Getting Healthier

As I look at age thirty rapidly receding in the rearview mirror, I feel a need to actually get my shit together. It’s like the feeling many of us feel around the New Year, but on crack. To that end I am making a conscious effort to try to get healthier. It’s a bitch. I’m tackling it on three fronts; drinking more water, eating healthier, and working out more. Drinking more water is not too difficult, but there are definitely things about it that can be bit of a pain. I never think about the fact that drinking more water means I’ll be peeing more. I have much more sympathy in this area for pregnant women now, because when I am really on top of the water game it seems like I have to pee again five minutes after I exit the bathroom. I’m becoming quite adept at scoping out the nearest restroom. I like to be prepared after all. I also didn’t realize how difficult it can be to find a place to fill a water bottle – especially if you’re picky about the water being filtered. So now I’m one of those assholes carrying a jug of water around. On one hand it’s convenient because it makes tracking the amount of water I’m drinking super easy, but it is rather cumbersome. And I recently read something about the connection between water in plastic bottles and cancer, so now that’s going through my head.

Eating better is one of those things that everyone knows makes us healthier, even if we don’t actually do it. I mean it’s talked about on Sesame Street for goodness sake. It’s a no brainer, but it’s so easy to mess up. Which seems kind of odd because all one has to do is eat more vegetables. It’s ideally very intuitive really if you just listen to the body. The problem there is that we have these diets that unite with our evolutionary need to eat as much as possible, because our bodies still think that we’re running around chasing wooly mammoths and food might be scarce for weeks. So many of us have eaten so much junk that our bodies scream at us that they want sugar. I find that if I eat badly at lunch, dinner is almost guaranteed to be bad. I can’t do the thing that some people suggest of making all but one meal healthy. I can’t have a cheat day. If I’m going to do such a thing I have to go whole hog or nothing. It doesn’t help that I wrap my lack of grocery shopping and cooking up in an excuse of “I don’t have time to do them,” which really is bullshit in so many ways.

Working out is another problem. First off just picking a workout regime is an issue. There are so many methods and books and videos and styles. You could do CrossFit, or yoga, or soul cycle, or barre, or weight training, or cardio, but you need a mix of high intensity interval training in there too, and each one of these requires a different shoe or moisture wicking garment, or fancy tracking device. It’s all so overwhelming before you even start. When you do finally pick one you have to figure out exactly what you’re doing. If I had the money I would book a couple of sessions with a trainer who could show me what the hell I’m doing right or wrong, but I don’t. So I’m stuck reading descriptions and watching YouTube videos and trying to watch what I’m doing in the mirror, and I’m sure there is so much that I am doing wrong.

I keep everything on charts in a notebook, but if I haven’t done a certain exercise in a while I always assume, in my male arrogance, that the last weight I was using will be the one to go with. Sometimes this is fine. Sometimes it’s not. More often than not I don’t realize how not fine it is until I finish the workout. Like the other day when I did squats for the first time in a long time and used the last weight I listed. The next day I squatted down to get a pen I dropped, and I couldn’t get back up.

Then of course there is the consistency issue. It’s all completely maddening. There is a small gym in my apartment building, so I have absolutely no excuse for not going. I literally just need to walk downstairs, and I don’t actually have to take the stairs, I could take the elevator. I have learned that when I get home, no matter how determined I am to go and workout, I won’t make it if I sit down. I must immediately go in, drop my bags, and change my clothes and then go right back out the door. I can’t even sit down to tie my shoes.

Getting healthier is really not a mystery. The problem is usually that we just wrap ourselves up in excuses and wind up getting nowhere, or we get paralyzed by the amount of information on the subject that we literally have at our fingertips. I am trying not to do that anymore. For many years I wondered if my desire to get in better shape was mainly motivated by our current gay culture’s obsession with people who are ripped and have six packs. I tried to say that I was just trying to feel healthier, but I think that image of perfection in my head was the main motivating factor – and one of the big reasons I would fail – because I wasn’t seeming the results I wanted very quickly at all. I was driven by that small part of me that wants to fit in so badly that it often overrides the more coherent thoughts in my brain. Now, as I am aging into myself more I think the balance is finally beginning to shift. I am less obsessed with attaining the body that is strewn across the men’s fitness magazines, and more focused on simply wanting to feel like a healthier version of myself.