My Exercise Life

I have to admit that I am hardly an exercise person. For most of my life, I really did very little exercising. Oh sure, on some occasions I went to a gym and on others I did some swimming. However, I was not very active.  I rarely went outside for long walks or to do a lot of swimming. Although I did have a pool in my house that I used, it was more for wading around in the water rather than swimming.

I was pretty close to 200 pounds when I had my tragic situation just over 2 years ago. In looking at my photographs around that time over the past little while, I was surprised to see how much I weighed and how it was distributed. Believe it or not, by the time I got out of hospital and started recovering from my terrible illness, I had already lost 40 to 50 pounds since I was not eating very much due to the medication I was taking which caused me to feel nauseated and lose my desire to eat.  Now that was something unbelievable. It was a huge jump-start for me and for my future, although obviously I wish I didn't have to go through such drastic measures.

Accordingly, there are goals that I have to reach given what has happened to me physically. I have to admit, dear reader, that one of my requirements these days is to keep my weight down so that I get better from the illness from which I am still recovering. Like it or not for me, there are some physical issues for which I will never recover and I have to figure out ways to get around them.  It does take a lot of physical exercising for me to do that.

One of the things that I must tell you is that I have put on weight since I have returned home notwithstanding how much exercising I do now. That seemed so horrible to me. Right now, my weight increase is about 12 pounds higher than it was when I returned home from the hospital. I must say that I was quite shocked and upset about that until I was told that my weight increase really was due to all of the exercising I was doing and the muscles that I was creating.  It did not mean that I was getting "fatter" but that I was gaining more muscle mass.

I have to admit, dear reader, that once I understood that then I started feeling much better. My weight increase was now not negative to me but positive because I was fixing up my body in a way that it had never been.

Let me give you one small example. One of the exercises that I do is that, while being seated, I lift each of my legs in as straight a fashion as is possible about as high as I can about 20 times.  Sounds easy doesn't it? Initially it was extremely difficult to raise the legs 20 times. Moreover, at first, the height that a leg was raised was extremely low, just barely off the floor.  Not now though. Although it is still not at its highest and best point, I am to raise my legs easily off the floor and quite high as well. Moreover, I keep my legs fairly straight as they go up. It just makes me feel good knowing that I am accomplishing so much. In addition, I am still exercising to get into the best leg position possible. Pretty soon, I also expect that I am going to be increasing the number from 20 to a much higher number.

I do these exercises 3 times a day now, once before each of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Each system takes somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes to do. I will then eat after I have finished doing the physical work. It does feel great being able to do so every day now.

I go through a number of different exercises that I can tell you about. It is an approach that I have seen is rather standard that is being suggested to people, especially my age or perhaps in a poor physical condition, now to do every day. These steps include:

- forward and backward up and down leg movements

-a number of knee bends that are increased as pains disappear

-a number of leg stretches using 3 different leg locations

-a dozen or so leg movements moving the legs up and down at the back of the body

-about 5 dozen paces walking along the house floor with the feet up and down in a special fashion

-leg lifting described above

-20 various arms motions in 2 ways each to keep them moving well

-final head motion which helps my eye problems as well.

Of course, twice now during the day, I use my "high-powered" elliptical trainer to help my body remain firm and to lose some weight obviously as my motion time increases as much as I can. I do have to admit that the amount of time I spend moving around is hardly what I have heard that other people do these days. My time is rather low now and I want to do better.

I do get tired, but I make sure to drink plenty of water and even have a snack to keep my energy up.  I also have resistance bands, which are a great accessory to my exercise regime. I do have the incentive however to do as much as I possibly can. That is exactly what I did do with all the exercising. i.e. I increase the number of steps that I take whenever I can.

I still require assistance to make sure that physically my body is improving and that I am able to do the exercises that are designed to help me without having an injury. For that, I have been under the care of a number of health care workers called PSW's (Personal Support Workers). They are wonderful and really help me in my daily routines! I did not realize it, but they were quite involved in looking after me initially when I returned home from the hospital. I honestly did not know who they were exactly because I was quite unable to know anything that was going on around me for the first month or so when I returned home. Apparently, I was not the easiest person to deal with at first because of the strange way that I was acting because of the medication that I was under but they were familiar with what was happening to a person like me and made sure that they were able to help me out so well.  

As time went on, the process changed and the PSW's came many days a week to make sure that I was doing better. When I transferred from Windsor to Tecumseh, my process changed to 3 days per week to do the physical work I needed. Believe it or not, I know that my objective is to reduce the number of days as quickly as possible, as I get better physically. That is my goal that I want to accomplish.

So that is what my physical life was like and now is like these days, dear reader. There is no doubt that as time goes on, I will learn different techniques to help me improve my situation and I will do so as often as I can. It has been such a blessing for me to have met so many people who have been so good in helping me out.

Exercising is important in all our lives. Even if you can do very little, it is good to get the body moving! Along with exercise, it is also crucial to have a well-balanced diet too. I like a nice treat once in a while (ex. a slice of pie or a cookie), but I believe moderation is the way to go.  Overall, making these small changes has really made a positive improvement in my life.