In the last month I’ve returned to teaching spin and
returned to showing my face in the gym... I no longer pull the big weights out
and do a 1 and half hour set before the
class, I go to stretch out my back and neck so that it doesn’t give way or
twist during the class. If I’m 100% honest, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed
that I no longer live up to the expectation others and myself have on me… but
in everything there is a lesson to be learnt.
You see while I love to be fit, I hadn’t quite realised just how much my
identity had got stuck in it, I’ve had time
to think and question all of this and as I look back I can see that somewhere along
the line, I stopped being sporty and started becoming a slave. A slave to the ‘fitness industry’. By that, I
don’t’ mean I now hate gyms and all fitness – NOT AT ALL! I love being fit and
healthy and look forward to the day where I am back up to scratch again. But my challenge is – Is the fitness industry
really about fitness? When you’re not
eating meals just so you can lose weight, when you’re happy to be iron
deficient, vitamin deficient and malnourished just to stay at 60kgs, when you
can smoke just to keep your weight down or reject friends meal invitations for
fear of what unhealthy meals they’ll cook, you can be assured of one thing –
you are not longer trying to be healthy, you are trying to be skinny and at a
push trying to be loved. I know personal
trainers who recommend tablets for weight loss, friends who train 3 hours a day
just so they can go out at the weekend to fit into that dress, and people so obsessed
by magic formulas and weight loss shakes that they spend more on it each month
than their mortgage! I know people who on the outside we would kill to have
their figure, but on the inside those lives I wouldn’t trade with for one
single minute.
As I look in the mirror each day and struggle to accept my
new self, the one that’s curvier and the one that’s not as gym obsessed. I
challenge myself to look past the exterior and look into the heart. Through all of this, I have learnt to love
who I am more, not what I look like. In turn I have learnt to love others
more. If I have a cracking set of legs
but use them to walk past the homeless person on the street what benefit is
that? If I have strong arms but don’t
use them to embrace my family and friends then what’s the point? When what I
look like, takes over who I am and how I treat my neighbour, one thing’s for sure.
My life is out of balance and I am definitely not healthy.
Lesson: I am loved,
for who I am. The striving can stop, the
mission is already accomplished – I am already 100% of the person God wants me
to be right now.
Regardless of what the future holds; triathlons and trifle, spin
or sausage rolls, weight lifting of weight gaining, I know that I have the most
important part of my health in check – My heart.
“Man looks at the outward appearance but God looks at the
heart” 1 Samuel 16:7
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