Positive Thoughts Week 2 and some other stuff

Week of August 11th:

1. Running in the rain is awesome.
2. Running 4 times in a week is also awesome.
3. I am lucky to have such wonderful friends such as Melinda, and even luckier that she had dinner and drinks with me and let me talk about myself almost the whole time and didn't judge me.
4. Harvesting fresh fruit (picking blueberries from my dad's blueberry bush) is satisfying and fulfilling in a way that nothing else is. I hope to plan a veggie garden and perhaps my own blueberry bush next year so that I can experience this amazing feeling on a more regular basis. (As Fleet Foxes sings, "If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm raw.")

The last couple days have been pretty weird. Again. We had some people over for a last-minute cookout Saturday night and I went for a run beforehand. The run felt good and the weather was gorgeous. The food turned out well at the cookout and everyone seemed to have a good time. I felt a little detached from the whole thing, but wasn't totally miserable. I drank probably two more beers than was necessary, but was by no means drunk -- and I also smoked a few cigarettes. Huge mistake. My husband even told me, "You're gonna regret that in the morning." I sure as hell did. Ugh. I've been "slipping" on that a little too often lately. Once a month is once too often. I need to recommit to myself, get back to making it a "non-negotiable" for myself. 

Sunday I slept about 14 hours. Not all at once, but between overnight and naps throughout the day, about 14 hours. And I was still tired enough to go to bed for the night at 11:30. Monday morning I felt as if I couldn't have easily slept another 2 hours, even after 8 hours in bed. That's definitely the depression. My energy level should not be so low with the regular exercise I've been getting and decent sleep schedule I've been on. I got out and ran a few errands, but almost burst into tears in Target for no reason. The same thing happened to me today during a meeting at work. It's weird, it's like I would love to cry. To cry real hard for a real long time. It would feel so amazing, but I can't. I get a little misty, but then it just kind of glosses over and I go back to feeling numb/bored. Tonight that shifted to anger for a little while; frustration over the house being messy and a bunch of dirty dishes being left in the sink. I felt better after working out. 

Oh, yeah, so working out. I decided to do some strength training tonight for the first time in... um... a really long time. At least 6 weeks. It's been months (and months) since I've done any heavy lifting. I'm back at square-one, folks. It's incredibly frustrating. I'm back at bodyweight and my 8lbs dumbbells for everything. I've put together a basic circuit training routine and hope to be able to stick with that 3 times a week on top of my running. I'm not going to try to overload myself, but I could probably benefit from some yoga in my life, too. I'm going to try to motivate for some Sun Salutations in the morning, just 15 minutes or so. The stretch will do me good after all the leg work tonight. I can already feel my quads and hamstrings yelling at me, and this was just BODY WEIGHT!! I'm trying really hard not to get down on myself over this. I've been struggling with a lot emotionally and it's okay that I let some things go for a little while. It's also okay that it may take some time and patience to work back up to where I was a year ago. It's good that I'm even trying to get my lady muscles back. 

I'm struggling quite a bit with going back to eating a deficit. I did all right for a couple weeks when my appetite was real low, but I think the increase in activity has boosted my appetite and I'm find it hard to not eat at maintenance every day. Now, it could be with the increase in activity what used to be "maintenance" isn't anymore, but I'm also not trying to fool myself. It's one thing to have a 3,000 calorie day a few times a month, it's another to have it be twice a week. Part of me feels like if I'm hungry, I should eat - but another part of me wonders if that's just my body trying to stay at its current set point. A set point at which I no longer wish to be. I'm really not stressing too much over it at this moment and more trying to be positive about being able to keep motivated to exercise near-daily. Overall, the exercise consistency is more important right now for my mental health. Once that is under better control, I can focus on giving up the Oreos. 

Now to switch gears pretty quickly: after some thought and discussion, I'm going to let my therapist know next week that I may need to start seeing someone else. He's a nice dude, but I don't think he's providing me with the cognitive behavior-type therapy that I was really benefitting from with my last therapist. Maybe we can work it out and he can adjust the way he's been working with me or hopefully he can refer me to someone who can provide me with the tools I need. I've also scheduled an appointment next month with my doc to not only to get my blood work rerun to check my triglyceride levels, but also to discuss possibly going on an antidepressant for a little while. I'm really worried about how much worse things could get for me once winter starts to set in. Winter is hard enough on me when I'm in a "normal" emotional place, I can't even imagine the level I could hit this year without some kind of intervention; whether that's increasing the frequency of visits with my therapist or medication, something will have to give there. 

