Today's Mind-Body-Because-No-Book-Report Post

I talk a lot about the mind-body connection.  Thing is, words are funny, slippery things.  Mind, in the way I use it casually, often means thinking and cognitive function and logic.  That is certainly part of what it means in the sense of mind-body connection, but it leaves out some stuff.  Like the emotional stuff.

I don’t know where I first heard the phrase “issues in my tissues.”  It’s not just about injury history and kinds of movements that are hard for a particular person.  It’s about how some of our emotional stuff manifests in our bodies.  Yes, it’s a little woo-woo, but it’s also common sense; we all perceive it when someone we know is holding stress in her or his body, for example.  Those facial expressions that we interpret as emotional signs:  hey, that’s the body moving to reflect an inner experience.

What this means is that sometimes when we move our bodies, we get unexpected emotional responses.  We can release emotions we didn’t know we were holding.  Many times, this is a good thing.  Sometimes it can be surprising or even a bit scary.  We think we’re just working out, but it turns out that we’re resolving that pesky issue with our kids or our spouse or our parents, too.

It’s okay.  Keep breathing.  We can get stronger in all ways, together.

Distinctions

Activity and exercise are not the same thing.  Understanding this can increase our fitness.  We need both in our lives.

Activity, in the sense I mean, is pretty much any movement we do.  Gardening, housework, shopping, and such are good examples.  Increasing our activity level can help us toward fitness by burning more calories than, say, sitting on the couch.  What we are tracking when we shoot for 10,000 steps per day is activity level.

Exercise, on the other hand, is a bit more work.  Our muscles need to end up tired and/or sore.  We need to get breathless.  We need to sweat.  This is where the real changes in our bodies come from.  When you get in those 30 minutes of elevated heart rate, you know you have exercised.

Sometimes we confuse activity with exercise.  When we go to the gym and walk on the treadmill while reading, we may think we are exercising.  For some of us, that kind of pace is enough to get our heart rates up and IS in fact exercise.  For others, it’s just activity, better than reading on the couch, but not enough to really increase our fitness level.

Go for it!  Get active and get exercise!

Keep Taking Out the Garbage

Not surprisingly, as a person embedded in our culture, I have too much stuff.  We all do unless we have consciously decided to go minimalist.  I don’t aspire to having only 50 possessions, or 25, or none, but I do want to have less clutter.  Some time ago when I was creating a goal list, I found that I could summarize pretty much everything I wanted in this phrase:  keep taking out the garbage.

This applies to fitness, of course.  I am sure I am not the only one who needs to think, continually, about taking the garbage out of my food choices.  Changing our body fat percentages comes down to taking out the excess garbage from our bodies by building muscle.

Taking out the garbage is work.  Sometimes it’s smelly and messy.  But if we keep doing it, we find ourselves in a much more pleasant place.