Forgetting the point

I haven't done a workout since Thursday. I had every intention to do a quick 10-15 minute metabolic workout Friday evening, but time got away from me and I headed straight out for Mexican and margaritas instead. I ended up out until 2am. The next day I didn't feel anything close to a normal human being. I spent the entire afternoon at my baby sister's play (which was wonderful, but verrrry long... Pride & Prejudice tends to be that way, I suppose), then headed straight to the grocery story, and shortly thereafter out again to my good friend's 30th birthday party. I didn't come home until 2am. Again. Only Sunday I had to get up at 7am with the kids. Definitely didn't feel like a normal person that day. Not only that, but all day my stomach was all wonky and weird. I couldn't tell if I was nauseated or about to poop my pants. (Sorry for the TMI.) I felt a little better this morning after a good night's sleep, but when I came home from work my tummy got all wonky again. I think I may have pushed it with going straight for some spicy stir-fry for dinner vs sticking with something more bland and easy. Oops.

Needless to say, there was no workout happening tonight. For the last weeks or so I've felt a little more up emotionally, but a weekend of junk food, alcohol, and lack of sleep quickly had me nosediving back down into downsville. It was all I could do to make myself bathe this evening, let alone put in 45 minutes of strength training.

I had an attack of "Get Your Priorities Straight" this afternoon and began beating myself up over a) not getting any purposeful exercise in over the weekend, and b) completely throwing myself off my normal sleep schedule when I know how important that is for maintaining my mood. I wish I could say it was because I was just having SO MUCH FUN I couldn't POSSIBLY SLEEP!! But really it was just because I was a little drunk and not making very good decisions for myself.

...that is not to say I didn't enjoy spending time with my friends this weekend - I did. But it wasn't anything that required my being awake until the wee hours of the morning, and I couldn't have gone home to bed at midnight and still had equally as awesome of a time.

I also smoked two cigarettes this weekend. I was/am really disappointed in myself, but I also need to realize that this doesn't mean I can't move forward and continue not being a smoker. I can and I have. I didn't go buy a pack of cigarettes. In fact, it didn't even occur to me that I could do that until I just wrote that. But I don't want to be a smoker again. I'm pretty solid in that feeling and decision. It's okay. There will be hiccups, and I can allow myself this slip-up and move forward realizing that it didn't make me feel good physically or emotionally and remember that the next time I think it might be a good idea to light a cigarette.

I had a moment earlier this evening where I thought, "I may as well just give up this #365daysofchange thing -- clearly a year is too long and I can't keep it up. I had a good run with #100daysofchange and I should have just left it at that." But that's just silly. I had a weekend of poor choices. It happens. I forgot the point of the whole idea; the point is to learn how to be a happier, healthier human being within my normal everyday life. Normal everyday life includes poor choices sometimes! But those few days of poor decisions and choices does not define the last 119 days, nor does it have to define the next 246.

I guess I still haven't quite figured out this whole "grown-up" thing yet. I guess I do still have some priorities to get straight... and if I'm going to be really honest with myself (and you), this was all probably a bit of a subconscious response to my husband telling me last Wednesday morning that if our youngest was going to decide to get up at 5:30am everyday (which he had been doing for 5 days in a row since switching from a crib to a toddler bed), then it was probably time to start sacrificing some things to be able to go to bed early enough in order to wake up rested at 5:30am with him. I flat out pitched a bit of a fit and was like, "You realize that would mean I would have to go to bed at like 9:30pm EVERY NIGHT and give up EVERYTHING I ENJOY DOING?!"

This, of course, did not go over particularly well. We didn't fight about it, but only because I decided to just end the conversation. I was pissed and felt like it was all incredibly "unfair". So what did I do? Well, go out all night all weekend, of course! Because that's how mature adults handle things!

...so, yeah. I didn't even realized that until I was writing all of this out. That was pretty stupid, considering I've been perfectly happy and fine coming home around midnight at the latest whenever I've gone out recently. And you know what? Nolan decided he'd start sleeping until a normal time again yesterday. It was just a normal adjustment for him and it looks like we'll be okay moving forward. Looks like I don't have to learn how to be a super early morning person just yet and can spend some of that extra time in the evenings thinking about what I want my top priorities to be in order to feel happy and satisfied in life.

