Making Peace

After about a week (well, another week in an on-and-off string of many) of being incredibly frustrated with feeling like I work my butt off, burn all these calories, try to (mostly) make better food choices, eat ALL THE PROTEIN, feel like I’m starving all the time despite eating 2000-2300 calories/day regardless if those are junk food calories or whole food calories, and seeing little fluctuation on the scale (aside from UP), and no progress in inches lost in the places I most want/need to see it (ie: belly/hips), I finally had a revelation yesterday: I’m fucking done.

And what that really means is not, “I’m giving up on trying to be healthy/fit completely and am just gonna be lazy and sedentary and eat all the junky faux foods and be a big fat American.” What it means is, I’m done tracking and macro counting and logging and obsessing and feeling disappointed in myself for not being able to maintain an appropriate starvation level while maintaining an appropriately high activity level. I feel like what is supposed to be appropriate is not appropriate for me. Something is not working and the added stress of constantly wondering/worrying if I’m “doing it right” on top of the normal stress in my life definitely isn’t helping.

As a young woman, I was always able to maintain my (must lower) weight with regular light exercise and eating mostly at home and eating what I was hungry for when I was hungry for it… sometimes that meant ice cream for breakfast and eggs and bacon for dinner.

I’m committed to my exercise routine right now. I’m enjoying the FBB program and got my 3 workouts in this week. While I’ve gotten lazy on the rest-day yoga and weekend runs (kind of hard to run with a foot of snow on the ground), I’ve got the strength training down and I believe that’s the most important.

I know I’ve experimented with more intuitive eating in the past, but it usually only lasts a couple weeks because I all of sudden start freaking out that I’m eating too many carbs or not enough protein or because I start getting paranoid about gaining weight back, even though I’m not… but what’s funny about that is, I’m pretty sure I eat LESS overall calories when I’m not tracking and get plenty of protein, etc. Go figure.

Throughout yesterday and today and my consideration of this “no fucks to give about tracking food” idea, I’ve also thought about giving up my FitBit for a couple weeks. I’m obsessed with it and the stats it provides me with… especially the sleep tracking, lately. Part of me thinks it might be beneficial to stick it in my sock drawer for a couple weeks or a month, but the other part of me isn’t ready for that just yet. Perhaps when spring temperatures arrive I’ll give it a shot, just because I’m more active in the warmer months to begin with. I’ve had the Flex for about 9 months, and have had some sort of fitness tracking device attached to my person since December of 2012. As all of you regular readers know, I’ve also had a weight plateau since about the same time. I’m not saying one has anything to do with the other, but I do need to consider that perhaps my fancy fitness tracker isn’t really boosting my fitness or activity level and therefore just provides me with more information to obsess and worry and stress over. So much technology complicating everything!

I really wish life were just a little simpler in all aspects. There is a Fleet Foxes song that I love called “Helplessness Blues”, and the bridge of the song says, “If I had an orchard I’d work till I’m raw, if I had an orchard I’d work till I’m sore.” Sometimes I really wish I had grown up on a farm or something similar, that I had something to put physical and mental labor into, to produce something worth producing. To take pride in the things I accomplish on a daily basis. To do something that makes getting up at dawn and going to bed at dark feel worthwhile enough that you don’t worry about what you’re “giving up” by being early to bed and early to rise.

I’m sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent there.

So, basically it all boils down to: I’m going to stop logging food. Possibly permanently. I will still be logging my workouts just because that data feeds to my FitBit and helps keep those stats more accurate. I’ll also still be hanging out on MyFitnessPal. I enjoy poking around in the forums every now and then, as well as keeping up with my MFP friends and real-life friends who also use MFP. I can still continue to support others’ journeys as I navigate the bumps in the road of my own.

I’ll now be eating more at home, I’ll be eating what I want when I’m hungry for it. I refuse to feel guilty. I refuse to worry about my protein or carb intake or how many/how little calories I’m eating. All the macro information for every food on the planet is burned into my brain, anyway. I know what “costs” my body what. Moving forward I’m going to continue to focus on planning meals and buying more local and/or organic produce/meats/dairy for better quality food.

It’s time to focus on my future, on lifestyle changes I can really live with, on accepting where I am now both physically and mentally, loving myself and my body, loving myself enough to improve. It’s time to really think about all those things on my “Future Self” list and start putting them into action. It’s time to quit worrying so much about what other people think of what I’m eating/how I’m exercising and just do what works best for me and keeps me healthy.