You're So Vain; You Probably Think This Post is About You

It was the song "Sexy and I Know It" playing in the background as I did lunges that prompted this post. If, perhaps, you have more sophisticated music tastes than I do, you might not be familiar with it. Get familiar. It is the best workout song ever. I know this because it says "I work out" right in the lyrics.

As you know, working out releases all those yummy endorphins. But, before it can do that, you have to be motivated to work out in the first place. Motivation has always been my struggle. In many things. (You may notice that I still haven't finished writing my novel.) And, to top it all off, I have a natural aversion to one of the other bi-products of those endorphins - smugness. Oh, for the love of all that is good and holy, if you're smug about your fitness, you make me cringe at a molecular level. It makes you ugly. And let's be honest; none of us work out with ugliness as a goal.

So, I need stupid songs written by juvenile-minded dudes to motivate me to join the ranks of the fit and smug. Appeal to my vanity. Do it. It's the only thing that works. So far, I've been doing pretty well. A different part of me is sore at the end of almost every day, so I must be doing something right. And I have a tape measure now, instead of just a scale. So I can work with that whole muscle-weighs-more-than-fat statement without secretly worrying that it might just be something people say to make themselves feel better. The fact that the measurements are going in one direction while the scale has actually inched up a tad in the other is my happy proof of that.

It is vanity that motivates me. Vanity. Not health. Not strength. Not the endorphin high. Don't get me wrong; I dig those benefits. I like feeling energetic instead of sluggish. I like the bad-ass feeling of being stronger than I used to be. But if all I got from working out were those things, without a change to my appearance, I wouldn't do it. Hell no. And, to be honest, I think most people who claim they do it for those reasons above vanity are lying. Yep. Calling you fools out. If working out made you energetic and strong and healthy but still left you looking flabby, 90% of you would ditch your workout plans before you finished reading this sentence. You can tell me I'm wrong; but I won't believe you. The majority of the exceptions would be people who made a living from being strong/athletic/agile. If you're a special ops dude, function may truly trump form. Same for a professional athlete. But spare me the smug diatribe on function over form. Even in the slim chance that you're being honest with yourself, it's going to go way over my head. I can't relate. Don't waste your breath. You have better things to do, like work out and practice your moderately-amused smug expression in the mirror.