Exercise Envy

There is a lot that people envy: wealth, good looks, jobs, and usually stuff. I have noticed that the envy that I suffer from is exercise envy.

I know someone of you are thinking, Huh? What? How? Why?

My definition is when you envy someone's athletic ability, exercise activities, or an event that they are competing in.

First, I don't have the amount of time that I'd like to have to run, bike, swim, cross fit, weight lift, etc. This is either do to work, family, exhaustion, and church. Facebook really is part of the problem, I see friends who have the time and energy to do running, swimming, aerobic training, etc. all in one day or just more miles running than me. They post their activity, they show pictures, they are maniacs of fitness, and I love them so I'm jealous.

Second, when I go off to run or workout I say I'm going to do more than I have been doing but instead I get tired or discouraged and don't do it. Then sort of shrug and say, "Well, I tried", but obviously not hard enough.

In part I feel like I don't have the ability I did when I ran a marathon or did my first triathlon, but I know what I need to do. Pick an event, pick a plan, and start making time for it. Envy is a bad thing, we should be content and thankful, but if it helps you focus and do better maybe it's the kick in the butt you need. (Sounds like I'm talking to myself again, could be worse I could be carrying on a whole conversation with myself. What that's what I'm doing right now... d'oh)

Good for your brain too!

A Great Article in the New York Times discusses how exercise also helps your brain. Here is the part that I found most enlightening, "After the single session on the treadmill, the animals were allowed to rest and feed, and then their brain glycogen levels were studied. The food, it appeared, had gone directly to their heads; their brain levels of glycogen not only had been restored to what they had been before the workout, but had soared past that point, increasing by as much as a 60 percent in the frontal cortex and hippocampus and slightly less in other parts of the brain. The astrocytes had “overcompensated,” resulting in a kind of brain carbo-loading."

You can read the whole article here: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/how-exercise-fuels-the-brain/?src=me&ref=general