It's a phrase that Jillian Michaels is very fond of - and that lots of my friends and bloggers and folks within the health/fitness community have grabbed onto for dear life.
"No excuses."
A lot of the time when I see people throwing this around, posting inspirational memes featuring it, or sharing their gym check-in or weekly progress photo splattered with this text, I think to myself, "Well, actually, there are ots of very real and serious excuses for why someone may not be able to workout/diet to a certain intensity." I sort of brush this mantra as a bunch of malarkey, going along my merry way doing the same things over and over that aren't particularly working for me when it comes to the realm of get-fit/get-slim.
Mike and the kids and I just returned from our almost-annual Thanksgiving trip down to Arkansas. The weather was beautiful this year and we did lots of fun things along with spending time with friends and family. We took Nolan to his first movie (Big Hero 6), went to the zoo, hit the Museum of Discovery (super fun, we will definitely go back!), celebrated Nolan's 3rd birthday, spent a few afternoons at the playground, took walks, etc. Keeping so busy, I hit my or exceeded my 10,000 step goal everyday and slept hard almost every night. With all this keeping busy and visiting and Thanksgiving-ing, calorie tracking fell to the wayside. We ate a lot of home-cooked meals at my Granny's house and went to a few local mom-and-pop restaurants, both of which are not easy to track accurately. Tuesday-Saturday I did zero calorie tracking/counting.
(I promise this is all going to be relevant in a minute.)
We got back home Sunday afternoon, we just wanted to get home as quickly as possible and ate a LOT of fast food for breakfast and lunch to avoid stopping to extended periods of time on the final 360 mile leg. We were also exhausted when we got home. And starving. We ordered out for dinner... and then Mike and I decided Dairy Queen was in order for catching up on The Walking Dead. Talking about some seriously poor food choices. I decided to log the calories anyway - to get back "on track"... I hit 3500 calories for the day and I'm sure I missed at least a couple food items.
Now, while I was in Arkansas doing my thing, not counting calories, eating whatever I wanted, I had several moment of, "This calorie counting thing is a bunch of crap and I'm so much happier this way! I can totally just whatever I want forever and be fine!" But Sunday showed me that, no, I really can't. Monday was a similar experience. Back at home, back to work, and not a completely out-of-the-ordinary pizza dinner at my in-laws, which included some ice cream I ate but didn't really want. After getting home I decided to have some bread and olive oil and a little bit of fruit... aside from my morning oatmeal, the best food choices I made all day. I still went over my calorie target by a couple hundred. I couldn't motivate to do my workout, although Mike and I took a walk at lunch. I've completely fallen off the bandwagon with my #365daysofchange updates. I feel like I'm lying to myself and my followers because I'm not really working on any type of real, honest "change" right now.
Bear with me while I shift into reverse for a moment and revisit what I said a couple paragraphs up: I'm going along doing the same things over and over that aren't working for me in my efforts to lose weight/fat.
This realization hit me like a ton of bricks today. I've been harping on myself formonths years about "commitment", "motivation", "drive", and "willpower" - but really what it boils down to is this: I'm never going to change my habits and my lifestyle by doing things I don't really enjoy and can't get excited for. I can't keep restarting the same workout programs and/or diet strategies when I'm consistently falling off within a few weeks or months. Something obviously isn't clicking for me if it's so easy for me to just drop it all and not have a single care to give about whether or not I get back "on track".
Part of me thinks maybe I should just delete MyFitnessPal and Fitocracy and Runtastic and MapMyWalk and all the other zillions of health and fitness related apps I have living on my phone that drive me bonkers and make me feel guilty and wrong in how I live my life and the action I choose to take throughout each day. (Run-on sentence alert!)
Sometimes I wonder if I am even capable of just letting it all go.
The other part of me think that I am just making excuses. And there should be No Excuses. Just do it. No pain, no gain. And all those other cliche fitness mantras. Just baked the four pounds of chicken every Sunday. Buy and bake ALL THE SWEET POTATOES. Prepare ALL THE FRUIT and ALL THE SALAD to snack on. Get ride of the Oreos and the Danish butter cookies and the ice cream. Say NO to the weekly ritual of eating a Blizzard while catching up on Walking Dead, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Modern Family, Gotham, or any of the other 37 television shows I "have" to watch!! ...say NO to watching so much goddamn television! Stop wasting so much time on social media! Say YES to funneling the eating out money and beer money and Dairy Queen money to a gym membership. Say YES to finding a group of gym buddies to motivate and inspire me. Say YES to earlier bedtimes and earlier wake-up times to fit in the run, the circuits, the HIIT, the heavy lifting. Say YES to taking care of and loving myself and my body so that I can be healthy and live a long time with my husband and our beautiful children.