Tuning In... Finally

Yesterday, after writing that whole big hullabaloo about how I'm accepting my body and moving past my obsession with obsessing over food, I found myself thinking, "I've been eating way too many sweets for the last week. What the hell is this about? I've had to have something sweet everyday for like 6 days!" This immediately sent me into, "Maybe I need to start tracking again, maybe I can't just eat intuitively, maybe I'm going to gain back all that fat, maybe I need to restrict..."

And then I had a light bulb moment after noticing I had a random low back ache: I'm due to start my period at any moment. Of course I've been craving and subsequently eating sweets for the last several days. Hormones are a bitch, I tell you. And my skin is reacting accordingly by breaking out with a vengeance. This is what happens. It's normal.

Instead of beating myself up for not having greater willpower and avoiding the sweets at all costs, I just realized that some Oreo cookies and a few handfuls of peanut m&m's over the course of a week isn't going to undo everything I've been working on for 4 years. It's just not. Especially when the rest of my diet has been just fine. It's been an emotional week, as well, so I definitely don't need the added stress of a negative inner-monologue following me around everywhere. I'm finally tuning into my body in a way I haven't been able to due since high school.

...now, if only I could be better about making it gets the amount of sleep its constantly begging me for. Something to work on!

Update!!

I've had a really hard time focusing on just about anything lately, which is why I've sort of actively been avoiding trying to write an update for the blog. I'm a little all over the place, but a couple things have been on my mind lately - and organized or not, I'm going to try to write about them now.

1) Focusing on fun.

As many of you Regular Readers know, I've been struggling with depression for a little over a year now, and recently it's been creeping back into the "worse and worse" area from the "improving" side it hung out in for a few weeks back in March/April. Week before last, after going through 3 days of arguing and screaming with my husband about how I want to move forward with my career/lack of one, I sort of resigned myself to being miserable and slept a lot of the weekend away. But then last Monday my husband asked me a very important question: "Do you ever have fun anymore?"

I replied, "I like hanging you with you." Then he said, "Liking me isn't the same as having fun." Which is true. And I realized, no. I don't really have fun anymore. I'm too busy with work, being angry and depressed over work, trying to be Super Wife/Mom at home (and feeling like I'm forever failing), and generally being frustrated and irritated with everything/everyone to really focus on enjoying myself or having fun in anything I do. I realized I had only done 2 things recently that I really considered "fun" - one was going to play trivia with a group of friends (which has become a weekly gathering), and the other was baking a pie for my dad for Father's Day. "But I can't go to trivia EVERY night or bake a pie every day." Well, no. But I could do those things a couple times a week and have a little enjoyment...

So, the other day it was kind of hot and disgusting here in Virginia, so I set up the baby pool with Nolan when we got home from work/daycare in the evening. I was sitting outside with him, dipping my feet in the water, while reading a book - and he kept trying to dump water on my head. I started to get frustrated and angry, but instead decided to put the book down and play with him. It made him super happy and in-turn made me happy. It was fun. And I realized, I have to do these things. It's not going to fix everything - it may not fix anything - but at least if someone asks me if I ever have fun anymore, I can say, "Yes, sometimes." instead of having to honestly realize, "No, never." and wallow in how depressing that is.

The #356daysofchange campaign/challenge/whatever-you-want-to-call-it was supposed to be about mental wellness as well as physical wellness, and focusing on fun is a step in the right direction. I continued the trend by going out Friday night for the margaritas and Mexican food I've been craving for weeks, seeing my good friend's band play Saturday, and attending a last-minute pool party Sunday afternoon. I am now a bit exhausted and looking forward to a few nights in this week, but I felt like I was able to really enjoy my weekend for the first time in a long while.

2) It takes a long time to get fit/reach the body aesthetic/weight you want.

Not for everybody, but for lots of bodies. It's easy to get sucked in to the "success story". The person who lost 100 lbs (or more) in a year (or less), the person who switched to a Paleo-style diet and cured their Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure within a matter of months, the person who shed 10% of their body fat in 6 months. These are major successes, but rare is it to read the success story of the person who reached their goal (whatever that may be; weight, body fat percentage, clothing size, cholesterol level, etc.) over the course of 4 or 5 (or 6 or 10) years. I sometimes feel as if people don't consider those to be real successes; that if you can't do it within a year, it really isn't worth celebrating or acknowledging.

