Deciding

I’ve decided to not be injured anymore.

That’s not to say that I’m magically healed. I’m not. I’m getting there, but likely still have another month or two before I’ll be back at 100%.

But what I mean is, I’ve decided to quit letting it drag me down. While I didn’t think I was really feeling so much that way anymore, some recent time to sit quietly with my thoughts and feelings has revealed otherwise. I’ve recently fallen back into some bad habits (outside of food/fitness stuff) which I’m now recognizing as a desperate grab for some kind of control over my life. For the last several months I “controlled” my exercise and food (although definitely more so the exercise), and when my back/leg started hurting I lost that. While I’ve been consistently in PT twice a week it’s been really difficult for me to look at that as “a workout”, even though that’s exactly what PT is.

Unfortunately I’ve reached a point where I can no longer afford to continue sinking money into physical therapy. I’ve struggled a lot with this over the last couple weeks – part of me felt like, “I’m on the road to recovery, they’ve done what they can do, I can’t keep spending the money”, while the other part of me said, “You’ve made such improvement in the last two weeks – surely just a couple weeks more and you’ll be almost back to normal. It would be a shame to quit now and delay your recovery!”

Well, that’s been almost two weeks ago now and while I’ve continued to improve, I’m not “almost back to normal” and my budget can’t take the strain anymore. I don’t even know what the real total will be at this point since my PT’s office hasn’t billed all my visits yet – but the few visits they’ve already billed the insurance, I’m looking at a remaining patient responsibility of over $600. I can no longer ignore the financial strain of continuing to go.

I’ve considered checking out either a chiropractor or massage therapist as an alternative, but I’m not fully decided on that factor. I hope that may be a bit cheaper (I know the massage would be, anyway), but I can’t be 100% sure until I start making some calls.

In the meantime, I have one more PT appointment scheduled for Thursday which I’ve decided to go ahead and attend, and I’ve decided to recommit myself to regular exercise. I did all right those first few weeks about continuing to walk almost daily, but then I started feeling sorry for myself and that all fell off. I guess not “all” – I’m still regularly walking on my lunch break. But my lunch break walks are quite a bit different than my more fast-paced, get-the-heart-rate-up walks I was doing in the evenings. I’m also healed to a point where I can do some strength training. I can do push-ups and even a few squats without pain. I think I may have even regained enough flexibility to do a little gentle yoga. As long as these activities remain pain-free, there’s no reason I can’t regularly start incorporating them into some sort of normal exercise regimen.

Getting back to exercise will be my main focus right now. I can’t even begin to tackle food. I’m more out of control with what I’m eating than I think I’ve ever been in my entire life. This is new territory for me, this level. I’ve considered ditching the calorie tracking (for the millionth time over the last year), but I’m also self-aware enough to know that this is me just trying to justify poor choices by not having to consistently SEE those poor choices reflected on my food diary. One thing I know about myself, though - if I’m putting the work into my body with exercise, it makes it 100 times easier to make better food choices. I’m hoping by putting my focus on the exercise, the food chaos will come around. In the meantime I’ll continue my daily tracking regardless of how often my macros are out of whack or my calories are above the goal line.

I know I’ve probably said this before… several times… but I’m hoping I can allow myself to take this as an opportunity to take things easy, start back at “beginner”, build a good foundation, and prevent future injury and burnout. While even the thought of starting from the beginning is frustrating to me (LIFT ALL THE HEAVY THINGS!! RUN ALL THE MILES!! EAT ALL THE PROTEIN!!), I need to use this whole experience as my “ah-ha” moment. It’s been hard to learn from all of this instead of just being angry and hateful toward myself. It’s been hard to not have the distraction of “the workout routine” from all these things bouncing around in my head regarding my life and my family and my goals as a human being. It’s been tough, but it’s also been good in a lot of ways.

So this is where I am, Readers. This recommitment also applies to this blog and a return to regular updates. As usual: stay tuned.