Why is that all so hard to say yes to?
Why is it so easy for me, as I sit here typing this up, to be putting together counter-arguments in my head? "You've gotta live life, Jess. You've gotta have fun. You've done so much better about going out and how many drinks you have each week. You love trivia and that group of friends and those 2 beers you have with that delicious brick oven pizza every Wednesday. Why should you give that up? And your tv shows... that's something you and Mike do together a couple times every week, something that guarantees you'll make time for each other. That's important, too, right? Not to mention the kids... if you're gone to the gym around your work schedule everyday, when do you spend time with them?"
Obviously some of these points are slightly exaggerated - have we all met me before? Exaggeration is my biggest talent. Obviously an hour at the gym isn't going to ruin my relationship with my kids. And giving up some television isn't going to ruin my life or my marriage. But this is a great example of the battles that rages inside my brain on a daily basis. I have this person that I think I want to be, but I can't decide if I really actually want to be that person. It seems that I if I really did want to change and become this other me, maybe it would be easier to make the right decisions to put myself on that path. Do I not because I'm I'll lose friends? Maybe. Because change is scary? Most definitely.
I also have to ask myself if I'll regret the sacrifices later in life. ...but I can't imagine I could regret reversing a path toward heart disease or diabetes or cancer. I can't imagine I could regret living to an age as a healthy, able-bodies individual vs a sick person.
Earlier this year, as I approached my 30th birthday, I kept having these attacks of mortality. It was what drove me to start my #100daysofchange challenge. And yet, those attacks have fled - here I am wondering to myself, why can I not grasp my mortality? Why am I feeling lately like I have all the time in the world to create good habits and get healthy? Most importantly, why do I look at my kids' crappy eating habits and, at least for James, total aversion to any type of physical activity and think to myself that it's okay because they are young and have all this time to change those bad habits? Why can I not commit the time and money to getting them involved in something active even just a couple times a week?
It just really isn't all that hard. And, yet, I guess I'm just selfish because my own health and my family's health never seems to be at the top of my priority list. I'd say maybe it's the depression, but I wonder if that's an excuse. "No excuses."
Here we are in December already (when did that happen???) and I don't know how I'm going to move forward into 2015. I don't how to reset my life goals and get a grip on the path I'd like to pursue. I have some serious thinking and planning to do. When I will have a few hours or days or peace and quiet to do that, who knows?
Deciding to get back to updating this blog twice-weekly could be a great first step, so I guess we'll start there.
"No excuses."
A lot of the time when I see people throwing this around, posting inspirational memes featuring it, or sharing their gym check-in or weekly progress photo splattered with this text, I think to myself, "Well, actually, there are ots of very real and serious excuses for why someone may not be able to workout/diet to a certain intensity." I sort of brush this mantra as a bunch of malarkey, going along my merry way doing the same things over and over that aren't particularly working for me when it comes to the realm of get-fit/get-slim.
Mike and the kids and I just returned from our almost-annual Thanksgiving trip down to Arkansas. The weather was beautiful this year and we did lots of fun things along with spending time with friends and family. We took Nolan to his first movie (Big Hero 6), went to the zoo, hit the Museum of Discovery (super fun, we will definitely go back!), celebrated Nolan's 3rd birthday, spent a few afternoons at the playground, took walks, etc. Keeping so busy, I hit my or exceeded my 10,000 step goal everyday and slept hard almost every night. With all this keeping busy and visiting and Thanksgiving-ing, calorie tracking fell to the wayside. We ate a lot of home-cooked meals at my Granny's house and went to a few local mom-and-pop restaurants, both of which are not easy to track accurately. Tuesday-Saturday I did zero calorie tracking/counting.
(I promise this is all going to be relevant in a minute.)
We got back home Sunday afternoon, we just wanted to get home as quickly as possible and ate a LOT of fast food for breakfast and lunch to avoid stopping to extended periods of time on the final 360 mile leg. We were also exhausted when we got home. And starving. We ordered out for dinner... and then Mike and I decided Dairy Queen was in order for catching up on The Walking Dead. Talking about some seriously poor food choices. I decided to log the calories anyway - to get back "on track"... I hit 3500 calories for the day and I'm sure I missed at least a couple food items.
