My Pills

Every morning at breakfast I take the following:

2 acetaminophen (tylenol) (400 mg)
2 ibuprofen (advil) (400 mg)
2 Kirkland Signature Daily Multi Vitamins

I think it has made a huge difference for me. I don't like to think I am a wimp or lazy but pain management since I started working out has been very useful to keep me exercising when I would otherwise be too sore. I have a couple of Costco size bottles of these three and just take them at breakfast everyday. If I feel sore at night, I take 1/2 of the same amount.

One reason I stopped exercising was because of heel pain (plantar fasciitis), which was causing me to limp and made it really hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. I think I can remember when I injured my foot, it was in a weight room and I was doing calf exercises using a seated calf raise machine. I loaded up too much weight and bounced the weight up with my calves and then kind of caught it on the way down. This put too much strain on my heel and probably tore a tendon connection to my heel. I should have known better than to do that. I messed up my shoulder doing something similar. I think using proper form and slow controlled lifting is the best way to prevent injuries in the weight room. My ankle would be very tight, like no spring in my step, and I could only shuffle along the floor until my foot loosened up. Each time my left foot hit the ground when I was running, it hurt. I tried to rest it for a month, then two, but it didn't help. Neither did any ibuprofen or over the counter pain medications. Rebecca's cousin happened to be a podiatrist and gave me a heel injection while I was in Texas which took the pain away completely for 6 months, but by that point I had not been consistently exercising (or eating healthy) for several months. The heel pain has slowly started coming back but is not as severe as before.

I take the vitamins because when I lose weight I tend to feel sick and empty. I know I am breaking down my muscles and using up fat stores and that my body needs to have the right nutrition to rebuild itself while I am not exercising. Eating vitamins is a way to compensate for the damage done to your body with exercise. I really do believe that when you exercise, what you eat matters even more than when you don't. Eating junk because "you'll burn it off" at the gym is self-defeating because you cannot rebuild your body with unhealthy fat and sugar. That being said I think it is important also to be flexible and make small compromises over time to your meals. If I feel like I am sacrificing all the time, I will eventually quit completely; and I will be a grouch until I do.

The other day I was running on the treadmill and on TV I saw someone skiing down a slope, but they only had one leg. It reminded me of how lucky I am to have two legs that I can exercise with. I thought about how much some people wish they had what I already have. I thought about how I had taken my legs for granted most of my life and decided to work on appreciating everything I have more. The best way I can think of to appreciate my legs is to use them.