I blogged for a long time. I blogged for five years. Wait, no, longer. But I blogged about “lifestyle” for 5 years. I rebranded my blog two years in. I changed the name from, what I felt, was a “clever” song lyric ("sweeping out the bats") when I created it to something more substantial - to something that better represented what I was blogging about: Jess vs. Life

I find myself reflecting on this name now. “Jess versus Life” -- as if life were something to fight against. And I suppose at the time, and even now in many ways, I felt/feel that it was/is. Except that it shouldn’t be. And I don’t benefit myself by thinking of every day as a struggle over an existence I have little control over.

I don’t want to be working against life anymore. I want to be living my life and present in my everyday; present in my body, in my mind, in my work, and in my play. And I want to blog about it.

And so we evolve yet again and become: Jess Has A Blog.

Because I do. And this is it. Welcome to it. Thanks to all of those who have followed me all the way through until now.

My last check-in back in September talked a lot of self-positivity and mindfulness. I’m still in pursuit of these things. I’m just trying to figure out who I am as an adult person and get used to being that person.

I think this me versus everything-else-but-most-specifically-my-weight-and-body-image mentality is what lead me to abandon this blog back in January of 2015. I wasn’t somehow battling against oppression and winning, I was fighting against myself and it was awful. That’s a lose-lose situation. So leaving the blog behind worked out pretty great… until it didn’t. I no longer had an outlet. And without the blog, no matter how much I told myself I would “journal”, I couldn’t keep it up and couldn’t keep myself accountable to it.

Writing is so good for me. It gives me purpose in my darkest moments when I feel like I have none. And sharing my thoughts and feelings accomplishes the same. The blog, it provided both the purpose and the outlet - and I greatly missed both.

So, I think I’m back. I’d be lying if I said, “I’m no longer blogging about health/fitness/weight loss/body image.” I will still be blogging about those things. Maybe even mostly those things, actually. I’m just going to come at it in a different way, from a better perspective.

I ended with a list of goals in September, they were as follows:

reduce stress
get back to running for the love of it and to support mental health
get back to strength training to support running and avoid injury
continue eating intuitively a wide variety of foods

I have a few tweaks, but mostly the same concepts. As we come into February, my goals will be:

reduce/manage stress by sleeping enough - regularly
begin a 5k training program to ease back into running
practice the body-weight strength program I recently began 2-3 times a week
continue eating intuitively - not too much, mostly veggies

I'm really excited to get this writing/documenting thing going again and hope you'll stay tuned.

This week marked the 5 year anniversary of beginning this blog. While I’m not currently regularly updating, I think about doing so pretty frequently. I’ve been focusing more on pen-to-paper journaling recently and I think it’s been really therapeutic for me, but I hate to say I’m just as inconsistent with it as I was about updating here.

In my last update I spoke all about all the Oreos I was eating in the middle of the day and having not a care in the world about it, about wearing a bikini because it makes me happy and not worrying so much about what other people think about my body, but recognizing that I would have times of insecurity. To quote myself, “There will likely be plenty of times at the pool this summer that I’ll think to myself, who the hell do I think I am wearing this bikini?!” And trust me, ladies and gents, there were. Like, almost every time I went to the pool. But I made myself do it anyway because I am pretty happy with my tan belly and it’s good to get outside of your comfort zone and push your own boundaries every now and then.

I was in a spectacular place with exercise the last time I updated, too. I was regularly hitting the gym and running 3-4 times a week, as well as playing tennis once a week. I was in a good mental place (as late-spring usually puts me!) and on a positive track. That continued through most of the summer, but mid-August found me beginning my annual battle with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and struggling to get out of bed every morning, let alone spending 1-2 hours exercising daily. I didn’t practice purposeful exercise much in August, though remained generally active. Thus far I can’t say the same for September. I’ve been to the gym twice this month and have done two runs. It’s certainly better than what I’d like to be doing – curling up in the floor and sleeping until April. I do what I can.

I invested in a HappyLight a couple weeks ago, which is a natural spectrum light that mimics sunlight and is clinically shown to reduce the symptoms of SAD. I use mine for about 20-45 minutes every morning when I get to work. I have not yet taken it home to use on the weekends mainly because I’m just kind of forgetful. I haven’t noticed a HUGE change thus far, but it does help boost my energy a little bit in the mornings and that alone is worth continuing to use it. The instructions say it generally takes about 3 weeks of consistent use to start noticing the benefit. So, we’ll see how it goes in the next couple weeks.

So, that’s where I am right now, but I wanted to kind of review the last 5 years and look at where I really am in my life with maintaining health.

In September of 2010 I weighed 205 pounds. Today, in September of 2015, I weigh… 205 pounds.

That’s kind of funny, huh? I just realized that. Ha.

There were 2 years in there where I maintained between 189 and 191. Two YEARS. Directly after having a baby, I might add. But this most recent two years has been rough. My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2013. Coincidentally this is also when I began taking on many new responsibilities at work, as well as stepping into a role that required managing staff. My toddler also turned 2 that year, which we all know is a spectacularly easy age for most children… not. That was a lot. It all was a lot. I sank into a pretty severe depression and I’m honestly not very certain how I managed especially when the following year, 2014, after beating cancer, my grandfather passed away suddenly from a stroke. We also came into a very stressful/busy time at work that fall which only happens once every six years (and continues on for 18 months and which we’re right smack-dab in the middle of right now), and I injured myself running and was in physical therapy for 4 months.

