Formosa Fitness

Charles Staley has a couple of great articles on this topic.

Think about it for a minute: isn't there a difference between constantly wanting to lose weight and get in shape versus just doing the activity because you love it? Sure there is, and yet so many of us get caught looking constantly at the scale and pinching our waists.

The exerciser is always looking for a goal outside of training -- training is done for an external purpose.

The athlete trains to compete and win but many keep training and competing because they love it. The activity itself becomes it's own reward.

The endless obsession with how we look should often take a back seat to just enjoying ourselves. Enjoy the way your body feels when you move. Enjoy the physical challenge of getting through a tough workout. Enjoy being slightly better next week than you are now.

I really wish more people would consider themselves athletes instead of exercisers. Just exercising can become mindless and eventually pointless. Always looking for external motivation in how we look shuts us off from how we feel, and isn't feeling good more important?

Funny how when you accept that you might have an athletic body type, the desire to be model perfect can go away, too.

The only part of the athletic paradigm I wouldn't want people to adopt is the athletic drive for performance at the expense of health. That's not the way to go long term.

But working out for the sake of working out and feeling good is IMO the way to go.

The final problem I see with the exerciser mindset is usually the non-awareness that fitness will have to be maintained. Imagine you achieved those external fitness goals. What then? Maintaining them when you don't really love what you're doing is mentally draining.

Why not just love what you do and get the benefits for a lifetime?