I'm still alive!

Dear Readers,

I'm still alive, I promise! Four words: busy season at work.

I have a lot I want to update on and pictures to share, etc. I'm slowly putting a draft together. I was sick over the weekend and have found myself going to bed at a decent time - which severely cuts back on goof-off time at home and therefore blog drafting at home.

Do not abandon me! Updates will be coming soon!

Love,
Jess

January So Far

Well, I gained a few pounds. Since weighing in at the beginning of the month, I've gained about 3 pounds. Legit gain, as the scale has reflected the same number about 4 times now. (Yes, I know, I'm obviously stepping on the scale too much.) It's funny how much easier it was to maintain that positive body image thinking/talk when I was maintaining a 1-2 pound fluctuation between 189 and 191... now I'm seeing 194 when I step on the scale, I'm having a hard time keeping that positive monologue going. But I'm committed to my resolution of no fat talk, and have refused to say, "I feel fat", etc. Talking about it like that isn't going to change it - being smart with food choices and exercise will. So I'm officially back on those bandwagons. I'm hoping this will help with my mood, as well.

Last Monday Mike and I decided to give the T25 program a shot, and I realized one very important thing about myself: I have an extreme dislike of workout videos. If it's not Jane Fonda's Low Impact Aerobics circa 1986 (I really wish they would release this on DVD!!) or yoga, it doesn't hold my interest for some reason. But, I told myself I would go through the rest of the week to try all of the different workouts. I bet this will shock the hell out of you... that didn't happen.

Tuesday was a bad day... Monday had also been a bad day... and then Tuesday just added to it. I came home from work so defeated, I had to just go lie in bed for a while. I let Mike fix dinner for himself and the kids while I felt sorry for myself for a little while and then after we got the kids to bed, all I wanted to do was cuddle up on the couch and not think about life for a while. So that's what we did. I'll give it to him, he tried pretty hard to motivate me to get the workout done, but when I started crying he dropped it pretty quick. ...that's not to say I was being a brat, but more saying that's how overwhelmed I was with everything.

Wednesday was a terrible day at work and I felt like I might start dropping F-bombs and walk out the door at any given moment. I don't how, but I managed to get super motivated to lift heavy things when I got home that evening. I cooked dinner and then headed down to the basement for some muscular punishment. It felt awesome. I had to start all over again with weight and was only able to knock out 3x3's on my working sets, but it's a start. It counts. And it felt good, and I felt good about doing it. I also danced/jumped around a lot in between my sets, so bonus goofing off cardio was had. Thursday night I did some power yoga with my fav yogi, Rodney Yee (and by "with", I mean on my television), to stretch out my sore muscles... silly me, I forgot what a core workout yoga can be! While I succeeded in stretching out my quads, glutes, hamstrings and back - I also succeeded in giving my abs a pretty crucial workout and had some pretty decent soreness Friday morning.

I had dinner plans Friday night with some girlfriends and didn't get any purposeful exercise in, but it was good to have a full evening out without having to worry about kiddos or anything. And I did a little dancing with post-dinner drinks. Saturday my workout was cleaning my house -- that felt good in a number of ways! I felt productive, the house was clean (obviously)...well, mostly... laundry got done, etc. We took the kids for a playdate, and then I stayed in with my husband for the evening (who's currently fighting a nasty cold -- here's hoping I don't catch it). It's been a while since I've just sat around catching up on DVR'd TV on a weekend evening and gone to bed a decent time. It was really nice. Unfortunately, I slept like total crap. I tossed and turned all night. According to my FitBit I was up about 30 times throughout the night. Even with the crappy night's sleep, I felt pretty decent Sunday morning. I fixed myself a good breakfast, headed out to run errands, got dinner in the slow cooker, Mike put Nolan down for his nap and I thought to myself, "I think I should go for a run." So I did. It was only about 48 degrees outside - which is certainly much warmer than it has been around here, and much warmer than it will be for the next 8 or 9 days - but I threw on the little bit of cold-weather running gear I own, and figured with it being such a sunny day I'd survive. Wouldn't you know - I did. I will say that the first 10-15 minutes was pretty miserable and I seriously regretted not putting some knit gloves on. I can't remember exactly when last I ran, but I want to say it was at least October if not September. I went a little over 2 miles and did walk/run intervals just based on how I was feeling, how long it took me to get my breath, etc. When I was running I was averaging a 10-12 minute mile, which is pretty decent for me. According to my HRM (I use a Polar FT4, in case anyone was wondering), I burned about 465 calories. My heart rate was pretty high most of the time, which shows how out of shape I really am. But damn, it felt really good to be out there -- especially once I got moving fast enough to keep my body warm. I wrapped up my 2 plus miles and felt like I could have done it all over again, but decided it would probably be smart not to overdo it on my first day back out. I will say, I definitely don't think I could run in weather any colder than, say, 45. I definitely found it much harder to breathe in the cold air. I'm very much looking forward to the hot days of summer. Even when it would be 90 degrees at 8pm, it never bothered me to go for a run.