I will say I feel a bit better having made the appointment with my regular doc, and making the mental decision to talk with my feelings doctor. There's a little less weight hanging over my head. I'm also glad I made myself get the strength workout in tonight. As I said already, I hope I can keep the motivation to keep up with that and the running. 

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.

Just a picture?

Before we left for vacation I was feeling a bit down on myself. I've been in a scale-weight plateau for 18 months and was feeling like I was working hard for nothing. My vacation and the pictures we took there put me in a much better mood about my body image. Away from the stress of work/home (mostly work), I was able to see how awesome my body is. Also, something that was able to walk/sometimes run around for 12-14 hours a day for 5 days without too much complaining seems pretty amazing. I started feeling grateful and good about my body. I started really appreciating my body.

Appreciation is nice, but aesthetics are also nice... as shallow as that may be. This is where my daily #100daysofchange pictures come into play. I was feeling like I wasn't make any progress... and then while scanning through some photos, I noticed this:

In case anyone out there isn't good at calculating time...  that's approx 2 months. THAT IS A MAJOR DIFFERENCE!!!

Clearly the time and effort I'm putting into strength training is paying off and I may be finally reaching a point where scale weight means nothing to me anymore. It's all about body composition and building muscle.

Another positive this month: I posted this to my personal Facebook page the other day, but I'll share it here as well. It's been 74 days since I quit smoking, 33 days since I "cheated" and had a cigarette (one of only 3 since quitting), and 26 days since I used my e-cigarette.

I started up the Girls Gone Strong level 1 program on Monday - my back did just fine and felt so much better after finishing the workout. However, I'm dealing with some pretty bad post-vacation depression and managed to pack a lot into my social calendar for the week - all of which coincides with my usual workout time. I realized that my motivation, dedication, and willpower are not where they need to be and it might be a good idea to just let myself adjust a little bit. I've still been taking daily walks, and I'm committed to starting "for real" either over the weekend or Monday. It definitely helps to see the above picture! That's motivation to get back to it for sure!

50 days in and so many changes!

So, here I am at the 50 day mark, halfway through my #100daysofchange! The biggest thing I’ve gained from this experiment so far definitely has to be the improvement in my attitude and mood. There have still be been bad days, but they are becoming few and far between.

In the last 50 days I have:

Done some form of exercise/physical activity every day

Made an effort to sleep at 7-8 hours every night

Quit smoking

Cut back drinking

Stopped drinking caffeine

Stopped taking birth control in order to regulate mood and get rid of increased migraine frequency

Inadvertently started spending more time at home with my husband and children

Started playing guitar/writing music again

I haven’t had a migraine in weeks. I have only “broken” and smoked 2 cigarettes since March 8^th. I will use an e-cigarette on the weekends when I’m drinking, but even that I find myself using less and less. Sometimes it’s enough just to hold it. I found a major, major, MAJOR connection between sleep and alcohol intake with how depressed I am/was. If I sleep at least 6.5 hours, I’m okay. Anything less than that and I feel really depressed for 2 or 3 days. Similarly, if I drink 4 beers or less, I’m okay. Anything more than that and I feel really depressed for the next day or two. COMBINE lots of alcohol and less than 6.5 hours of sleep? We’re looking at a whole week of feeling pretty severely depressed and the desire to slip back into bad habits.

I think quitting caffeine has helped with my migraines quite a bit, and going off birth control may be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for my physical and mental health. And, no, I’m not trying to have another baby. Various other forms of birth control are being used CONSISTENTLY, and I’m tracking my basal temp and cycles in order to avoid high fertility days completely. While I think recognizing how important sleep is when it comes to my mood, the lack of faux hormones has also had a big impact. I feel more in control of my emotions overall. This could all be psychosomatic, but I’ll take it regardless.

