Renovating Kaeti

I recently started taking yoga at a studio in my neighborhood. During a class the other day, my teacher warned us about staking happiness on specific accomplishments. During one particularly difficult pose, he looked around at all of our constipated faces, and said, “You know, you can try your whole life to try to touch your foreheads to your toes … or, you could relax, smile and be happy where you are right now.”

There was a sort of communal sigh of relief (and you could hear it, what with our Ujjayi breath and all). It was such a liberating concept, especially as my heels have yet to touch the ground in downward dog, and my forward bends look more like bows compared with the limber types around me.

My teacher went on, saying that many times when we base our happiness and worth on reaching a certain goal (or pose or weight, for that matter), we achieve the goal only to realize that it doesn’t make us happy and we’re exactly where we started — dissatisfied, feeling “never good enough” and usually pretty crabby.

This isn’t to say that having goals or celebrating achievements isn’t important. It is. But I find that to truly revel in reaching my goals, I need to be coming from a place of acceptance and completeness — before I reach them. If I can’t love who I am at this weight, weighing 20 pounds less isn’t going to change that. In fact, when I start basing my progress on the numbers, it’s a struggle not to get addicted to them. Instead of focusing on feeling right in my body and being healthy, I just want that number on the scale to creep down (OK, if I’m being honest, plummet down). And when it does, I’m like a junkie: never satisfied, always looking for my next fix.

Getting trapped in this cycle exhausts me, and leaves me feeling terrible about myself. That’s exactly why, when I began to lose weight as a natural byproduct of the changes I was making (you can read about them here), I decided not to weigh myself regularly. I chose not to count calories. For some people, these measures may be important or useful, but for me they were a trap. When I started playing the numbers game — measuring every crumb I ate and viciously observing every tenth of a pound I lost — I didn’t have the energy or time to eat consciously or actually enjoy my workouts.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the “skinny is best” fervor that dominates so much of the health and fitness world. Thankfully, mainstream culture is finally starting to wrap its mind around the idea that fit does not equal thin. In fact, recent research suggests that overweight, physically active people age slower and reap more health benefits than their slimmer, couch-potato friends. So maybe by revising goals and expectations to focus on health measures rather than arbitrary numbers like weight and calories, we can find a much more sustainable and satisfying way to move forward.

This could mean anything from lowering your resting heart rate, to eating fresh, whole foods — rather than aiming for an idealistic pre-college weight or eating flavorless, low-calorie foods (Kristin Ohlson wrote a great article on why this doesn’t work, anyway). Measures like body-fat to lean-tissue ratios, VO2 max, heart rate and strength are all beneficial ways to gauge progress, but even these can become a distraction and end up sabotaging your momentum if you get too wrapped up in the numbers.

For me, a big part of this ongoing venture into health and fitness has required that I let go of my unrealistic expectations (seriously, who are these girls that run the treadmill at a six-minute mile pace??). Maybe, instead, I can take a deep breath and smile, look at how far I’ve come, and embrace who I am right now. And when I feel at ease in my life, I can find the energy I need to keep moving forward.

What do you think? Do the numbers help or hinder you? Have you ever been tempted to aim for unrealistic ideals?