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fitness for fat nerds

Fitness for Fat Nerds: Doctor, Doctor Give Me the News

There are several things you need to do before you get started on the whole exercise thing, my fellow fat nerds. Make sure you have good shoes (more on this later). If you’re of the female fat nerd persuasion, get some good sports bras. Invest in a tiny mp3 player if you like music. Things like that. But here’s one you probably haven’t thought about:

Get a new doctor.

Well, let me back off that blanket statement a little. Your doctor might be perfectly fine. Your doctor might be wonderful, one you’ve had for years and years, one that listens to you and works with you. If you’re lucky that way, good for you. Don’t just keep that doctor, declare it Awesome Doctor Appreciation Day and make him or her a pie.

But most of us? Need a new doctor. It’s a giant pain in the ass, depending upon your insurance company. Your options might be severely limited. But it’s worth it to explore those options.

Let me tell you a story.

Back in 2005, I was unemployed. My job hunt was becoming so desperate that I seriously considered joining the Army as a viable career path. That didn’t end up panning out, but one thing the Army recruiters did that I will owe them on for the rest of my life is they taught me how to run. So even when I gave up on the Army thing, I kept running.

Somewhere in there, I started developing these awful, sharp, shooting pains in my knees when I ran.

Now, I hate going to the doctor. I hate the feeling that I’m being a whiner, if nothing else. I’m much more of the suck it up, Cupcake school of pain management. So if I’m willing to actually make an appointment and go, that should tell you just how much pain I have to be in. Enough pain that mainlining Advil doesn’t cut it. Enough pain that I’m actually starting to worry about my bodily integrity.

So after months of increasing knee pain, I finally went to the doctor.

You know what the doctor told me? Your knees hurt because you’re fat. Lose 15 pounds and they won’t hurt so much.

Never mind that my knees hurt because I was exercising, and at that point I had already dropped 20 pounds. Never mind that the pain was so severe on some days that it was interfering with my ability to exercise and thus continue to lose weight. I just needed to lose more weight, and things would magically become better.

I kept going with running and kung fu and did my best to just ignore the increasing amounts of pain, because I told myself it was all a weight issue. The pain in my knees got bad enough that I started having problems with stairs. At that point, I considered going to the doctor again, but I knew that she’d just tell me I was still too fat. I didn’t see a point in coughing up a copay so my doctor could make me feel like shit about myself.

A few years after the original diagnosis of being too fat, my right knee locked up and I fell down the stairs. My significant other convinced me to try going to the doctor again.

Due to the strange vagaries of being in an HMO, I ended up seeing a different doctor.

She listened to me explain my knee pain, about how much exercise I was getting per week. She actually believed that I was that physically active, in spite of my weight. She messed with my knees a bit and then told me that “A lot of female athletes have this type of knee pain…” Yes. She used the word athlete. And then she referred me to a physical therapist.

It took the physical therapist all of five minutes to diagnose my problem (I have an old injury in my right hip that screws up my leg alignment, plus arches that collapse), tell me to get special insoles for all my shoes, and give me a set of exercises to do.

So that was great. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. I had to take two years off of both running and kung fu while I let the physical therapy do its work. My knees are better now, but they will never be good.

And a lot of that is because I had a doctor who didn’t want to look further than my weight.

There are a lot of doctors out there like that. And that’s a problem. I avoided going to my former doctor a lot of times when I shouldn’t have because I didn’t want to get a lecture about how I needed to lose weight. I knew that I was overweight, and I was trying to do something about it. When I did have a problem severe enough to make me go, it was blamed on my weight if there was even a tenuous connection that could be made.

If you’re serious about physical activity, if you find a way to exercise that you enjoy and do a lot, you are going to end up needing to see a doctor. You’ll screw up your ankle, or mess up your knee, or pull a muscle. It’s going to happen. Life in general is hard on our bodies, and if we live it large and have fun, injury is almost inevitable. And that should be fine.

You need a doctor that you can trust to actually listen to you when there is a problem, someone who will help you fix the problem instead of just telling you to lose weight and call it a day.

Hell, even if you’re not going to turn into a fitness fiend, you deserve a doctor that will listen to you. This is not to say that we are completely divorced from our weight. There are some health problems we fat nerds can end up with that are related to our level of fat. But our health is also so much more than just our weight.

And so are we.

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fitness for fat nerds

Fitness for Fat Nerds: A Run a Day Keeps the Wibbling Away

Ever try to go to bed without brushing your teeth? I just can’t do it. Some kind of awful little plaque alarm in the back of my head starts going off and refuses to stop until I’ve done something, even if it’s just smearing some toothpaste around in my mouth with one finger. Part of this could be because I’m absolutely terrified of the dentist and will do anything it takes, up to and including ritual animal sacrifice (no, not really) to guarantee that I will never have a cavity again.

The bigger root of my tooth brushing obsession is probably just the fact that it’s been a nightly routine almost as long as I can remember. Routine plus desperate desire to fight tooth decay wins, apparently.

I bring this up because we’re animals, and animals like routines. I’d like to think I’m slightly less neurotic than my cats when I miss giving them their morning treat and idiot talk, but I’m still a slave to my daily habits. This is a fact I’ve tried to turn to my advantage for exercise.

