No Sweat

On most days, I can be found at my local YMCA sweating and straining and grunting in the most embarrassing of ways. I do it on purpose, by the way, despite the fact that it really sounds kind of masochistic when I put it this way.

Unlike most people, I didn’t join my gym to lose weight. For me, getting in shape was secondary; I joined my gym to fight the crazies.

That’s right, you heard (read) me correctly. My therapist, juggernaut of insight that she is, suggested that I start working out to ease tension and release stress. And she was right, I mean, I’m not one for self-diagnosis, but I believe I was suffering from a bout of the hohums and an acute case of Shleprockitis. Don't even ask about the woe-is-mees.

But I have drifted off topic just to explain that I was in the gym for an hour six days a week and that I wasn’t there to lose weight. My apologies. So much for exercise increasing your ability to focus.

You know me, I'm one for analysis and it doesn't stop when I'm working out. I watched the crowd over my first months of membership and decided that it could be be split into two basic categories. No, not the sexy and the sloppy. It’s a YMCA, not a Bally’s for crying out loud. No, the two categories I registered were those who drip and those who stayed dry.

The drippers were splotchy and wet and a little gross if you must know. They were the ones who left the gym in desperate need of a shower -- STAT.

The dry crowd might have worked into a glow. They looked aware and ever so slightly rejuvenated, like the people in a coffee shop, or folks with recent Botox injections. These are the folks who'd leave the gym, still clad in their lycra and spandex, and continue comfortably on to a series of errands when their workout was done.

Until about a month and a half ago, I was proud to be in the dry crowd. After all, sweating is gross and I was a delicate flower.

Unfortunately, I was a delicate flower with a fat ass.

Of course, anyone who’s ever spent time in a gym knows that you can only go so long before stories of amazing weight loss come rolling in. There were people who’d done what I was doing and the results were 20, 25, 30 – even 35 missing lbs.

Me? Not so much.

I worked out six days a week for six months and didn’t so much as lose a pound. In fact, a gained a few – damn that “muscle weighs more than fat” clause.

Well, call me a genius, but after six months I started wondering how I could maybe get in on the weight loss action. I studied my peers to see what they did that I didn’t do. There may have been eating differences, but I couldn’t prove this. The one glaringly obvious difference was that they were all drippers and I wasn’t.

So I kicked it up a notch and found that I (delicate flower that I am) am, in fact, capable of sweat.

Oh, I can get downright beastly if you let me. I actually did tricep push-ups the other day and sweat so hard that I couldn’t see. I don’t soak the floor like my new role models, but I have a dream. . .

Baby steps.

I’ve also stopped eating like the calorie rules don’t apply to me (it turns out they do). That helped. So far I’ve lost 9 pounds in the last 4 weeks, ten if you catch me in the morning.

Tuesday morning a gym buddy and I were briefly discussing this idea. The idea of sweat, I mean. She was soaking wet and we were kind of celebrating. It’s gross, I know.

Our conversation got me to thinking about the importance of sweat and the effort that it both requires and reveals. I considered the journey I’d made from one who never sweats to one who can drip with the best of them.

Thinking about the journey naturally led me to consider my starting point and I realized that it’s been a long time since I’ve felt stressed out the way I did back in February. I thought of the many things that had originally stressed me out then (landing me on my therapist’s couch) and I realized that many of these things still bother me, but they don’t overwhelm me.

I work not to let them. I pray for strength. I reframe issues to gain proper perspective. I delight in the long-term benefits of short term sacrifice and a willingness to be uncomfortable.

In many ways, I treat the challenges in my life the same way I treat challenges in the gym.

I won’t lie to you and tell you that it’s easy. It isn’t. I work my booty off (literally) every single day, but that’s okay because I feel good. And the stresses and strains? Well, that’s no sweat.