You are absolved

I make people feel guilty.  I don’t want to or intend to.  It’s just my existence that does it.  People find out what I do and suddenly feel convicted of not exercising enough or eating the wrong food.  However, I am not here for that.  I am not anyone’s judge.  I have enough of my own issues, thanks.  I do not need to be evaluating everyone else’s.

All of us, me included, come to fitness with our own set of expectations for ourselves and many of them are—how to put this gently—totally unrealistic.  Yes, there may be people out there who exercise for hours every day and eat a perfectly calibrated number of calories that exactly fill their nutritional needs, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never met any of them.  I’m also pretty sure that their lives have to be built around doing that, and most of us have other priorities, as we should.

I am not saying that we should not aspire to do better than we do now.  We’ll feel better if we do our cardio most days.  We’ll be able to play longer if we lift weights pretty regularly.  Our bodies will appreciate the broccoli and the water we feed them.

We have lives, with families and jobs and cars and dogs and parties and errands and all the other beautiful, complicated stuff we need to show up for.  We need to show up for our bodies, too, but it is a part of life, not all of it.

Guilt is not the best reason to work out.  Love is.  Do the work of fitness because it enables all the other good stuff.

And if that’s not enough:  I forgive you for the cake last week and that missed workout on Wednesday.  Go play.