Shape Those Muscles!
Okay, boys and girls, give me your attention. Quiet down. Eyes on me.
Very well. Today we are going to participate in a writing exercise. Get out your writing journals. And a pen. Okay, now, using your own thoughts, write what comes to mind after you hear this prompt:
Exercise in any form su_ _s.
I’ll give you a few minutes.
Okay, pens down.
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de·ter·mi·na·tion
-noun
the quality of being resolute; firmness of purpose.
For those of you who don’t know, I had back surgery at the end of June. I’d been battling a back injury for about a year and at by the time I’d decided to do the surgery, I’d gotten pretty dough-like; all puffy like I’d been kneaded and left out to rise. The pain had really grown debilitating. I wasn’t even able to walk more than a house length away before I’d start to hitch up into a fetal position.
It was the second time I’d had that same surgery on that same kind of injury. I’d taken my recovery seriously the first time but what I hadn’t done was stuck with it long term to avoid the re-injury. So this time, I decided it would be selfish of me to slack off. But the discipline is hard.
I’ve walked an average of 50 miles over the past six months. I do 20 minutes of sweat inducing core exercises four times a week. I’ve increased my average speed while walking and increased the amount of exercises I do in the 20 minute work out. I’ve toned muscles and reshaped my body but I haven’t lost any weight this entire time. For months I’ve weighed the exact same thing - to the ounce! I’ve weighed myself in the morning and in the evening. Being a woman, I’ve expected fluctuation due to a natural physical cycle. But nothing. To the flippin’ ounce. Weird.
But today I stepped on the scale and for the first time in a long, long time, my weight changed.
I gained two pounds.
However, I simply stepped off the scale and laughed. I know that what I’m doing is good and right even if it isn’t producing the ideal results.
And then I saw the correlation to my writing. I write. I read. I study. I rewrite. I share. I research. I exercise. And yet I’m experiencing the struggle of my writing life with a story line in my WIP. I’ve never had this difficult of a time before. It is similar to having worked out constantly and diligently only to gain two pounds.
However, I know that the law of physicality says that if you build enough muscle, eventually the muscle stokes your metabolism and helps you to achieve your goals. So I will keep walking and doing the god-awful planks and I’ll keep lifting word weights, cutting and rearranging and eventually it will all start working for me and not against me.