What happens when you don't work out

Tuesday 8/25/26

I read an article about what happens if you stop working out. It was sobering. What's troubling is how fast a person can undo what they've spent so long building up.

The article discussed how one's mental state worsens, anxiety deepens, stress increases and doesn't dissipate, and self-image falters, as well as the physical side of the equation.

Your body composition changes two weeks after you stop working out. Obviously this means more depending on where you're starting from--that is, the point you got to--but isn't that a bucket of cold water? Two weeks. Think how brief two weeks is.

"Working out" is one of those terms that can be fraught with enormity for some people. Working out isn't just training for the marathon. There are all sizes to working out and everyone has their own size. The ten-mile run that is perfectly appropriate for one person isn't more appropriate generally speaking than lifting some light weights or a half hour's walk can be for someone else.

A workout is a workout. You need to do what's good for you. That's what defines a workout, not the volume or intensity of the thing. My eighty-four-year-old uncle goes to the gym three days a week. I don't know what he does there, but I know that I work out by running stairs in an obelisk and he works out by doing what he does at the gym in the retirement community in which he lives and we both work out is what I'd say. "Gerard works out" and "Colin works out" are each accurate statements.

Different people have different ends in mind, certainly, but what they all have in common with their workouts is a desire to be healthy--a desire they're acting on in this area. There are of course other areas. If you wish to be emotionally healthy, you try and deal in truth. If you want to be in healthy relationships, you try and communicate well. And so forth.

What I'd say is that trying to be physically healthy is easier for people to act on. Facing the truth--especially the truth about one's self--is harder than breaking a sweat and getting that heart rate up a little. You could say it's practically an uncountable amount of Monument stairs.

My mother takes almost no exercise. I speak to her about this often but she doesn't do as I advise. She turns eighty in November and is healthy now, but I tell her that she needs to prepare for the future because she doesn't want to be unable to get around on her own.

I'm not expecting her to do anything arduous but she should be walking. You are preparing for later. All exercise, regardless of your age, is a form of taking care of ourselves today so that we are also preparing for later. The athlete works out for the future contests. The frustration over last night's loss is also pared away, acted on, rather than left to simmer and spread. The elderly person incorporates exercise into their lives so that they aren't sat in one spot later on unable to go where they wish or live independently.

When we work out, we are in effect saying, "I matter to me, and I'm taking control over this thing I can control." This isn't narcissism. Ideally, we want to be as effective as we can be, both for ourselves and more importantly--this is how I look at it--others. I don't create my art for myself. I create it for the world. That's the goal.

That I have been denied in getting to the world, in large part because of what I am and the discrimination I face as a result, doesn't change the fundamental motivation. The purpose of it all. I don't write the likes of "What the Mouse Knew" for me. It's for others. If I hadn't taken steps to ensure my physical health (and other health aspects) by working out, I wouldn't have been able to create a work of art I know is better than anything else anyone has ever made. I likely wouldn't even have been alive to create it.

My mom has a lake in town that she can drive to and walk along the beach. It's picturesque. She doesn't do this, though. She could walk out the front door and take a couple turns around the block or the neighborhood, but she doesn't do this either.

Kara came by the other day with the girls and made her join them in one of these walks (which doesn't mean she had to badger her; she'll go and she's capable, but she won't get herself to go, and that's a big part of the trick of it, in the workout sense and in other ways in life; you have to make sure to get yourself to go), saying she had to get out, but it needs to be every day.

During the winter she says it's too cold. Okay. It is cold. And there's a lot of ice. So, come the thaw of spring, I revisit the subject, but she doesn't budge, in more ways than one. I've also tried to get her to go back to the gym, which she stopped doing during COVID. She says that people will be looking at her.

My mom looks fine for one thing, and the gym doesn't work like that for another. People of all ages are to be found in gyms, especially where she lives. It's an area that definitely skews older. I walk past a gym here in Boston's North End and the demographic skews younger. Different necks of the wood. That's neither here nor there, though.

I understand that she's self-conscious for whatever reason, and that you don't need a based-in-reality reason to feel self-conscious about whatever it is you feel self-conscious about, but I think the issue in this case could be overcome by the act of going and seeing all sorts of people at the gym and people being friendly and no one pulling up a chair to watch her on the treadmill and dissect her form and rate.

I know how much it would bother her to lose any of her independence so I continue to raise the issue, but I think I need to increase my efforts or try and get the message across a different way. I send her health-related articles. Not to scare her, but to make her aware. Older people are of course prey to falling. Those falls can be incredibly dangerous. My mom's mother fell one day in her kitchen and that was the start of the end. Many people could share a similar story about a loved one. I just want her to be well.

You might think that with what I do--all the things I do--that some of that would rub off on people and they'd be inspired. You know, the whole keeping going and continue to create thing while having nothing to live for with no hope of ever having anything to live for, the ceaseless hard work, the making over of myself in so many ways, the non-drinking with no support, the writing of thousands of words every day of my life, the change I try to make in this world, and the going up and down of thousands of stairs every day, but I've never known anyone to say, "He does such and such, so I can do blah blah blah."

Maybe there are people out there, but I don't know it. They've never written and told me. No one I've known personally has done anything on account of feeling roused or inspired by my example. People say things on occasion. Lip service things. "Why, I wish I had a Bunker Hill Monument right outside because I'd run stairs in it every day." That one makes me laugh. Depressing laughter.

The truth is, if you were someone who could do that type of thing, on account of what's inside of you--I don't mean physically now--you wouldn't need the Monument. The Monument isn't the issue. You can find a Monument, if you follow me, wherever you are. The Monument is more of a symbol. It's a place. A piece of historically-mantled gym machinery, if you want. But it's not the fire within. The fire within finds its own Monument. Whether that's out on the flat of the prairie or in the deepest valley of despair.

I've never even known anyone to try and do the right thing when the right thing is hard because of the example of my courage and commitment. No influence whatsoever. I doubt if people are capable of being inspired at all in this world in whatever capacity.

Sure, they'll take things from other people. Copy what they do and call it being influenced by some musician or writer if they fancy themselves a musician or writer. But inspired to do their own thing? To reach into themselves and find and do more? I think it's highly unlikely that exists as something anyone might do anymore in this world.

The cost of that loss is immeasurable. It's part of the reason why we're where we're at and also why there are so few inspirational people anyway.