Lifting the Weight of Emotion

It's taken me a year to get around to confessing this. I confessed to my journal buddies, and to a trainer friend, and now on my blog.

Have you ever had one of those situations where you're having some feeling or experience, and it's powerful and real for you, but you feel like telling anybody about it makes you sound like some kind of lying whining goon? You just feel so stupid you don't even want to bring it up. Well that's how I feel about this.

I'll summarize it like this:

Weight lifting hard seems to be stimulating my body in a way that invokes a ton of emotion. I suspect it is stored biochemical based on past emotion. It's not positive. It is fear and rage and more, a flood of a million feelings at once, so powerful that the first time it happened, I dropped my dumbell and nearly ran from the room, and went into denial and 'forgot' about my interest in weight lifting for six months.

It's happened repeatedly now. It profoundly affects my doing it at all, or more than several minutes.

I love weight lifting. Love it. I think it's the greatest feeling, I think testosterone is the coolest natural drug ever, I think I feel so good when I am lifting that it's almost a different personality on me entirely. Much more tough and competent and physical.

So anything that interferes with that is a problem. I've never heard of anybody having their bodybuilding interfered with by an emotional problem. That's just ridiculous, it seems to me.

It made me wonder if my self-therapy about a horrible childhood, a two year period (mostly) during which I gained ~200 lbs (age 22-24), might have instead just 'insulated' me from my own body, my own emotions. It wasn't long after that I broke through the sociopathic repression of emotion, and who knows?--maybe it was the massive fat that somehow made my body feel less threatened by that; maybe all that stored biochemical of the past is there, stored under the myelin sheath of the nerves as the Biogram theory postulates, and weight lifting is stimulating, releasing it or something. I don't know. I have theories but I don't really understand it.

All I know is that weight lifting as a physical thing is awesome and I have no problem with it and am driven to do it. But the emotional overwhelm that seems to kick in some minutes in now -- it didn't used to. (?) -- has made it an incredibly difficult, challenging activity.

This is July 2008. It's basically been a year since I was doing any regular workouts. I'm down to 366#, which with an over 500# high weight is not so bad, but I've got a very long way to go. Exercise is starting to feel critical.

I'm starting to WANT to do it. I believe this isn't just because I'm lighter. I believe that my average insulin is lower over time and my body is hence able to access more of my stored fat for energy. I did a glucose test recently and my numbers were pretty good:

Fasting: 60 (I'd fasted too long, it was late afternoon)
~110+ fast-acting carbs (orange juice, & blueberry smoothie)
15 minutes later: 130
1 hour later: 107
2 hours later: 97

I'm certain my blood sugar wasn't anywhere near that healthy a couple of years ago, when eating just about anything would nearly put me into a coma a little while later, when I had huge very dark patches under my armpits from insulin resistance. My body seems to be healing somewhat, from eating well. Thank God!

So this is a new month and I feel it's time to start again.

And if what I'm lifting is less about iron and more about the weight of my emotion, so be it. If I need to play angry rock at 160 decibals and scream my head off while doing it, so be it. Maybe on some level the physical work is forcing me to experience a part of myself I wouldn't otherwise, that sitting comfortably, sedentary, never forces me to face. It's difficult. But I guess it's about time.

PJ