I was thinking this morning about what my real motives are for working out and putting myself through this hard work to achieve the "body beautiful".
Realisticly and I know this I am not going to re-capture my youth, or have a youth where I was confident. Nor am I going to have the perfect body and look of a Calvin Klein or Abercrombie & Fitch model (and I have met a real A&F model in the Flesh Hi Jon!)
So knowing that the best I can do is still not the gay ideal why do I do it? Well, it has nothing to do with what other people perceive of me or teh actual way I look. Bet that doesn't make sense to some people, as all I do is talk about "my fat" etc.
To explain let's go back a few years in my life...
When I was a teenager growing up I was a skinny beanpole, I was also very outwardly confident and totally insecure inside. It was nothing to do with the way I looked, it was my personality, my coming to terms with my sexuality and the world in which I inhabited. I was also a very naiive kid, and in some ways I probably still am a little naiive, although these days I think it is manifested in my almost total lack of irony :)
In my mid twenties as my first real relationship broke down and subsequently crumbled I discovered the gym. Through the gym I learnt two very important lessons about myself and about the gay scene & society at large.
The first lesson was that as my body improved I got more attention from boys and that helped to both soothe my insecurities and inflame them too!
The second lesson which is much more important was, I learnt that when I put my mind to something I could achieve it both physically and mentally. Now I don't just mean in terms of putting on muscle or looking good, I mean in terms of physical prowess and my ability and beliefs.
For all of my life I had been the bookish one, not really any good at sports or games - I still can't catch a ball to save my life, the whole hand eye coordination thing escapes me! But I had been trained to believe that I was physically inferior to the other boys and this inflamed my poor self worth.
So in my mid twenties it was almost an epiphany when I discovered that I was not inferior it was a great leap forward for me and has served me well.
So my motivation for working out and getting fit? Well it's all about me and my ability to achieve things both physically and mentally. Since giving up smoking which has been a huge turning point for me, I feel better, more alert, more alive. I want to expand on these feelings and make sure my heart and my lungs recover, and the best way is to do lots of escercise, to eat well and to take care of myself!
My motivation is to make sure that I can keep on enjoying life as much as I do now and into the future. And if I make the effort now in my life before I truly get unfit or fat or slow or whatever, keeping it up is so much easire to do than at 45 having a heart attack and having to start from scratch.
I wanted to make a shoutout to a great blogger Sangroncito and in particular a post of him showing off his fabulous body at 51! He is agreat writer and he has a great outlook on life, he intends to live life and take care of himself so he can enjoy his life! So howdy from Australia!