I did a LOT of stretching once I got back home, and I'm hoping that will pay off with my soreness Monday since I play on jumping right back into my lifting routine while I seem to have all this motivation to get exercise done. Thankfully my B lifts are more upper-body, less legs. Right now I'm planning to try to get yoga in on non-lift days. As I said above, I believe it will be just too frigid to run here for the next week or so. (Our high on Weds is supposed to be 15. YUCK!)

Friday evening, Saturday afternoon/evening, and pretty much all of today (Sunday) my mood has been pretty good. It's almost like I still feel the depression following me around, but it's not actively bothering me - which is very nice. I ate really well today, and all the exercise over the last few days I'm sure has helped immensely. It might also help that I haven't smoked or had any alcohol since Friday evening. I know with my return to work tomorrow that hiatus won't last long, though. The stress really gets to me during the week and sometimes I feel like a beer and a cigarette is the only thing that really help me "wind down" -- maybe lifting and yoga can take their place. I'll think positively on that while I'm feeling like I'm in a positive place and leave it at that.

One of the many fitness bloggers I follow posted a writing/motivation exercise recently that I'm thinking about trying - sort of along the lines of lifting/yoga/running taking the place of regularly drinking and smoking. She asked her followers to think about the person they want to become, to write down the answers to a few simple questions, as well as anything else they feel might be pertinent; what does that person do? how do they behave? who do they spend time with? As well as more health/fitness related questions: what do they eat? how much do they sleep? why type of exercise do they do and how often?

I thought this could be a useful exercise for me and something that I'm planning to work on over the next couple weeks as I find the time/have the motivation.

Positive thought of the day: I'm really proud of myself for taking advantage of my sudden motivation to go for a run today, and I'm also really proud of myself for taking the time to do so much playing with Nolan today without messing on my phone or trying to take care of chores or anything else at the same time. I know my kids really appreciate that, and I think I appreciate it more than I realize.

Unfortunate truths

I constantly feel as if I'm not enough.

I constantly feel that I'm failing as a mother.

I constantly feel like I'm failing as a wife.

I don't think I'm very good at my job.

I disappoint myself almost daily.

I've been told I'm a perfectionist, but mostly I just feel like I'm lazy and lazy people generally aren't very good perfectionists.

I constantly struggle with commitment to important endeavors in my life; I think this is because I don't like myself very much and feel like I'm not worth the commitment.

I'm still waiting for the epiphany. 

Kitchen Ghosts

It’s 1:30am and I’m standing in my kitchen eating a bowl of granola cereal, hoping I don’t throw up and wondering if there are demons in my house trying to possess me. I want to cry, I’m so tired. All I want is sleep. If I lie on my left side, my left arm and leg go numb, my cheek tingles – if I roll to the right, the same thing happens on that side as the pins and needles subside on the other. If I lie perfectly still on my back, my neck hurts slightly, my feet want to cramp. I had dozed off for a little while, but then I saw these flashing lights above my bed… and I was so hungry… I’ll realize later that I was seeing migraine auras. This doesn’t occur to me when I’m standing in my kitchen in the middle of the night worrying about the supernatural. I have the hood light over the stove on, because it just seems unnecessary to turn on the bright pot lights overhead… but right here, in this moment, I’m a little bit scared of the dark. I don’t want to fully admit it to myself, but I'm also scared that if I turn the “big light” on it might just make it easier to see the boogey man that is surely lurking in the shadows of my living and/or dining room, keeping me from sleeping.

I eat as quickly as I can. I’m so hungry. I don’t remember ever being so hungry that it’s woken me up in the middle of the night, so hungry that I almost feel like I need to vomit from the tempest of stomach acid churning inside me, forcing me to sleepily slog downstairs and find something quick and hopefully filling. I finally finish my late-night cereal, shove half a banana in my mouth and chug a large glass of milk.