I’ve packed the weight back on slowly over the last 1-2 years as I deal with the fall-out from all the turmoil. It’s mostly okay. I mean, I’m not okay with it – but I have to be okay with it. More and more I realize how exhausted I am with the constant pursuit of “health” or “fitness” or “thin” or whatever-it-is I’m telling myself I’m pursuing in that moment or on that day. I can’t live the rest of my life being insane about and around food. And I can’t live the rest of my life punishing myself with exercise to atone for all my “sins” of being “bad” when it comes to food and exercise. Not only “I can’t”, I WON’T.

I have to choose to love myself. I have to choose to love my body, just as it is, right this moment. I have to choose to take care of myself emotionally and physically. I have to choose to stop thinking I need to control my body through food and exercise.

The last two years has been proof that I cannot control my body and shouldn’t see that as a tangible goal. I’ve continually gained weight regardless of my physical activity level and calorie intake. I’ve had weeks and weeks where I ate barely anything and exercised like a fiend, and then weeks and weeks where I did nothing but sit on my couch and eat ice cream. My stress level and anxiety has resulted in a sporadic menstrual cycle which I then worsened by attempting to control it by going back on the birth control pill, which then spurned some of the worst migraines of my life and lead to my finding out that because of my ocular migraines I shouldn’t even be on hormonal birth control at all due to a MAJOR risk of stroke. I’ve been on and off an antidepressant which, though I believe helped me to get through what could have potentially been a terrifying and disastrous winter last year, also affected my already fucked menstrual cycle and lead to some weight fluctuation.

Mostly I have to stop constantly talking about how to control my body (or how you should control yours), stop feeding into the incessant fat-talk that not only my friends participate in, but also my husband and family, and start praising myself and others for things that have nothing to do with our physical appearance. A perfect example of this is to stop saying, “You look great!” when running into someone I maybe haven’t seen in a while, but to instead say, “I saw on Facebook you volunteered for two days with the clothing/food drive for the homeless [or whatever other meaningful event here]. That’s so great! How was that experience?” Because what your body looks like has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of person you are or the things you’ve accomplished intellectually or spiritually – and, oftentimes, nothing to do with the things you’re capable of physically accomplishing either.

So, I’m trying to love myself, which is actually really hard when you’re fighting depression. And it seems I’m fond of attempting these great feats of self-love during depressive episodes, but then I think, well, that’s probably when I need it most. For about the last month, part of my self-love has been practicing more intuitive eating and not making myself crazy by regularly tracking calories. I’ve maintained my weight while doing that. I just realized that now. I was just saying last night, “I’m sure I’m back up to, like, 215 pounds by now.” – but I’m not. I’m exactly where I was when I last weighed myself the first week in August. So, actually, I’ve maintained for almost 2 months. I’m slowly reaching a point where I don’t really think about food anymore outside of, “Should I thaw something for dinner tonight?” I’ve even had several days where I hit the late afternoon and realized I’ve been so busy with work or things at home that I forgot to eat. That’s something I haven’t done since my late teens/early 20’s. The last 5 years especially, everything has been about food – thinking about food, worrying about food, hating myself over food, praising myself or feeling morally superior for eating the “right kind of food”, constantly thinking about how food tastes/what I’ll eat next/when I can eat, etc. I read back through a lot of my early blog posts and I’m blown by how much moral significance I put on my food choices and how much pseudo-science I bought into.

I also see how desperate I was, desperate to just lose the weight, to recognize myself in photos – to find that “magic” diet or exercise routine that would somehow transform me into my 17 year old self again. But if I really stop and think about it for a few minutes… if I play psychologist on myself… I thought that having my 17 year old body back would also somehow provide me my 17 year old state-of-being back, that maybe somehow I could reset my life and make different choices.

That, obviously, has everything to do with the mental/emotional and absolutely nothing to do with the physical. Being 145lbs doesn’t reset the last 15 years of life and 5 years ago I believed it somehow would.

I’m working hard to stop living in the past so often and focus on living my present – in my present state-of-mind and my present state-of-body. To be “mindful” overall. Even with that, probably the largest goal I’ve set for myself is reducing my stress, which means making some really big changes in my life and lifestyle. I fear change in a major way, so this next year will be an exercise in having to constantly push myself outside of my comfort zone in order live my life the way it ought to be lived. I’ve found when “real life” starts to make me uncomfortable that’s when I tend to throw myself back into the "trying to lose weight" cycle. I use controlling my body as a distraction from the things that really scare me. When life gets a little too in-my-face, that’s when I’ll make a big statement about “recommitting” to “the process” – that I CAN lose 50lbs in a year! I CAN increase my lifts AND increase my run miles ALL while eating AT A DEFICIT! …feeling out of control of your mental health, your job, your friends, your marriage, your children? JUST CONTROL YOUR BODY, JESS!

This will be the hardest thing for me; to stay centered and to exercise control over my life choices instead of exercising control over my body.

My short-term health-based goals right now are:

reduce stress
get back to running, because I really do love it and it’s the best thing I do to support my mental health
get back to strength training to support my running and prevent injury
continue eating intuitively a wide variety of foods

Jess Has A Blog

Pages

5/26/16

Find me over at Wordpress!

2/22/16

Review of the last couple weeks

2/11/16

"Maybe it's your thyroid."

2/2/16

Gentleness

1/31/16

A Rough Sunday

1/29/16

Welcome Back

9/25/15

5 Years