Gratitude for Fitocracy

Today, I’m grateful for Fitocracy.

I’m still not sure how they did it, but the social fitness site Fitocracy actually got me to enjoy exercise.

If we’ve met in the past in meatspace, then you know that I was never one for physical achievement.  I used to look at people who centered their lives around sports, fitness, and the outdoors with a little bit (ok, more than a little bit) of smugness.  I wondered why anyone would spend so much time improving something that was just going to break down anyway…

… as I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, drank like a fish, and used my taste buds as the deciding factor when choosing what to put in my mouth.

And the depression?  Naw… that was all in my head.  I could just think my way out of it.

There would be brief moments of clarity when I would say “OK, I’m gonna take care of this.”  My actions would last a a day, maybe two, a week if I was lucky.  A month of regular exercise was unheard of.

Even when my interest in running and fitness really started up, it was a lonely venture.  I used a few of RunKeeper’s fitness classes, and browsed /r/fitness and /r/running quite a bit.  I never really participated… I was just a lurker, soaking up all of the information I could get, trying to figure out what was bullshit, what wasn’t, and what my next steps should be.

I believe that  it was in /r/fitness that I first saw a post offering invites to a new beta site that was being built for people who wanted to track their fitness.

I’d joined sites like this before.  Check off boxes, fill in logs, get silly little medals for achievements.  Probably wouldn’t be much different.  But it was free, and it was being build by people from reddit, and beta’s are always fun… so why not give it a shot.

That was back in February of 2011.  I won’t say my transformation since then is anything like that of Vainglory’s (quick plug for his blog: Food is for Fuel) or pamo’s – those are some real, phsyical, see it with your own eyes examples of the kinds of transformations that are possible with exercise and diet.

The only part of my body that has ever been overweight is my brain.  Dragging the depression, the fear, the anxiety, and all of that accompanying “stuff” around with me has been pretty difficult.  Learning to fix my diet and exercise has been a huge part (but not the only part) of losing a lot of that mental weight, and replacing it with much leaner confidence and hope has felt pretty damn good.

Fitocracy has helped me to do that – those “silly little medals”, points, levels, and most importantly the inspiring and supportive people I’ve met really help me continue on.

So today, I’m grateful Fitocracy.

[This post is entry 13 of 365 of A Time for Gratitude.]

P.S. – I’m lymanreed on Fitocracy as well.  If you’d like to join the site, it’s still in invite only mode.  Be sure to follow @Fitocracy on Twitter and keep an eye out for codes.  I’m currently out of invites I can send, but if I can get more I’ll post the link here.

 Update! Another reason for Fitocracy gratitude: I don’t think I’ve ever been a member of a site with such accessible founders!  Within minutes of this post, Brian added a whole mess of invites for me to share – grab yours here.