I’ve come a fair distance in recovering my physical health and fitness over the last sixteen years. Down from a scale weight of 396 pounds to 190, give or take a five pound swing. My resting heart rate ha gone from 125 beats per minute to 52. My blood pressure has gone from through the roof to text book perfect. I’ve gone from huffing wind after waddling to the refrigerator and back to enjoying fast pace jaunts of a mile without breaking a sweat. Life has gotten better. And, all that has taken a lot of hard work.
My mother, bless her, is not in the best of health. She is grappling with obesity, very bad knees, and suffered a massive heart attack about two years back. She needs a walker if she is going to go very far, and stairs are a big challenge. She spends a lot of time sitting and watching television. She is living an unhealthy lifestyle and knows it. There’s the rub.
My mother is a very smart woman, with a degree in nursing and a long career of psych nursing behind her. She put in twenty years at the Veterans Administration hospital, and was a rock star of a group therapist. She is no dummy. She knows better than to leave her body in its current condition, and she knows that she knows it. Still, she is not taking action and she laments that.
I was visiting with her the other day and we were discussing these very issues. The problem comes down to feeling too uncomfortable in her body to do anything about it.
That’s the break point.
The Chinese have a saying in the Kung Fu circles, “You have to be ready to eat bitter.” That phrase helped me a great deal in the early years of my martial arts training as a morbidly obese man. It still helps.
If you are living in a discomforting physical level of health, the only way out is with more discomfort. Exercise is not easy. It is work. The pay off is a more comfortable existence, but the road there is not.
The American phrase for this is, “No Pain, no Gain.” That doesn’t quite work for me as well as the Chinese saying above. “No Pain, no Gain”, as I have often heard it used, seems to imply that you must suffer. Suffering comes from thinking that things should be other than they are. The Chinese sentiment is more like taking medicine. It may be unpleasant, but it’s good for you.
It takes time to live a life of only lazy comfort to get your body to the point where life itself is discomforting. It will take time, and discomfort to get out. Learn to value discomfort and live a life free from suffering.
