Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

There’s a little something I’ve started to experience recently, and it surprised me in quite a positive way.

I am usually a very quiet person, both in my behavior and in my occupations. I can keep sitting on a chair, typing on the keyboard, drawing or reading a book, for hours and hours. While I’m not a big fan of TV, thus not spending much time on the couch, I’m a big fan of my computer, and let’s admit that spending this time reading articles on the web, while pretty much interesting and instructive, isn’t making my body move. I am sort of a “busy” person - not an “active” one.

However, in the past days or even weeks, I’ve begun to experience a somewhat weird, yet not unpleasant feeling: my legs are itching for a walk, or for anything that would make them move. There was a time where I could sit unmoving for four hours in a row, minding my little business, yet now, barely after one hour of inactivity, I’m starting to feel the need to get up and pace around - or, better, go out for a walk, or hit the gym. I, who for so long had had as much desire to move as a rotten cabbage, have found myself getting fidgety at times. Isn’t this astonishing?

“Exercise breeds exercise”, is how I define this phenomenon. There isn’t any other way I was able to put this into words, as I don’t think it’s essentially linked to me losing weight, but more to me using my body more, whether it was while hitting the gym or simply walking my dog out. And perhaps I don’t need to look out for more reasons than this; perhaps it’s indeed my body that slowly got used to do more, and after a while, if not doing enough, wants to go on with a more exercise-intense routine.

Not so long ago, I read an article about a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, regarding whether being fidgety or not could influence the weight gain, and whether this behavioral tendency could be reversed. Obese people would have a tendency to sit, and lean people, a tendency to get up and move more. This made me wonder in which “category” I could place myself, then and now. Then - definitely in the sitters one, ilustrating what I wrote above; there were times I even felt stiffle because I hadn’t moved at all for hours - how idiotic does this sound, really, in spite of being exactly what would happen. Now - I don’t know anymore.

The study said that these tendencies couldn’t be reverted - that a lean person gaining on weight will go on fidgeting, and that an obese person losing weight will remain a sitter - but when I look at myself, I feel confused by all of this. I’ve been feeling more like going out, too, walking in town, climbing the stairs two by two, running in the stairs, walking to a store even when I didn’t need to and could take the car… Right now, as I’m writing these lines, I’m noticing all of a sudden that I’m wiggling on my chair and tapping my feet, and regularly placing my legs in different positions, as if not being able to decide on how to sit.

What the article doesn’t tell, though, is whether the obese people put on diets in the study had to exercise as well? This also makes me wonder. Sure, I started exercising because I knew I needed it in order to lose weight; gradually, though, I’ve started liking it for what it is, a good way of getting rid of the stress, of emptying my head and focusing on my body, of having fun, of feeling physically well… and I could go on and on with this list. Would a diet alone have made me “fidgety”, given me the desire to exercise? I’m ready to bet that probably it wouldn’t have changed a single thing in my sitter’s attitudes. However, getting to move more seems to have awakened in me something unsuspected.

I’m not fooling anyone here, if the weather is awful and it’s raining cats and dogs, I won’t get the urge to go out and walk until I’m soaked to the bone. I’ll nevertheless get up often to play tag!-you’re-it with my dog, open and close windows, or move my legs under my chair; this got proved to me by the very snowy and cold weather we’ve had up until a few days ago only, as I was slowly realizing that I was more listless than what I remembered about myself.

All studies now put aside - in the end, it’s anyway a good thing for me, I think. And if exercising encourages me to exercise more, thus helping me further my weight loss goal as well as staying healthier generally speaking, then I sure won’t complain at all!

- Kery

• Fidgeting Helps Separate the Lean From the Obese, Study Finds