I’ve been kind of lurking around this site for the past few weeks, trying to figure out if this is a good fit. I’m still not sure, but upon self-reflection, I think that there's no way to tell except to try.
Fair warning, this is all quite negative, my experience with online (and real life) fitness communities has been universally bad, and I'm jaded as all get out by now. I'm not even sure what I'd like to get out of this.
I was a skinny, active kid until my late teens, then I became a fat, active kid. I still have no idea what caused it, hormone changes, puberty’s last vicious joke, ill-omened alignment of the stars, some undetectable (because it tests normal) thyroid problem; but at age 17, with no significant changes to my diet or activity level, I suddenly ballooned over the course of about 4 months from somewhere around 130 pounds to over 200. My doctor, who had been my GP since I was 10, looked at me like I was something he'd stepped in and told me nothing was wrong, I just needed to be more active and eat less. I thanked him for his time, went to work to unload a feed truck, then spent the next 3 weeks refusing to eat anything but raw vegetables.
My weight proceeded to bounce all over the place with no rhyme or reason; from down to around 150#, up to about 250#. I struggled with it for a while, but pretty quickly realized that was pointless. My weight doesn’t correlate at all to my diet or activity level, it just cycles on some ineffable schedule, and I’m dragged along for the ride. If I make a concerted effort at diet and/or exercise while I’m gaining, I may gain a few pounds less than I would have otherwise, but I’ll still gain weight. If I sit on my couch and eat junk while I’m losing, I may not loose quite as much, but I’ll still go down a couple of pants sizes. Then, a few months later, without any action on my part, the trend will reverse. As you can imagine, that made involvement in any kind of fitness community....problematic. There's an expected trajectory to weight loss and random reversals don't fit that, so I spent a lot of time with well-meaning people trying to pinpoint what I had started doing "wrong" or "right" whenever my body decided to switch directions.
Given that reality, I eventually came to a point where I pretty much just ignored my weight. I haven’t stepped on a scale outside a doctor’s office in years, and don’t ever plan to. I judged my health as measured by my body’s function, not its appearance. I was working in physically demanding jobs and keeping up active hobbies without undue difficulty. I figured it didn’t matter what the BMI chart said, if my blood pressure and cholesterol were good, I could put in a full work day of hard physical labor, and then go run an agility course with my dog a few times that evening I couldn’t be too out of shape.
So fast forward a couple of years. I got very sick (not weight related, or not directly) recovered from it, and then moved to another state. A lot of things changed in the time surrounding that move, mostly for the better. I have health insurance and actual money for groceries now, I no longer live in an unsafe apartment, and I have a wonderful and supportive boyfriend. However, I also went from working a physically demanding historic site job to a series of desk jobs, I no longer had easy access to a horse, my dog passed away and the new pup didn’t have the temperament for agility, and the wonderful boyfriend has a Pavlovian aversion to vegetables in any form. My weight has continued its random fluctuations, which I expected, but what I didn’t anticipate is how rapidly and severely my fitness level would degrade.
In December, my uncle lost both of his horses in very quick succession. Looking back at pictures of them I realized how profoundly I missed riding, so I started looking for a horse so I could get back in the saddle (literally). I found a very nice lady who was just happy to find someone with time to ride to help her keep her horse in shape and offered me a sweetheart of a lease. As one of the terms of the lease, I agreed to feed the horses two evenings a week, which should seriously not have been a big deal.
Except, it is. Feeding is easy as far as horse related chores go. It’s just walking around with buckets and hay, scooping grain out of bins, opening and shutting gates. I don’t even have to move the hay bales or shift the feed sacks. My back should not have been screaming at me by the time I was done. I shouldn’t have been winded, and certainly shouldn’t have been dripping sweat in near freezing weather, but that was exactly how my first night of chores ended.
So I find myself in the “now what?” stage. I’m reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that my lifestyle, while it has changed for the better in a LOT of ways, is no longer going to keep me in functional shape without specific effort. I just have very little idea of what form that effort should take. Riding is great, and it can be amazing exercise. But given the horse’s age (he’s in great condition for 19, but still, he’s 19) and my fitness level, we’re gonna be mostly ambling so that benefit falls more on the mental than physical health side of things.
And other than riding, I really don’t know. I know I'm going to have to find some way to exercise just for the sake of exercising. I don't mind physical work or play; I really enjoy exerting myself to accomplish something. But walking in circles (or worse, in place), lifting heavy stuff just to put it back down where it was, and worst of all, doing all of that around people, that bores me just thinking about it. The quickest way for a game to lose my interest is if I have to put time into level grinding instead of advancing the story, and the thought of doing that in real life is a very bleak one.
