The Association Between Food and Movement

So today I lifted weights again, for the fourth day in a row. I’m pretty sore, and really wasn’t super keen to train, but I’m planning to deload next week so I want to really put in a big effort this week and get as much stimulus to build muscle as I can while I’m eating in a surplus.

At least, that’s the sensible part of my brain talking.

Underlying that (relatively) sensible thought, was my ED voice. (Sidebar: maybe I should give that voice a name – I’ve heard of others doing this and I think it’s a technique used in CBT). Anyway, the ED voice was saying something a little more irrational. At breakfast, it was something like ‘if you train, you can eat a bigger breakfast, because you’ll burn off those carbs’. So I ate two extra pieces of toast at breakfast.

It also had a followup, which was something like ‘you have a 300 gram rump steak in the fridge for dinner tonight. If you don’t train, then it would be such a waste of all that protein and you will probably just get fatter!’ – I always feel like I have to ‘earn’ my food. This is so fucking irrational. I need to eat. I deserve to eat. I don’t have to bloody well earn it. It’s something I NEED to do no matter whether I train or not.

This association between food and movement is an ED hallmark, for me I have a bit of a double whammy in that not only do I have lifting (which is really important to me, as I still have aspirations of looking somewhat muscled at least once in my life) but I also have the Fitbit giving me anxiety around whether I achieve 250 steps every hour and 10k steps every day. The latter is less of an issue these days – honestly, I could probably take the Fitbit off, if I wanted to – I’ve had many occasions lately where work or other commitments have prevented me from getting up and moving and the anxiety about that is significantly less these days. But I do still believe there are legitimate health benefits to taking a 10 minute walk after every meal in terms of digestion, blood sugar regulation, and those sorts of things, as well as just a chance to get some alone time with one’s own thoughts. So even if I didn’t wear it, I think I’d probably still try to do those little walks when I could.