We Can't Do Hard Things

And by "we," I mean me. And by "hard things," I mean exercise.

I started seeing someone for disordered eating in 2018. I remember, in the early days of recovery I was listening to a lot of Food Psych. Christy had a guest on talking about compulsive exercise, and how in order to heal her relationship with movement, she took a two year break from exercise. This was shocking to me. I had lived most of my life believing that as long as I exercised, I would not die. I didn’t know about a lot of things yet, namely genetics, and I thought that whatever disease was coming for me would need a Planet Fitness membership to catch me.

My first year of recovery focused on food and eating. My second year focused on exercise. This is when I learned that I did a fun thing called compulsive exercise. Spoiler alert: much like the guest on Food Psych, I too had to take a break from exercise. It was both terrifying and fortuitous because a few months into my exercise hiatus, the pandemic hit and no one could go to the gym anyway.

Going through eating disorder recovery in your mid-forties, in perimenopause, during a pandemic is …. wild. Someone should write a book about that. It’s me. I should write a book about that.

I’m not going to detail my old compulsive exercise stuff because truly, who cares. Also, it’s triggering. I will only say that I was competing in Half Ironmans, which IYKYK. It’s a lot of exercise!

Earlier this year, I was listening to episode #40 of this great perimenopause podcast, The Midlife Feast, and the guest was Dr. Fionnuala Barton. Barton was saying that many of us experience acute stress and anxiety during this hellish time and doing certain types of over-exercise and high intensity movement like HIIT can exacerbate that stress. She recommended doing movement that’s slow and steady, like low intensity interval training, resistance work, lifting weights, or Pilates. Things that are going to help calm your nervous system.

As someone who used to both over-exercise and do a lot of high intensity stuff, this really landed for me. I don’t want to do any of that anymore. My stress level, nervous system - whatever, stays at about an 11. I don’t need anything that makes that higher. I need things that bring it down.

So now I do things like taking short, slow walks in the woods and stopping to look for hawks and owls. Once a week, I take a longer walk with a friend and then we go to Trader Joe’s together. I’m a longtime member (and fan) of Lauren Leavell and I do recordings of her barre, recess and strength classes. And I just joined The Underbelly, Jessamyn Stanley’s yoga community. I’m really enjoying it so far.

This is what I want to do right now: take nature walks and roll around on the floor.