I half-almost-run back up the stairs. I leave the stove light on. I don’t want the shadows to get me. The upstairs hall is so dark. I’m 5 years old again at my grandma’s – if I can just get down the hallway I can hide in the bed. Deep breaths while reminding myself that I’m adult and this is my house and nothing scary or bad has ever happened here, I make myself walk slowly, walk quietly, to the bedroom. The only ghosts that are chasing me are the ghosts of a familiar irrational feeling...

I’m so scared of the numbness. My mind starts telling me that if I fall asleep I’ll probably just stop breathing altogether because my lungs will go numb or some other weird thing that’s probably not even possible. I’m panicking as my husband snores. He’s slept more soundly in the last two weeks than he feels like he ever has, he tells me at dinner Monday night.

I lie in corpse pose (ironic) under the covers and try to breathe deep into my belly, slow on the inhale, slower on the exhale. I think it may have been close to 3:30am before my mind finally gave up on creating horrendous organ-failure-due-to-numbness scenarios and the yoga breathing allowed me to pass out. The baby woke up at 5:50am.

I slept on the couch from about 6am until close to 8am. I didn’t go numb at all, I didn’t imagine my organs failing once. I just slept… but on the way to work, it started again. My right hand was all tingles, my hip, my foot. I was starving. Again.

I had breakfast (two breakfasts, actually) and popped a bunch of B Complex thinking that all this tingling crap might all be some kind of bizarre migraine side-effect. It seemed to help a bit.

You know what else B vitamins are good for? Keeping stress and anxiety hormones in order.

I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s a pretty clear sign of high stress/anxiety when one is awake in the middle of the night concerned about being possessed by demons due to seeing some migraine auras. …this could also be made worse by the fact that American Horror Story can be scary. Or late-onset paranoid schizophrenia. Let’s just really hope it’s not late-onset paranoid schizophrenia.

Tomorrow I go and meet with a new therapist. Tomorrow can’t come fast enough. I also called and scheduled a physical/check-up with my regular doctor for later this month. Sure as hell couldn’t hurt to have some blood tests run, check hormone levels, etc. I don’t know that I’ve had a regular check-up since I was 17 or 18.

The point of this bizarre story is not to make you realize that I’m even crazier than you already thought I was (though I am sure it probably accomplished just that!), but more to show myself what a breaking point I’m reaching.

I had made a promise to myself within the last couple weeks, that come April I would be making some serious life and lifestyle changes. Some of those changes I can begin working on immediately, some of them I originally felt like needed to wait. I’m not sure how much longer those other things can wait anymore. More and more I wake up in the morning and think to myself, “I can’t live like this.”

You’d think I was in some kind of abusive situation or something… I know I seem a bit dramatic, but it feels very stifling, smothering. I can’t even get into a lot of it here because it would be unprofessional and could get me into trouble. Even in saying that I feel as if I’m not being quite vague enough.

Something’s gotta give, and as much as I want to say, “This is what I need and want and this is how I get it, so I’m doing it right now!”, I know that it’s also a delicate situation and a delicate balance and these decisions are ones that I cannot take lightly or be reckless with. I’m hoping within another couple weeks I’ll be able to have the energy and focus to put a plan into place and start taking responsibility for bettering myself and my life so that I don’t have to spend any more nights cowering in my kitchen over a bowl of granola worrying about the boogey man and organ failure as I listen to my husband’s quiet snores coming from upstairs.

2013 In Review

Well, I’ve spent the last 6 days trying to read back through some/most of my 2013 blog posts, but I’ve been unsuccessful due to my lacking skills in prioritizing time as well as (what I can only assume is) depression-fueled inability to focus on anything for longer than about maybe 15 or 20 minutes. That’s probably being real generous with myself.

I did get through enough to know one thing: I didn’t get anywhere close to the physical goals I set for myself. 22% body fat by year’s end, eh? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAaaaaa….ha…heh. Siiiiigh.

But I also know another thing: I’m much happier in and with my body that I was a year ago from today. I love my body most of the time, and I love the way it looks a lot of the time. I’ve done a lot of thinking about if I’ve reached my “happy weight”, I’ve done a lot of thinking about redefining what “goal” really is.

