Quote:
Originally Posted by traveling michele
But, back to my story... I took a morning class and there was a new woman in class (several newbies actually)-- I noticed her as being very underweight and I wondered what her story was. After class she stopped me and we had a long conversation. She told me she's pretty much addicted to cardio-- doing cardio and running at least 1.5 hours a day. She said her body hurts and she feels like she's doing damage to it. She told me my body/figure was amazing and I was a "freak of nature" at yoga. It was humbling to hear that from a stranger. I tried to assure her that yoga is an all around great workout (cardio, strength training, etc) and I think/hope she's going to back off the gym and give it a try. I also talked to my yoga friend Sunday night-- we went to see Cee Lo Greene and Lionel Richie in concert!! She is quite thin and I know she does bikram most days plus runs. She also told me that she has body/food/exercise issues and we talked a lot about it. I guess I need to remind myself that no matter what someone looks like (thin, heavy, etc), I really don't know them internally and I should never ever think I do.
I can relate to this woman, as it's been a struggle with me to cut back on cardio from a non-negotiable hour daily to as little as 15 minutes on lifting days. Now my addiction is to exercise in general. I don't seem to acknowledge walking all day as "counting," either.
Watch that woman, Michele, as it's possible to become addicted to Bikram yoga, and for me, anyway, I just seem to replace one addiction or compulsion with another. Once, it was food -- now it's getting in exercise.
Yesterday I had a revelation and I'm going to try it: I'm going to give myself permission to be average, ordinary, to fail and fall short. My goal is to remove the "better than" from the "feeling less than so must be better than to be equal to."