Because I just my have (erroneously) thought you were lazy.

Like you, I believe in my way of life. Well, most of it… There of course things that I know I could and should improve, but, if we live a certain way and do some things rather than others it is because we obviously perceive more value in one mode of being over another. Thus, I’m guilty of the thing that we all do – judge others for being different. For example, when I see someone who has completely given up on self-care, I shake my head. We inhabit our bodies all our lives, they are the home of our minds and the abode of our souls. Perhaps wrongly, I imagine that one must be healthy for the other to thrive. To me, it is unfathomable that one would neglect basic care and maintenance.

However, our life and our self is the result of our habits. Good habits that come early can be good for us all our lives. In 1984 I watched the summer Olympics and found it inspiring: The performances and the excellence of the athletes captivated my attention. I was a young adolescent, just beginning to be body-conscious, and the physiques of the athletes impressed me too. So, it wasn’t long after that that I began jogging, that I took pride in going on longer and harder cross-country ski runs, and eventually, lifting weights.

After decades of dedication to fitness, it is anything but a chore. A day without exertion of any sort feels weird; by four or five in the afternoon on a day without exercise I usually feel antsy about not moving enough and grab my bike or running shoes and head out. The need is physiologic, and psychologic. Fitness is not just what I do, it’s also part of who I am. This is of course, the key to enduring habit formation, making the action part of your identity.

And I must admit that I’m also lucky. Fortunate to be born as the type that gym rats call a hard gainer, it might be frustrating to struggle to put on a pound of muscle, but it is equally hard to put on a pound of fat. The former bugged me years ago, the former serves me well now.

So when I see the person who has obviously decided that fit is not what they are, I have a tendency towards pity. While I may have some sympathy for the fact that they are ‘easy gainers’ (some have a natural tendency to favour a metabolic pathway called mTOR that predisposes us towards cell growth and proliferation, and some of us also have finer tuned energy receptors in our brains that adjust our activity levels to caloric inputs), my pity stops there. I still found it regrettable that they don’t integrate fitness into their lives despite the genetic challenge.

After a recent injury, and a vacation, I stopped exercising for a bout. I was active, just not dedicating any time to generate an adaptive response to physical stress. I just started again. And it hurts. If it takes weeks and months to build aerobic capacity and synthesize protein for strength, it evaporates remarkably fast. Add jet lag, a sleep deficit, and a recent cold to that and I am not at my best. I feel weak, I feel tired and slow. I punctuate my run with walks to catch my breath. I feel lazy when I do. And, in consequence, I don’t want to do it as much as I used to. Sometimes not at all. I find myself doing something I almost never did before, negotiating with myself – I can skip today because I went hard yesterday (not really, but part of my brain wants to fool the other part). And I realize what people who haven’t developed this habit and identity must feel like when they start. I feel what you (if you’re in the non-exercising group) must feel like, and I sympathize with those who struggle with fitness like I never did before. I feel guilty about my pity.

How hard it must be when you can’t see that it gets easier. I can see land beyond the horizon because I’ve been there before. But for one who has never seen it, how can they feel anything other than ‘this will always feel horrible,’ that it is pain all the way down. Columbus and Cabot and Cartier and the early discoverers of the New World didn’t do so because suddenly ships were able to go the distance. They set out convinced that the world was round, they knew they’d hit land (Asia). Until them everyone thought there was nothing there or certain peril, so they stayed closer to home. The question of distance is ever more pertinent with respect to fitness as studies show that people with a higher body-mass index actually judge a distance to be run as longer.

I know what’s on the other side of the suffering. But, if I didn’t already know what it feels like to run effortlessly, if I didn’t already know what better feels like to bang out a few dozen push-ups, would I really have the faith to push through? And I know I can get there. Bit, iIf I had 50 pounds to shed, would I believe it was possible?

As my jog became a walk I realized what people who are trying to develop the habit must feel and I realize I was unduly hard on them. This really makes me think about feeling sorry – for ourselves and for others.

In what other area do I have a self-imposed limitation – do I estimate that the destination is farther than it really is? What is it that I’d like to be and do, but haven’t integrated into my identity yet or lack faith? What does the climb back into better fitness teach me about what I need to do in that other arena to be a better version of me?

And there is also the fact that we all need to feel good about something about ourselves. It may be that, since I’m not quite hitting it out of the park on other status games, I like to focus on this one as a sort of compensation… I know I am prone to do this through the way I react when I encounter someone truly athletic and in great shape (the kind that makes me look like the skinny middle-aged desk-bound guy that I am). On a good day I grant them the respect they deserve for putting in the effort I haven’t, but if I’m down on myself in any way, they might be some shallow muscle-bound freak that should spend less time admiring themselves in the gym mirror and exercise their mind and build character too. And where are you judging others so you can win some sort of status game? They might be this or that, but they’re not (like I am)…

K. Wilkins

author of:

Stoic Virtues Journal: Your Guide to Becoming the Person You Aspire to Be

Rules for Living Journal: Life Advice Based On the Words and Wisdom of Jordan B. Peterson