I set a lot of goals for myself throughout 2013 – some realistic, and some not. But what I noticed as I tried to skim through my updates each week/month, I put a lot of pressure on myself to accomplish a lot of different things at once. I just don’t believe you can wake up one day and say, “I’m going to change everything about my lifestyle TODAY!” and be successful. It’s great to have the epiphany that something should change or needs to change. But my greatest piece of advice is: baby steps. One thing at a time. I’m always saying, “Starting right now I’m eating all the fruits and veggies and lean proteins and doing all the fancy workouts and do the exercise EVERY DAY ALL THE TIME!! ALL THE THIIIINNNGSSSS!!!” – and then I do nothing, or only tiny pieces, or give up on myself, etc, etc. I noticed every other post title throughout 2013 said something along the lines of “Do-over!” “Making excuses!” “Rethinking!” “Begin again!” “I hate the scale!” “The scale hates me!” “Failing again!” and on and on and on… I would set all these goals each month, I would meet none of maybe one of them, I would feel like a failure, I would press on with workouts and making healthier food choices, but I think I stopped trying. I stopped trying early. I think by March I was completely defeated and that just continued on. By June I was sinking deep into full-blown depression, and there was no amount of recovery when it came to getting back on the weight loss/fat loss wagon. I didn’t have the emotional energy.

I’m proud of myself for getting more body positive toward the end of the year, for cutting myself a break from all those goddamn monthly goals, for saying to my broken self, “Hey, dude, it’s okay. It’s cool. You keep doing the best you can, you keep making the effort when you have the emotional and physical energy, you cut yourself some slack and be kind to your brain and your body both in your thoughts and in your daily habits. YOU KEEP DOING THE BEST YOU CAN.”

And so I have. Mostly. I’ve been off and on with workouts. I’ve been pretty steady with my diet of about a 60/40 split of healthier foods vs not-so-healthy foods. Yes, ideally I’d like to be at a 80/20 or 90/10 split – but this is the best I have in me right now, and that’s okay.

In July I updated my goals for the remainder of 2013 to: Be Happy, Be Healthy, Be Active. Then in September, I took my weight and measurements and upped my calories to a maintenance level of about 2400. The idea was to stop stressing about losing weight/fat, doing purposeful exercise, and to just kind of live life. I thought this would especially help me with the “Be Happy” part. However, in giving myself the permission to just be, I realized the large majority of my stress and subsequent depression has/had nothing to do with the pressure I was putting on myself to reach my ideal body aesthetic and lifestyle. In fact, I would go so far as to say that “stress” was probably a hearty and healthy distraction from the real issues. Now that I took a couple months to take that distraction away, I feel I’m more unhappy than ever with certain aspects of my life. It’s honestly somewhat debilitating. I couldn’t tell you how I manage to get out of bed every morning. I have no idea how I do it. But I feel like I’m getting off track a little bit. While this blog is supposed to be about all aspects of my life, I would like to focus on my physical/healthy changes over the past year.

In short: Not much has changed. I’m almost exactly the same weight (give or take a pound or two, depending on the day), I have slightly less body fat, my body composition overall has changed just a little, and I feel like I’m still dealing with the same struggles when it comes to food/exercise.

Here’s the stat comparison:

January 2013:

Weight: 189.6 lbs

Estimated Body Fat: 32.5%

Chest (across bust w/sports bra on): 39”

Waist: 34.5”

Waist at naval: 39”

Hips: 45”

Bicep (flexing): 12.5”

Thigh: 26”

January 2014:

Weight: 191.2 lbs

Estimated Body Fat: 31.5%

Chest (across bust w/sports bra on): 37”

Waist: 33”

Waist at naval: 35.5”

Hips: 44.75”

Bicep (flexing): 12”

Thigh: 25.75”

(These stats were actually from the end of November 2013, so there may be some slight changes since then, but nothing so major that my clothes fit differently or that I can see any difference. The weight was as of last week, so that’s current.)

Positives of 2013: I learned to love my body as it is now, to not expect it to be/look perfect, to appreciate for doing all the amazing things it does and putting up with all the terrible things I do to it.

I plan to take my body positivity into 2014 and make a conscious effort to drop the “fat talk” I did a lot of on this blog in 2013.

Stay tuned for an update on how I plan to get through 2014 both from a health/fitness perspective, as well as from a human/emotional perspective.

Thanks for being my readers for another whole year!!

Coming Soon!

I'm currently working on my "year in review" wrap-up for 2013. As you've probably noticed by my background, I'm also working on updating and rearranging the look of the blog just a little bit.

Please stay tuned!