Pattern Fitness: Your Body, Your Mind, Your Workout!

By Scott Shoemaker

Pattern Fitness is about learning how to approach exercise when you suffer from a mental illness such as anxiety and depression. It explains methods to stay engaged while also providing first hand understanding of how a mental illness can get in the way of achieving your goals of getting in shape. Pattern Fitness is for anyone who has had trouble getting started and maintaining an exercise program. It is specifically designed for those with anxiety, depression, and ADD/ADHD. Because this book is written from a personal perspective, it is easy to read and follow as you can rest assured the author knows how hard it is to keep up with fitness program because he himself is a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, depression, and ADD. This book was painstakingly put together over time as the author learned how to deal with his mental illness and began taking notes throughout the process of getting in better mental and physical shape!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Aug 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662915710

Book preview

Introduction

Now that I’ve completed two books in the Sharing Mental Illness series in hopes of helping others move forward with their mental health struggles, I recently acquired my personal training certification, as I felt inspired to take things to the next level. I now turn my attention to helping others get in shape, lose weight, and feel altogether better! Although reading my first two books will be helpful, you do not need to have read them to start releasing your inner strength and determination to get in great physical shape!

Fitness and nutrition require that those who suffer from depression, anxiety, or ADD alter the conventional approach to getting in shape. Hiring a personal trainer who is gung ho on fitness and tries to push you along without understanding the psychological issues you are facing will most likely end in failure. My approach to fitness and nutrition comes from a different viewpoint, one that I have developed as I’ve gone through with my own mental health struggles.

From start to finish, this fitness book will be based on new and exciting approaches that will encourage you to get up and to start moving your body. I understand what it is like to be so depressed that you don’t want to move or get up off the couch, so you will never see me waving pompoms and yelling motivating chants for you to feel inspired. I feel that inspiration comes from real-world examples of what has worked for other people with similar mental health issues. Unlocking your potential is what I hope to accomplish by the end of the book.

Let’s begin!

1.

Taking Stock

Taking stock of where we are physically before beginning training programs seems a no-brainer, but what about taking stock of where we are mentally as well? I believe that physical fitness also includes mental fitness. For example, when you are mentally out of shape, you may experience depression or anxiety because you lack energy. This lack of energy may bring about a feeling of lowliness and can exacerbate an already fragile mind.

If we are mentally out of shape, our desires to stay physically fit can be inhibited, even to the point of making us feel weak and tired all the time, which hinders us even more. How do we get both the mental and physical to work together? The answer is to start working on both at the same time! You may progress faster with one or the other, but at some point in the near future, the two will start to grow in both strength and endurance, in tandem. This principle is the most important thing to remember when you get started.

There may be days when your body just doesn’t want to be physically active but your mind is ready to go lift weights or to go running. Then there were the days when my body wanted to get up and go running, basically telling me that being sedentary was driving it crazy, but I wasn’t mentally able to pick myself up to go and do it. This is an issue that has plagued me, and learning to understand and accept it was the key for me to get in shape as well as to lose fifty pounds.

It’s this mental struggle that can prohibit us from being able to spring forward and take the necessary steps to start moving our bodies. I know this from personal experience, as my mind seems to get overwhelmed easily so that I am unable to get up and start moving my body. This is where the mental health struggles come into play, and this is where I will begin to teach you how to approach them in such a way that you can begin to add getting in shape to your schedules.

Many times, my body has told me that it wants me to get up and start moving, but the mental power needed to do so kept me down. As soon as I was prompted by my body to start exercising, my mind would begin to kick into high gear with all the reasons why it would be easier to not exercise. My brain would race, thinking that I needed better running shoes; that I was hungry and should eat first; that my hair was a mess and I don’t like to wear hats, so I couldn’t exercise; or that I didn’t really have nice enough exercise attire to be seen outside, because I only wear old T-shirts and faded shorts around the house when I work out.

How many excuses have you used over the years? I have used so many that they can’t be numbered, even though all I really wanted to do was to get up and exercise. Contending with our mental struggles in order to start moving our bodies is in itself a workout for the brain. Exerting energy to fight against your own brain to overcome the mental blocks may sound silly, but those of you who have ever been tormented by mental health struggles when you try to force yourself into doing something know exactly when I’m getting at.

In my first two books, I try to help others start working though their mental health struggles by suggesting that moving the body helps the brain also start moving in the right direction. Taking stock of where you are in your struggles to get into shape may turn out to cause its own tension, but following the steps that I lay out in this new book will help you tap into your inner strength and find the brain power necessary to start getting into both mental and physical shape.

I touched on problems with depression, anxiety, ADD, and even bipolar in my other books. This book will focus on the same challenges of symptom management but will begin to incorporate strategies based on attaining physical fitness, along with suggestions for increasing your nutritional intake by eating healthier foods and understanding portion sizes. It doesn’t have to take years for you to figure out how to get your brain and body to work in tandem. I have successfully worked through the issues myself and provide easy-to-understand steps to help you get in shape, lose weight, and walk with more confidence and a better posture. By the way, I believe there is such a thing as both mental and physical posture, and if you follow the principles I teach you, you should notice a difference both in how your carry yourself when out in public and in how you feel about how you walk, stand, and sit.

Let’s face it: When you have suffered from a lifetime of anxiety and depression, the last thing you want to do is try to fake being confident by walking tall with your shoulders back. I’ve tried this many times over the years, but because of the lowly way I felt about myself, my head always hung and my shoulders were stooped. I suppose there are many reasons for the difficulty in walking tall when you’re depressed or anxious, but the simplest one is that a lack of self-worth makes you not want to draw attention to yourself, and your mind supposes that slouching is a great way to keep people from looking at you. It’s not a realistic supposition, however, because you are drawing others’ attention because you carry yourself with a lack of confidence. I believe a lack of confidence in our physical appearance causes us even more emotional issues because we not only look depressed but also end up feeling even more mentally unhealthy because of the way we carry ourselves.

So, take a few minutes to stock of where you are with both your mental and physical health. In the following chapters, you will learn how to start conquering that which has always evaded you!

2.

Getting Started

What I try to accomplish in all of my writing is for those of us with mental health struggles to realize that we will never be able to fake confidence in our bodies and minds. Let’s look at the example of slouching to avoid extra attention when we are out in public. I have been overcoming this issue in the past year because I have been able to keep a regular exercise schedule that includes back and shoulder workouts. I was never able to fake looking confident by puffing my chest out and holding my shoulders back, so I learned I could look confident by actually strengthening them over time.

Those of us with mental health issues, to even begin considering an exercise and nutrition program, have to take things one step at a time. First we take stock of where we are (see chapter 1), and then we start breaking down our goals of getting in shape and losing weight. If you have read my first two books, you have learned that breaking down our goals into simpler steps is the key to progression in anything in life—but how does that work when we are looking at beginning a fitness routine?

Breaking down fitness goals is easier and harder all at the same time. Easier to learn how to do it properly while you suffer from mental health issues, and harder if the person training you doesn’t understand your challenges. Let’s face it: In America, we want to look good in ninety days, no exception! After all, every exercise and fitness TV commercial tells us that if we buy their videos and give it some effort for three whole months, we’ll have spectacular bodies and want to show our abs in public. We all know that those results are not typical—they even say so at the bottom of the screen. It took me a year of working at it for five or six days per week to lose fifty pounds and start toning my body. Don’t worry, because a year isn’t