Here's a new concept: the exercise splurge

Over the past several years of grappling with the arthritis, gout, and resulting chronic fatigue, I often discovered myself struggling to maintain a precarious balance between just enough exertion vs. overdoing it.

This is a juggling act all too well known to anybody coping with a chronic but variable health condition. Some days there's just no getting around the fact that you feel like warmed-over crap, and between feeling physically icky and feeling depressed over the ickiness, all you want to do is just crawl back into bed and hope it all goes away. But then come the days when you wake up feeling mysteriously, miraculously good--and you're so overjoyed that you want to rush out and do all the things you used to do and feared you would never be able to do again. To the point that, the day after, you're back in physical agony, and even more depressed than before.

So then you try to rest up and recuperate the best you can, and the next time you have a really good day you cautiously go out and do just one or two things you hadn't been able to do in a long time. And either that's still too much, and you're back in the agony bed again, or it goes okay, so you try a few more things, and then a few more beyond that ... and then you rediscover the agony. Wash rinse repeat, over and over and over and over again.

Well, now I'm finding the cycle a little more complicated, but a whole lot more encouraging. My physical condition is definitely improving as I eat more healthily, remove more weight, and take more pressure off my long-suffering joints. So the temptation is huge to get overly enthused about this real improvement, and totally overshoot into overdoing-it land. And because my condition keeps changing, it's much harder to figure out where that fine line between doing and overdoing has strayed to at any given moment. Mind you, this all falls into the class of Problems You Like To Have -- as in, I much prefer being confused over an ever-improving capacity for exercise, to being confused (and demoralized) over an ever-worsening capacity. But it's still a challenge, and still requires a certain amount of cautious attention.

Well, this past Friday night I decided to throw caution to the wind, and the day after I definitely paid for it. But this time, for a change, I've decided that overdoing was actually a good thing rather than a bad thing. You see, I went to hear a friend's band perform Saturday night, and I actually got up to dance. And not just for one song either, but for a good five or six numbers.

Now this is significant because, for me, dancing to rock music is a whole lot more than just mere exercise, or a mere social activity. I am a member of one of those generations for whom rock music is a deeply meaningful thing, and dancing at rock shows akin to a full-body psycho-spiritual experience. Time was when I could stay on the dance floor seemingly for hours, dancing myself into a trance, to the point of having a something akin to a shamanic experience on the dancefloor. Dancing was also my personal liberation from others' narrowminded opinion of my physical appearance--it taught me to love and respect my body just as it was, at a time when my bod sure wasn't earning me a helluva lotta love or respect from my peers or my family. In other words, to paraphrase Lou Reed, from my teens onward my life was almost literally saved by rock'n'roll.

So when my physical condition first got bad enough that I could no longer dance with such abandon, or even dance at all, it was a real blow to me, a loss I grieved so deeply I was at a loss for how to make peace with it.

But now I feel my ability to dance slowly but surely coming back, and it's filling me with such excitement and hope that sometimes I can barely contain myself. So on Friday night, when my friend's band took the stage and began to rock out, a little voice in my head spoke up and said: "Fuck this caution shit--we gonna shake a little tail feather tonight! Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!"

And the next morning--or rather, the next noontime--I came to and realized that, yep, that twang I felt in my left hip during my last dance of the previous evening had indeed morphed into a major owie. Oh yeah, and I had even succeeded in giving myself a wee bit of a hangover. But you know what? I wasn't depressed over any of this, even though I spent most of that day creeping around the apartment like a little old lady. Because--damn it, I'd had a wonderful time that night, and any discomfort I was feeling the day after was totally worth putting up with for the sake of having such a wonderful time.

Plus, because my general condition has been improving, I was actually 90% recovered after another 24 hours. Pre-health regimen, such overexertion might have put me out of action for the better part of a week.

And thus was born in my mind a new concept to add to my health regimen: that of the Pre-Planned Exercise Splurge. Like the Pre-Planned Dining Splurge, the Exercise Splurge is not to be indulged in too frequently, as the negative consequences will shortly start to outweigh its more positive features. But when judiciously scheduled, and accompanied by adjustments in the regular routine to compensate for their impact, both types of splurges provide a much-needed safety valve. There's only so long, after all, that one can maintain a tightly-controlled regimen before one has to do something with all those urges to be, well, unregimented, and it's much better to channel those urges into a short, well-planned "vacation" than to have them bust out in an unanticipated and potentially hazardous binge.

So--I'm very pleased with my first test-piloting of this new concept, not to mention my short recovery time, and I'm already looking forward to my next opportunity to shake it on the dance floor and commune with the Rock 'n' Roll Gods. This, after all, is part of what I'm really going through all this rigamaroll for--not to be perfect at negotiating the rigamarole, but to reclaim my physical liberation.

Comments

[Cam]

Yeah! I exercise-splurged yesterday; Josh and I have taken possession of 2500 pounds of great big river rocks. So I was happily rolling 100-pound rocks around the garden and building little one-rock-high retaining walls for my herb garden. Now I'm hobbling around half-zonked, but I don't much care, because yesterday was just that awesome: fresh air, sunshine, making something pretty.

Sometimes common sense has to take it in the neck. Besides, I never really know where my limits are until I exceed them. And the splurging always inspires me to eat well, take my pills on time, and drink plenty of water.

Speaking of being buff and active, I gotta share: I'm down two pants sizes from a year and a half ago. Total pounds lost: seven. I kid you not. It makes me want to preen and flex and say things like, "All muscle, bay-bee!"

And have you seen this news about obesity and microbes? Thought-provoking stuff.

[Cam]

Ah, crud. Let's try that again:
http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2006/05/obesity_and_your_microbes_ii.php

[mizducky]

Hi Cam--congrats on rocking out with the rocks (sorry, couldn't resist), and also on your general bod-buffing.

And no, I hadn't seen anything about those microbes at all! I confess I have never thought about the possible influence of gut flora on weight, but it certainly makes lots of sense. Putting this on my list of topics to pursue more deeply ...

[Kill]

I totally know what you mean about the dancing - both the spirituality of it and the disappointment that you felt when your body could no longer handle it. That has been one of my more devastating losses with my weight gain of the last few years. I'm currently at about 305; back when I was going to the clubs a lot, a couple of years ago, I was hovering in the 250-260 range. It still kinda hurt then, but I could overcome it by drinking a lot of water and, well, indulging in alcoholic drinks. Now, though, I can barely do one song.

I really think that reading your blog is helping me to put a lot of things in perspective. It's hard sometimes to sit back and enumerate the ways in which your life has been impaired -- until you see that someone else (especially someone so wonderful with words) has been through it.

[mizducky]

Sending you virtual hugs, Kill! You can get it back. Just be really gentle with yourself ...