Working On My Fitness

Image Courtesy of popkey.co

How do you define "Fitness"? The dictionary defines "Fitness" as "the condition of being physically fit and healthy" or "the quality of being suitable to fulfill a particular role or task." That's a little more in depth than how many burpees you can do (my answer: 0). There was a time (a little over a year ago) when I was feeling very fit. How was I measuring that? Well, there are always the old standards... weight/clothing size but, it was more in depth  than that as well; my ability to sprint up stairs without getting winded or slay a challenging spin class were some of the criteria. Even though, my routine, recently, has involved less of the things that make me feel fit, partly because I had to take a break from ALL the spin classes for a hot second for medical reasons (lame but, it's ok I'm fine) and partly because my day to day started looking a little different I would still define "Fitness" for myself the same way. That being said, after weeks months of not going to the gym regularly, a YOLO summer diet, my birthday, having a commute that involves minimal walking, etc. that's not the only thing that had started to look different... just picture the below image in reverse although I would say I'm somewhere in the middle #realtalk.

While I think the only solution for that situation is just to get back to incorporating regular exercise and a non "ice-cream everyday" diet into my normal routine, I now find myself contemplating my own self image on the regular. While this habit is a normal consequence of going through any physical change the way you see yourself if not, necessarily, the same thing as being "Fit." When I first started to lose weight/inches as a result of going to the gym in an attempt to be a healthier, happier me there were positive side effects (less of me) and some less happy side effects (fewer clothing options.) While I really struggled with reconciling the number on the scale and the size on the clothing tag with how I viewed myself it helped to hone in on how I was feeling in terms of "Fitness" which, in one word, was healthier. Now that I am feeling less "Fit" I find myself craving that healthy feeling again so I don't fall back into old and (frankly) common habits of getting caught up in measuring myself by numbers (weight/clothing size) or comparing myself to other people/my former self from a few months ago. Life happens and that is why it's important to keep  "Fitness," as it is laid out by the dictionary as "the condition of being physically fit and healthy" (or your own twist on it) in mind instead of getting bogged down by details that are not directly in line with the aforementioned definition. How do you define/measure fitness?