty pounds of excess fat here, and none of the actual dieting discipline to get rid of it. Getting it has proven to be a long, slow climb.
That doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. Candy bars are a much less frequent occurrence than they used to be. I have cravings for actual fruit and vegetables now. And I rarely have cheeseburgers. However, for every minor victory, there's the usual host of problems. I can't consistently exercise to save my life. I'm still far too in love with pastries and cookies (my current love: apple and cheese croissants from Specialty's). And my desire to develop new habits still frequently outpaces my actual ability to develop new habits.
The general concept of weight loss is so, so simple. Spend more Calories than you eat. Voila! The practice of it, however, is astonishingly hard. It's a lot like Zen that way: be right here. OK! Wait...how do I do that?
There's no secret to weight loss and physical fitness, I'm beginning to see. It's just a matter of being dedicated to eating things that are best for your body to use, and use your body the way it's meant to be use. Run, jump, kick, lift. The only thing making it hard is the way we've developed our society to be as sedentary as possible. It's not easy to find 'real' food to eat, and it's not easy to exercise your body for any good length of time every day. Finding a job that requires sitting eight hours, within a five-minute drive of McDonald's? *That's* easy.
If you're not paying attention, it's easy to keep the same habits that got you through your early adulthood long after they've stopped working for you. Keeping up with the way your body shifts over time requires you to stop, pay attention, make a conscious effort to change and stick to that change with dedication. I know this, but I'm still learning how to do it.
So, hopefully, you won't mind the occasional post or two about learning this stuff -- how to eat well and use my body, how the world around you makes that difficult to do, how to find ways to make that easy again. I'll keep the exercise filter for raw stats and trends, just because I need to have my numbers geek side addressed somehow. But theory and practice stuff, I'll try to keep up at least once a week.