In September, it'll have been 4 years since I started really working on losing weight and getting healthy. There was a pregnancy in the middle there, but losing weight and getting healthy was still on mind throughout the entire process. I couldn't tell you what I weigh today, but I betcha it's about 192 lbs. I've weighed right around that for 18 months. Sometimes I feel like this is a failure. But when I look at my body, the way my clothes fit, how I feel in the middle of a run or a workout - I'm a success. My body is completely different at THIS 192 lbs than at 2013's 192 lbs... and even more so than JANUARY'S 192. I gained a lot of fat over the winter...

But that's part of my point: it's not always a direct line from A to B. Many more people struggle over the course of several years to reach their goal. It takes time to find a good nutritional balance, the type of exercise you enjoy/respond best to, to make things like diet and exercise a constant top priority - but also to find a balance between that and letting loose and having fun sometimes without obsessing over calories or "is this the healthiest choice" or feeling like "I'm going to have to run this off later".

I still have fat on my body that I don't want or feel is unattractive. But overall I'm beginning to feel really comfortable in this body and to really like the way it looks. I'm also starting to focus more on buying/wearing clothing that is flattering on my body now instead of what my body might look like in 2 years. That's helped a lot in the self-esteem department.

3) I'm finally free from food.

Okay, that's maybe a weird way to put it... but I am finally free of calorie counting. A lot of this has come along with my body acceptance, as well as my realization that I just can't "heathily" track calories. Meaning, no matter what I've said in the past, I just get too wrapped up and obsessed over calories and macros and end up just feeling horrible about myself most of the time instead of feeling like I'm accomplishing something worthwhile. Because I was so obsessed for so long, I now know what types of foods I need to eat in order to regularly meet my nutritional needs without tracking everything. I have no idea how many calories I usually eat. Some days I'm sure it's close to 3500, some days probably 1900. I don't care. I'm continuing to build muscle and lose fat and my clothes fit and look better every day.

I'm learning to enjoy my food and eat more mindfully. I've fallen in love with salmon lately and have been eating tons of that and other fish. Same with vegetables. Especially grilled! All the salmon and grilled vegetables all the time!! I can't wait to buy a new grill this weekend so I can start grilling things outside vs on my George Foreman.

I can't tell you how good it feels to be able to eat the ice cream if I want it, or drink the beer, or go out to eat without feeling like I need to exercise to compensate for the calories. And on top of this, I've noticed I don't feel the desire to eat junk nearly as often. Nothing is off-limits, and therefore I don't ever feel deprived. If I'm hungry, I eat. Without guilt. It's amazing.

100th Day and Beyond!

I don’t think I realized how much my #100daysofchange challenge would affect my life when I first decided to do it. In fact, I was sure I’d get 2 or 3 weeks in and just stop. Thankfully, and surprisingly, I stuck with it. Incorporating Instagram and the daily photo inspired me and kept me accountable in ways I didn’t expect – and so much of that is thanks to all of you who began following my progress.

I still have a long way to go, but I’m pretty proud of where I am right now in my fitness goals and body image.

So, what now? Well, that’s an excellent question. I want to keep going, there’s no question about that. Clearly this whole “post photographic proof” thing is benefitting me in keeping with my goals. My ultimate goal for this project was to do something active every day. While I had rest days and/or travel days here and there, I was probably 90% on-target for physical activity. That ain’t bad. But this project was simply that: physical activity. I made mention a couple times of “oh, and I’m going to try to do some things here and there for my mental health also!” but I didn’t really, with the exception of taking rest days when I knew I could really benefit from them both physically and emotionally.

The truth is, even after 100 days of making exercise a habit, eating decently, not obsessing over calories, and breaking my unhealthy bond with the scale – I’m still dealing with some pretty serious depression, stress, and anxiety. I think part of me (a bigger part than I realized) thought as long as I was treating my body well with exercise, good food, and plenty of sleep, I would be “better”. That changing my lifestyle would have this almost magical effect on my mental health. This is not to say that maintaining physical health doesn’t help – it helps. It helps immensely! Especially making sure I run at least once or twice a week. But despite my runs and my lifting and my food choices and my sleep habits, lately my anxiety has just been getting worse. I’ve had 3 panic attacks in the last 8 or 9 days, one of which lasted nearly 3 hours and almost sent me home from work. I feel like I keep repeating the same thing to myself every few weeks, “Something’s got to give/change”. Aside from selling all my worldly belongings and leaving all my friends and family to go start a new life someplace not here, there’s only one thing I can think of that I can do to really change my life: leave my job.