I also admit that I had a lot of help getting it going, in the form of severe jetlag.

I was in Germany for almost three weeks. My first night there I managed (somehow) to stay awake until about 9 PM, at which point I collapsed like a badly made souffle. The next morning, I woke up at 5 AM entirely on my own. I’d already discovered that there was no gym in the hotel I could use, so running was my only option. And I also realized that I probably wasn’t going to feel like running after working for ten hours. So I warmed up, put on my running shoes, and went for a 30 minute run along the banks of the Weser in the pre-dawn dark.

Same thing the next day. And the next. And at that point, I was on a real streak and it seemed a shame to break that, so the next and the next day…

For those three weeks, I was able to break out of my habitual pattern of staying up late, and I got used to getting up every morning and going for a run before breakfast. There were a couple of days when it was too cold to run outside, but I still got up, stretched, and did the few exercises I could do in my hotel room.

By the time I got back home, I couldn’t not get up and do something. Despite the fact that the return to high altitude just screwed my lungs for the first week.

Because this is the thing. For all I talked about finding some sport/fitness activity/game/etc to do that you think is fun and awesome, almost nothing is fun and awesome 100% of the time. There are always, always going to be times when you just don’t feel like it, and you need to be able to make yourself do it anyway. Making the exercise routine really helps in that fight against your own inertia. If you get up at x time and do y every day, you’ve got one more weapon to fight your own excuses: “Yeah, I’m tired, but it’s 8AM and that’s when I run.”

Trying to get into a routine sucks, I’m not going to lie. If you’re me, about five days in you’ll be questioning your own sanity and wondering why you wanted to do this so badly anyway. After the first two weeks, it starts getting easier. But this is your brain trying to lull you into a false sense of security, to convince you that it’s okay, just take a day off and sleep late. Don’t trust it. Unless you are physically incapable of doing your routine, do it. After three weeks, you’ve built the foundation for severe psychological discomfort if you stop doing your routine. But don’t even give yourself a break then. The whole point is that you keep pushing yourself until every time you think, “Don’t wanna,” the thought is immediately followed by, “But that’s what I do. So… yeah.”

How exactly you want to build your routine is really up to you. I used to just do evenings. This getting up in the morning and exercising is a very new thing for me, and I don’t think I could have managed it without a healthy helping of jetlag to get me going. But this is what you do:
– Pick your exercise.
– Do it every day at approximately the same time. Even on weekends.
– Don’t stop.
– I mean it.
– I don’t care if the bed is warm and your cat is purring.

I will add a caution, though, to the every day plan. Particularly when you’re starting out, trying to go hell bent for leather every day is honestly not a good idea. It’s rough on your body. You will need to take a day off from your activity of choice every few days to let your muscles recover. That’s perfectly okay, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But taking a day off shouldn’t mean sleeping through your exercise time or using it to watch reruns of Castle. It’s still your exercise time, so do something with it. Take a walk. Play Dance Central. Or at least stretch while you’re watching your Castle reruns.

Because there will be times when you genuinely cannot exercise, for a multitude of reasons, and possibly even for an extended period of time. Etching this routine into your brain so that it can never be removed will help you pick things back up afterward.

I also understand that for a variety of reasons, you may not be able to do an every day at the same time routine. Maybe you have a weird work schedule, or classes screw with you, or whatever. Routine building still works when it’s not every day.

I had a routine before Germany as well. I went to kung fu on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday (and I ran on Thursday and Saturday). Even when I didn’t feel like it, I made myself go to kung fu because I knew I would broil alive in my own neurotic wibbling if I didn’t. Unfortunately, that particular routine got destroyed by a shoulder injury in November. I was struggling to keep going with exercise, and then Germany came along and that put me back on track.

I will say one thing, comparing the two routines. It’s easier to stick with one that is every day as opposed to just on set days of the week. But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way and you have to do what you can.

If your schedule is so random and awful that you can’t put together any kind of routine at all, you’ve got it the toughest out of anyone. That means that when you are fighting your own inertia to try to exercise, all you’ve got is ‘do it’ without the added push of habit. It can be done, though. I believe in you.

But if you’re in the latter situation – and please, don’t think I’m judging you because I have no idea what your life is like – before you tell yourself that you just can’t have a routine at all, take a good hard look at things. If you want to do this exercise thing, you need to carve the time out of your life to do it, because it’s important. You don’t exercise when you have time, you have to make time to exercise.

If you think about it that way, maybe you can carve out time to create a routine after all.

Exercise being fun helps you get through that first month of building the routine. After that first month, then it reminds you why that was a good idea.

Hi, I’m Rachael. I’m a fat nerd. I also run 3-4 miles a day and have done kung fu for eight years. I’m not writing this because I want to be some kind of fitness guru. Hell no, that would be ridiculous. I’m writing this because I’ve got a lot of friends that struggle with the [metaphorical] Fitness Demon and I’m hoping my experience might make things a little easier for them. I’m also writing this because it’s a lot of stuff I wish someone had told me, back when I was making attempt after unsuccessful attempt to get into this exercise thing. If it helps you out, great.

