Gym Shame and The Basic

I came to a terrible realization about a month ago.  I was getting fat.  Not obese, mind you, but certainly overweight.  Part of it had to do with the fact that I love food.  Not just eating…food in general.  I love cooking, reading about, learning about, and listening to radio programs about food.  Since there is a saying, “never trust a skinny chef,” let’s just say that I was beginning to look mighty trustworthy.  (**note..the picture to the right was taken after 6 weeks on the plan mentioned below)The other contributing factor was that I live a pretty sedentary live.  Almost everything I do, be it for OBC or for Nashville music stuff, involves me sitting in front of a screen.  So besides my pale complexion, my mid-section and hind-quarters were expanding.  About a month ago, I stepped on a scale and realized that I was the heaviest I had ever been.  Something had to change and change fast.  So I joined the newly built rec center behind our house and began looking for diet and workout plans that I could follow.  I decided on the Men’s Health “Belly Off” program. It’s a “body weight only” workout regimen, combined with a daily eating plan.  The first day I tried the workout, I just about threw up.  It was REALLY hard.  The irony is that it’s made up of exercises that look like they would be easy: push-ups, pull-ups, forward lunges, etc...  It’s nothing flashy but it’s shockingly hard.  This, of course, led to an additional problem.  Gym Shame.

 

 Gym Shame is what I call the emotion you feel when you go to a fitness club and feel like a loser because the amount of weight you’re lifting is less than the person next to you.  I, of course, felt this in a magnified way since I was lifting no weights at all.  It’s one thing to grunt and sweat as you heft impressive looking dumbbells.  It’s quite another to grunt and sweat as you do squats holding an invisible bar.  There are two things that keep me going.  1: The fact that I’ve been seeing results.  I am, in fact, losing weight and gaining strength.  And 2: The Article.  The Article was something I read as I was searching for workout plans.  It said that the strongest, most “ripped”, athletes got that way by mastering the basics first.  They had perfected doing push-ups and lunges before they moved on to other things.  Why?  Because those exercises are still considered some of the best ways to strengthen your entire body and loose weight when combined with a well balanced diet and portion control.  So when my Gym Shame rears it’s head, I remind myself that I’m learning to master the basics and that my belt has had to come in a notch already.

 

I don’t know about you, but even as I was still in the gym, I could see the spiritual analogy.  We need to master the basics and we haven’t yet.  That “we” is a collective “we” meaning both you and me.  I’m not talking about fasting, prayer and memorizing The Bible (even though those are great things).  I’m talking about something even more basic than any of that: Believing God.  On a very bare-bones level, everything starts here. It’s THE Basic. How can we even trust God for salvation unless we’ve first believed Him when He tells us that we need to be saved in the first place.  Believing God means that we trust that what He says is right.  Regardless.  Even if everyone around us are flexing their churchy muscles, even if our lives aren’t as flashy as we think they ought to be and our Christian “gym shame” starts whispering doubts in our ears.  Remember this:  From Genesis to Revelation, all of the heroes of faith believed God first.  They were good at trusting that what God said was what was best and not what the culture, their friends, or even what the religious establishment told them.  And thousands of years later, we are still talking about them.  They mastered The Basic and the world was never the same.