Welcome to Wellness Wednesdays! Today’s focus is exercise. Allow me to remind everyone that I am not giving medical advice, but just sharing my journey that has allowed me to move toward better health.
For most of my life, I’ve tried to incorporate some type of exercise. As a teenager, I ran track for a couple of years. I tried out for field hockey and made the initial cut to do conditioning but that level of running left me exhausted. Looking back, this should have been a stop sign to find out why I was so exhausted. In college, I worked out fairly consistently my freshman year and lost about 25 pounds. But when my course load increased sophomore year, physical activity decreased. After graduating, I worked at an hmo and went to the gym there several times a week but it seemed that I toned more than lost weight. And the saga goes on and on. Frustrating, yes?
Around 2011, I started having issues with my hip and so I chose yoga and stretching to help ease the concerns. And it worked! Another clue but I still hadn’t taken the time to put all of it together. I walked a good deal and did other higher impact aerobics but was just maintaining weight. Then I started following doctors and nutritionists who focused on PCOS. That was a game changer.
Basically, I had been doing a lot of the wrong type of exercises for me. While exercise is wonderful, the body believes there is stress and increases cortisol- your fight or flight hormone. Well with pcos, that hormone is hard to get back down and that increases the storage of fat and inflammation, especially in the gut. So I’ve changed to longer, slower walks and always stretch at the end. I try to do a yoga or Pilates based workout twice a week. Weight training probably once per week. I limit hiit workouts to maybe twice per month. Sometimes I cycle or do the elliptical at the gym, when available. And that’s it! After years and years and years of thinking that the harder I went, the more I would lose 🤯 I don’t have to do that. How amazing to have that revelation! And I have still lost 97 pounds in the process! 🤩
So I encourage you to find the workout that is best for you. Comments, questions? Drop them below and share what works for you. See you next week!
Fantastically 40-ish 