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fitness for fat nerds

Fitness for Fat Nerds: Enough With the Mental Bullshit

Stop me if this is a nightmare you still have: You’re wearing those tiny, humiliating shorts. You’re faced with the climbing rope, or sometimes it’s the chin up bar. Whatever task it is, you struggle to pull yourself up with arms that seem terribly flabby and inadequate, and you get nowhere. And then your classmates, a bunch of shithead kids in equally ridiculous shorts, laugh at you.

I don’t know what it is about physical education in school. If you’re a fat nerd (or a thin nerd, no need to exclude) the classes felt like they were tailor made to drive home the point that physical activity is the most miserable experience a human being can have inflicted upon them. And then there were the jocks. You know, the people who spent all their time being utterly mean to us, and then running effortlessly up and down the field, and you know what? Fuck those guys. They’re jerks. If that’s what it takes to be good at sports, you didn’t want to be one of them anyway.

When I was in junior high – this is a true story, just ask my mom – the first time they dragged us outside and made us run on the track, I was in the middle of a twenty teenager pile up and broke my leg. And I was relieved. Happy even. Because it meant that while everyone else had to run on the track – where I knew that I’d be puffing along at the back of the pack, if I could even keep running at all – instead, I got to sit on the bleachers and soak in all the sympathy you can earn for having a cast on your leg.

What the hell is wrong with this picture, that I’d feel happy I broke a bone?

This attitude follows us out of school, I’ve noticed. Just listen to how most people talk about physical fitness: I had a piece of cake, I need to punish myself on the elliptical trainer tomorrow. We’ve all heard things like that before. Exercise is presented as something you inflict upon yourself in retribution for enjoying good food, or playing too many video games, or just having the poor taste to be chunky. Maybe it’s just something that appeals to the weird, creepy inner puritan of the American psyche. Chocolate cake is something you like, so it’s a sin. Exercise is good for you, so that means it’s got to be unpleasant because it’s bad to enjoy things okay?

Because we all know, exercise isn’t supposed to be fun.

Yeah, screw that.

This is the problem, with treating exercise like a punishment: unless you’re a hard core masochist, you’re not going to want to be literally inflicting something horrible and unpleasant on yourself, day after day. It’s just not in human nature. There’s a lot of evolutionary programming in us that says unpleasant things are bad and that we should avoid them. Eventually, the urge to not suffer is probably going to win over your willpower. I think even more importantly, there’s the fact that life is short. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Why the hell do you want to spend a significant portion of your day doing something that you absolutely hate if you don’t have to do it to survive?

I struggled for a really long time trying to come up with an exercise regimen I could stick with, because I knew I was out of shape and I didn’t want to be. (Here, I mean out of shape as in “oh god don’t make me climb a flight of stairs” as opposed to “judgmental jerks call me fat.”) The problem was, after a while I’d find myself making excuses to not do it, because day after day, running on an elliptical trainer was slowly driving me insane. It wasn’t fun. If I had my choice between doing that and playing video games, the video games were eventually going to win because I’m only human.

And that’s okay.

This is the secret: exercise is supposed to be fun. The people who we all hated in school because they were stupidly, effortlessly fit? That was mostly because it was fun for them. When doing something is fun, that makes it really, really easy.

The first inkling I ever had that exercise could be fun was thanks to a game called Dance Dance Revolution. I could play that thing for hours at a time, until my muscles were just burning and screaming out for mercy, and I’d still be ready to keep going because it was fun. Working up a sweat and dancing until I thought my heart was going to explode was fun. Fitness was fun? It was fun!

I really believe that the first step you have to take is getting rid of that mental bullshit about exercise being punishment. Exercise shouldn’t be a thing you inflict upon yourself because you’re overweight or lack definition in your muscles or want to fit back into your old jeans. It needs to be a thing you do for yourself. It needs to be joyful and something that makes you feel alive.

And it can be anything that is joyful and makes you feel alive. I run and do kung fu. But I’m not the archetypal fat nerd. That’s a thing that doesn’t exist. My experience is not going to hold true for everyone, and I don’t expect you to like the same things that I like because I’m not a jerk.

So what to do? Do you like taking walks? Dancing? Water polo? Weightlifting? Do some exploring and see what you enjoy. Figuring that out is the first step, and we can always talk about that more later. The point is: whatever gets your heart going and helps you work up a sweat is a-okay as long as you like it, and anyone that tells you otherwise can go hang.

There aren’t many of these – I think that a lot about fitness is individual. But this, I’ll lay out there as a universal fat nerd truth: You need to have fun.

Because if you’re not having fun, why the hell are you doing it?

Hi, I’m Rachael. I’m a fat nerd. I also run 3-4 miles a day and have done kung fu for eight years. I’m not writing this because I want to be some kind of fitness guru. Hell no, that would be ridiculous. I’m writing this because I’ve got a lot of friends that struggle with the [metaphorical] Fitness Demon and I’m hoping my experience might make things a little easier for them. I’m also writing this because it’s a lot of stuff I wish someone had told me, back when I was making attempt after unsuccessful attempt to get into this exercise thing. If it helps you out, great.