I KNOW THAT feeling all too well.
You get an invitation to something in the future that requires you to wear a suit.
No problem, you own a suit. You’ve had that suit for a long time. “Brilliant! I’ll be there”, you reply, imagining how good you’ll look wearing that fantastic outfit you had tailored when you were looking after yourself really well.
The day of the event arrives. You pull the suit from a dry cleaning bag, go to put those pants on and – there’s a chasm of plump flesh where the pants used to easily button up. They don’t fit. Not even close.
That suit was tailored exactly for the way your body was shaped when you bought it. It’s tough to accept that something in this equation has changed shape and it’s most definitely not your outfit.
This has happened to me more than enough times. A previously good run of eating right and moving well gets interrupted by a holiday, a new job, a new partner, a new kid. You blink your eyes, a year goes by, and now you’re shamefully texting your host, ”I’m so sorry but something’s come up. I’m not going to be able to make it.”
It’s a challenge to be anything but reactive in these situations. I’ve certainly been there and thought to myself: that’s it!
The very next day I’ve gone absolutely nuclear, straight into a strict fasting protocol, trying to equal my previous 5K PR (even though I haven’t run 5K in a number of months), or heading back into to the gym and trying to lift the same amount of wheels as I did last time.
The only thing that happens in this instance is I either blow out my back or overtrain so hard I end up sick for two weeks, the delay sapping all momentum out of the drive to start moving again, and before you know it, I’m back in my track pants thinking about some takeaway.
If this cycle sounds familiar, you’re not alone. The wild thing is that we know exactly what to do in this situation. We know we should start at a lower intensity, but our ego can get in the way and send us back down to where we were.
I’m no exception. I know exactly the gentle curve of activity I need to introduce if I want to get moving again after a period of inactivity.
I discovered it in my late teens. When I (barely) graduated high school, I weighed 112 kg. No muscle, all fat. And when you’re a fat kid, walking is your natural enemy because unless you have a gait like a jackaroo just back from muster, walking makes your thighs rub together.
When this friction combines with the special steaminess of subtropical Queensland, that sweaty raw skin quickly gets fungal and you end up with a whole world of nasty in your trousers. It was hellish and made me plan my days to minimise the amount of walking I’d be doing wherever possible.
When I was about 19, after a stint at TAFE, I found myself unemployed, living at home with mum and slipping into uselessness as each day went by. Sitting in front of the TV mindlessly eating wasn’t ideal and after a few weeks I started to notice my brain turning to jelly.
Sitting there too numb to even mute the ads as I consumed another bowl of mid-morning nachos I’d made for myself, there was an ad on TV at the time with a male character saying, ‘I didn’t want to have to get ready for a job, so I just got ready for whatever might come along.’
I’ve got to hand it to whoever wrote that ad, because I heard that as a call to action. I was inspired! I might even go for a walk . . . outside. But going for a walk was too hard, so I made another sandwich instead and waited for Oprah to start.
The next morning when I woke at the crack of 10am, in a rare window of self-reflection, I realised that I would have to trick myself if I was going to get anything physical done. So, I told the part of my brain that didn’t want to go for a walk, ‘I’m just going to check the mail’. A twelve-metre walk down the hill to the mailbox, and twelve excruciating metres back up the hill to the front door would be well enough exercise for my day.
When my brain caught me grabbing some socks and started to get suspicious, I told it ‘Just putting some shoes on, don’t want to get hit by any bindis’; as I didn’t want to alert it to my cunning plan.
I plodded down the hill, when I got to the letterbox, I just kept walking. All the way to the end of my street, then left at the corner to loop back around to our street, back to my letterbox, where I picked up the mail and went inside.
My brain didn’t cotton on to the length of that walk, because yes, we had just checked the mail. Exhausted by this 600-metre trek, I didn’t make it past the first ad break in Oprah, I just passed out from the effort on a bean bag. Regardless, I did the same thing the next day.
On the third day of doing this I told the reluctant part of my brain, ‘Just going for a walk around the block’, but I didn’t say which block. There was another loop in our hilly suburb of cul-de-sacs that was a little longer – a very hilly 1800 metres, which was quite a challenge. Sure enough, though, when I got back to the letterbox I’d ‘just gone to get the mail’.
After a while, I no longer needed to trick myself like I’m a dog with a worming tablet. It felt good when I did it so I started to want to walk further and further.
With nowhere to go and nothing to do, I’d just walk, exploring the extended neighbourhood. With no phone, not even a Walkman to listen to, I’d just walk and think.
I hadn’t really put together why I was walking for so long, but I did notice that the more I walked, the more I felt like walking. I looked forward to my walks, and slept better for them.
After a few weeks of this, one day I was setting out for my daily walk when something enormous inside me rose up and I just had to run – it was as though I’d burst if I didn’t. Hurling myself forward, the wind in my hair, my chest aching, my legs screaming.
Each step flying me down the street faster than I could have dreamed. It felt incredible to move like this. Until my intercostal muscles started to feel like I was getting stuck with a prison shiv and I was forced to stop, coming to a halt under a shady purple jacaranda.
Hands on my knees, gasping for breath, I was finally able to stand and see how far I’d come – it was the distance of two power poles – a whopping forty metres. Happy with what I’d done, I walked for another two hours.
The following day I ran to the next power pole, then kept walking. In 20-metre increments I increased my run:walk ratio and within a month of first checking the mail I ran that full 600-metre block.
From there my capacity increased exponentially, and the weight just fell off my body (bear in mind I was 19 and my body did nothing else but synthesise protein and pump out testosterone).
Having this transformative experience early in my life, you’d think I’d be smart enough to know it intuitively, but I have to admit I’m not that smart sometimes. So now, instead of tricking my brain into training, I have to trick my brain into not training so hard.
“I’m not going to do my regular workout, just going to grease the wheel a bit” – and instead of grabbing the 24kg kettlebell, I’ll grab the 12kg. I’ll do the same movements, just at a lower intensity.
To make sure I don’t get carried away and try to match my PR of how many sets for time I can do, I won’t even write it down. The fact is, whether you’re 19 or 49, starting from zero or getting back to where you were, the same principle applies: you can’t leap straight to the person you want to be, or even the person you used to be.
You have to start with who you are today, and that’s enough. So forget the idea of a health kick. Take a health step instead. Tell your brain you’re just checking the mail. Then keep walking. If there’s one thing I learned under that jacaranda tree, gasping for breath after my almighty 40-metre sprint: instant transformation is a fantasy.
The most important thing for me to do is to get my ego out of the way and just show up where I am, one step, one rep, one bite at a time. And that’s enough.
The rest takes care of itself.
