Date: January 29, 2011 8:40 AM
Topic: My Body is Changing

My body is changing. I can feel my shoulders opening up and my core getting stronger. I can feel my thighs getting leaner and stronger and I can feel a different kind of energy running through my whole body. There is more focus and less scattered energy as it is moving through me.

For the last 3 weeks now I have been working with a trainer and then making 2 additional visits to the gym to work on what she has given me. I have been tracking it here on SparkPeople and on a file that she has at the gym for me, because I know as I go along that I am going to get a wide variety of different things to do and I want to be able to keep them all straight and to know what I have or haven’t done so I can keep on top of it all and not get lost and overly dependent on my trainer. So I am grateful for the places to keep track that I have and I am grateful to my trainer Jennifer and I am grateful to have a body that responds so quickly to a bit of strength training and stretching. I am not sure yet how grateful I am for squats but I am pretty sure that some day I will be.

I always knew that cardio training was important and when I was doing it I could feel differences in my body and I knew that any program that I could put together for my body would have to involve walking, swimming, running, elliptical training and other cardio work. I always thought that strength training wasn’t for me or wasn’t necessary, because cardio is what burned the calories and made the heart healthier. Besides strength training always looked so vain and constricted and not free and moving. I have done some strength training before in my life and even worked with a trainer before but I never got it before.

I get it now. I get how it opens me up and balances me out from all of the abuse my sedentary work I do ends up doing to my body. It contracts and strengthens the muscles that are always being pulled and stretched as I hunch over a keyboard and it pulls and stretches the muscles that are always contracted so I can sit in my various chairs all day. When I work those muscles in the opposite way to the way that I use them over and over again I get stronger over all and feel that energy moving more vitally through my whole body. And of course it make the cardio all that much more possible too.

More stuff to learn about all of this and that’s half the fun. I am not just ignorantly moving forward, as I have done so many times before in my life with diets and exercise, I am moving forward consciously making my own choices and feeling the impact that those choices have on me and my body. I am studying and making my own decisions about what is working and what isn’t. I am measuring, without judgment, calories into my body and calories burned and noticing the difference and what impact that has on my weight and shape and then making choices or decisions from that informed place. I am responsible, no doctors or dietitians or trainers or experts or theories or any kind of “expert” knows more about me or my body then I do. I am the one I have to listen to first and last. I am the one that experiments with other peoples ideas and then makes my own choices, me.