Now, while I was in Arkansas doing my thing, not counting calories, eating whatever I wanted, I had several moment of, "This calorie counting thing is a bunch of crap and I'm so much happier this way! I can totally just whatever I want forever and be fine!" But Sunday showed me that, no, I really can't. Monday was a similar experience. Back at home, back to work, and not a completely out-of-the-ordinary pizza dinner at my in-laws, which included some ice cream I ate but didn't really want. After getting home I decided to have some bread and olive oil and a little bit of fruit... aside from my morning oatmeal, the best food choices I made all day. I still went over my calorie target by a couple hundred. I couldn't motivate to do my workout, although Mike and I took a walk at lunch. I've completely fallen off the bandwagon with my #365daysofchange updates. I feel like I'm lying to myself and my followers because I'm not really working on any type of real, honest "change" right now.
Bear with me while I shift into reverse for a moment and revisit what I said a couple paragraphs up: I'm going along doing the same things over and over that aren't working for me in my efforts to lose weight/fat.
This realization hit me like a ton of bricks today. I've been harping on myself for
Part of me thinks maybe I should just delete MyFitnessPal and Fitocracy and Runtastic and MapMyWalk and all the other zillions of health and fitness related apps I have living on my phone that drive me bonkers and make me feel guilty and wrong in how I live my life and the action I choose to take throughout each day. (Run-on sentence alert!)
Sometimes I wonder if I am even capable of just letting it all go.
The other part of me think that I am just making excuses. And there should be No Excuses. Just do it. No pain, no gain. And all those other cliche fitness mantras. Just baked the four pounds of chicken every Sunday. Buy and bake ALL THE SWEET POTATOES. Prepare ALL THE FRUIT and ALL THE SALAD to snack on. Get ride of the Oreos and the Danish butter cookies and the ice cream. Say NO to the weekly ritual of eating a Blizzard while catching up on Walking Dead, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Modern Family, Gotham, or any of the other 37 television shows I "have" to watch!! ...say NO to watching so much goddamn television! Stop wasting so much time on social media! Say YES to funneling the eating out money and beer money and Dairy Queen money to a gym membership. Say YES to finding a group of gym buddies to motivate and inspire me. Say YES to earlier bedtimes and earlier wake-up times to fit in the run, the circuits, the HIIT, the heavy lifting. Say YES to taking care of and loving myself and my body so that I can be healthy and live a long time with my husband and our beautiful children.
Why is that all so hard to say yes to?
Why is it so easy for me, as I sit here typing this up, to be putting together counter-arguments in my head? "You've gotta live life, Jess. You've gotta have fun. You've done so much better about going out and how many drinks you have each week. You love trivia and that group of friends and those 2 beers you have with that delicious brick oven pizza every Wednesday. Why should you give that up? And your tv shows... that's something you and Mike do together a couple times every week, something that guarantees you'll make time for each other. That's important, too, right? Not to mention the kids... if you're gone to the gym around your work schedule everyday, when do you spend time with them?"
Obviously some of these points are slightly exaggerated - have we all met me before? Exaggeration is my biggest talent. Obviously an hour at the gym isn't going to ruin my relationship with my kids. And giving up some television isn't going to ruin my life or my marriage. But this is a great example of the battles that rages inside my brain on a daily basis. I have this person that I think I want to be, but I can't decide if I really actually want to be that person. It seems that I if I really did want to change and become this other me, maybe it would be easier to make the right decisions to put myself on that path. Do I not because I'm I'll lose friends? Maybe. Because change is scary? Most definitely.
I also have to ask myself if I'll regret the sacrifices later in life. ...but I can't imagine I could regret reversing a path toward heart disease or diabetes or cancer. I can't imagine I could regret living to an age as a healthy, able-bodies individual vs a sick person.
Earlier this year, as I approached my 30th birthday, I kept having these attacks of mortality. It was what drove me to start my #100daysofchange challenge. And yet, those attacks have fled - here I am wondering to myself, why can I not grasp my mortality? Why am I feeling lately like I have all the time in the world to create good habits and get healthy? Most importantly, why do I look at my kids' crappy eating habits and, at least for James, total aversion to any type of physical activity and think to myself that it's okay because they are young and have all this time to change those bad habits? Why can I not commit the time and money to getting them involved in something active even just a couple times a week?
It just really isn't all that hard. And, yet, I guess I'm just selfish because my own health and my family's health never seems to be at the top of my priority list. I'd say maybe it's the depression, but I wonder if that's an excuse. "No excuses."
Here we are in December already (when did that happen???) and I don't know how I'm going to move forward into 2015. I don't how to reset my life goals and get a grip on the path I'd like to pursue. I have some serious thinking and planning to do. When I will have a few hours or days or peace and quiet to do that, who knows?
Deciding to get back to updating this blog twice-weekly could be a great first step, so I guess we'll start there.
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