I think I sometimes forget how long it’s been since this unhappiness started. It’s been 2 years. And it’s been 10 months since I said I was going to change my life and get out of my current job situation. I’m clearly a liar as I haven’t done ANYTHING up to this point. And while things got a little bit better for a little while (a very little while), overall things aren’t changing and overall I’m not sure that any amount of change in my current environment would make things better. Now I’m faced with additional responsibility on top of what had already pushed me to a mental breakdown last September and a borderline suicidal place by the end of December. On top of that, I’m beginning to feel solely responsible for everyone else’s stress and happiness – which so far continues to manifest in my continuing to hate my life (and myself) in order to make everyone else happy and/or content. In reality, I think I’ve probably always felt that way, but I’m just now becoming aware of how much I feel it.

In light of these things, I want to really challenge myself to change many different things about my life and lifestyle, and I'm going to give myself another 265 days to do so. I was playing around with a bunch of different tags, but I think it might be best to just stick with #365daysofchange. Simple and to the point. I'll continue my near-daily physical activity and overall physical health stuff, but also set some goals for whole-life changes - new job, maybe go back to school - basically find something I love, or at the very least enjoy, and pursue that as a career. I have 9 months. If I can grow a fully formed human being inside my body in 9 months, surely I can decide what I want to be when I grow up and begin working toward it in 9 months. But my main goal is to reach that 365th day feeling better about my life as a whole. 

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...sort of?

I’m not really sure how to start this one off, so I’m just going to kind of brain-vomit here for a minute:

It seems that the more depressed I get over certain aspects of my life, the more positive I get about my body image. I don’t know how to explain it really, but I’m struggling so much with making some major life choices and am adhering more and more the mantra of “life is too short to be miserable” – and while this isn’t magically dissolving my depression since I haven’t actually made any decisions yet, it has made me realize that being overly fixated on my body image and being unhappy about how I look is ridiculous. The fact of the matter is, I like my body just fine. It’s a pretty good looking body. It’s a pretty well-functioning body, too. 6 months ago, when I went for my first physical/check-up since I was a teenager, I was a healthy person. And in the last 6 months I’ve made several BIG changes that are only adding to my health: quitting smoking, eating out less often, drinking alcohol less often, getting 7-8 hours of sleep regularly, and being more active and/or exercising on a daily basis.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t still things I want to change about the way I look – there are. But I’m learning how to let go of those aesthetic (and scale weight) changes as my main focus and putting more emphasis on how things make me feel and how they affect my physical (and mental) health. Am I going for a run because I feel like I have to in order to eat that pizza/drink that beer/have that ice cream, or am I going for a run because it makes me feel good/clears my mind/boosts my mood? Am I doing strength training to get “awesome abs”/”toned arms”/”dancers legs”, or am I doing it because it makes it easier to lift my toddler/boosts my metabolism/makes me sleep better?

More and more I’m doing my chosen type of exercise for the health benefits, not the what-my-body-looks-like benefits. And the fact is, my body composition will change as I continue to do these things and one day I may wake up and realize that doing things for my health has also improved my body aesthetic – but that is quickly becoming just an added bonus and not the main purpose of all this time and energy I put into fitness.

…as far as counting calories goes, I’ve all but given it up. I will still log my food – sometimes daily, sometimes just a couple days a week - but I don’t really stress over the calorie count anymore. I’ve raised my “limit” to TDEE, and I’m making sure my protein and carbs are where I want them to be. Probably the biggest change for me and my relationship with food is now when I eat “junk” or sweets I make sure to ask myself after the first bite if I really want it. If that first bite isn’t as delicious as I want it to be, more and more I’ll choose not to eat any more of it. I’m maintaining my weight while my body composition continues to change, and that’s okay. I’m happy here. And thank goodness! It’s hard enough dealing with all this depression, stress, and anxiety without the added pressure of hating my body all day every day. I was in that place over the winter and it was pretty terrible and crushing. I’m working really hard to maintain this body positivity while wading through the rest, and it feels so wonderful to give myself a break from the abuse and negativity.

Now for something completely different:

#100daysofchange will soon be coming to an end, and I’m kind of freaking out about it. It’s been such an amazing tool for me and an excellent way to hold myself accountable. Thank you to everyone who has been following (and participating) in this little project! I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve decided I want to extend this challenge for myself. I want to make this a year-long project. I’m still coming up with a tag for it, but it may be as simple as #365daysofchange or something similar. I’ll be sure to make the announcement once I’ve made up my mind.