So far I’m really enjoying this journey. I still haven’t found my “thing” when it comes to diet/fitness and that equaling weight loss, but I think I’m starting to realize that shouldn’t even be my focus in this whole experience. I recently have been questioning myself regularly regarding my feelings of disappointment on the scale not moving (or not moving in the direction I want it to). Do I enjoy the exercise I choose to do? Yes. Does it make me feel good to eat more things like fish and veggies? Yes, absolutely. Do I feel comfortable in my body and the clothes I choose to wear? For the most part. I still have “trouble areas” that I feel negatively about, and I still have days that are filled with Fat & Ugly attacks, but overall I feel okay with how I look. So if I’m happy, healthy, and comfortable – why should weight loss even be an issue? I don’t know the answer to that right now. “Because I want the scale to reflect my hard work” comes to mind, but the scale is a terrible judge of how hard someone is working to improve their overall physical and mental health. This is one of those pieces of information that I know to be true and yet still have a hard time believing for whatever reason.

So I still struggle with scale-weight, and I still struggle with calorie tracking. These past two weeks I’ve been wanting to jump back on the quit-calorie-tracking train. It’s starting to really stress me out again. I put myself in a 400 calorie deficit from what I found to be my maintenance number and I’ve upped my exercise significantly. I initially lost a few pounds, but now I’ve gained those back. A couple people suggested that since I increased my exercise (and therefore TDEE), I might need to be eating more. WHO KNOWS?! I try to following what my FitBit shows, especially on high activity days, but I just don’t really know what my true TDEE is. These are all estimates. So, it could be WAY higher, or WAY lower. Although I think if it were too much lower I’d be gaining a lot more weight than just a few pounds over the course of 2 months… It’s such a pain in the butt, and this is why I sometimes feel like I need to just leave it alone. My most successful adult weight loss came from doing strength training regularly (though lazily – not pushing myself or upping weight, etc.), slacking on cardio, not counting calories but eating most my meals at home (and mostly packaged, at that), and indulging in beer and bar food 2 or 3 times a week. Go figure. I know I’ve said this before, but it’s like I need to unlearn all these things I’ve educated myself on in the last year or more. So I’m a little stuck there.

Overall I’m really proud of how far I’ve come in my lifestyle changes in the last 50 days, but there are obviously still things I struggle with and things that I still need to work on.

Enjoy some (slightly blurry) progress photos from April 13th:

Here’s to the next 50 days!

My rocky relationship with running and the fat on my body

At some point last summer I started running. I don’t know why. I’ve always kind of hated running. I would run every once in a while as a teenager, just because that’s what people did to stay in shape, right? My mom and dad have always been big recreational runners. My mom used to get up at 5am everyday to run when I was little bitty. That and Jane Fonda aerobic videos was how she lost her pregnancy weight after I was born. My dad still runs on-and-off throughout the year for weight loss/maintenance, but also because it’s a mental release for him. He’s always told me he does his best thinking on a run and feels so much better emotionally after running. Throughout my running experience I’d regularly been plagued with shin splints and similar injuries, plus I never really experienced the “runners high” probably because I was very active in my everyday life anyway and was just “high on life” most of the time. Essentially there was not much that drew me to it other than a great-big Fat-And-Ugly Attack. Then I’d throw some sneakers on and go run a couple miles and feel like I did something healthy for myself.

My experience with running last year was very different. I invested in some good shoes, took it easy, and learned to run more on the balls of my feet and less slamming my heal into the ground to avoid the shin splints I’d regularly suffered. I did mostly intervals on my runs as I was dabbling in the “Primal” way of exercising at the time, but realized very quickly that sometimes I just really enjoyed a steady-state run for a little while. It was my time to be alone with my thoughts (and my music), and I understood for the first time in my life what my dad meant when he talked about that mental release during a run. I guess maybe that is similar to the “runners high”. It definitely boosted my mood, as well. Considering the depression I was/am currently battling, this was/is obviously a great side effect.

While I didn’t run regularly (or at all, really) over the winter thanks to the Polar Vortex, I definitely missed it a lot. I signed up for my first 5K a couple months ago (as most of you regular readers know), and since the weather has started to thaw out a bit I’ve been trying to get out at least twice a week in prep for my race. But what I realized last night is: running is making me feel my age. I can feel all the aches and pains in my joints that I never experienced in my 2+ years of on-and-off weight lifting. And I don’t think I like that.

(Full disclosure: I did experience some lower back pain over the winter due to poor squat form, but once I corrected my form the pain quickly subsided.)

Another thing I don’t particularly like is feeling the fat on my body jiggle around when I’m running… which is something I’ve noticed more of lately. Special thanks to those fat stores I put on over the winter while slacking on my diet and my exercise… A friend posted on Facebook yesterday about being frustrated with what she called “saddle bags” – but essentially she just meant having hips much larger than your top, making it hard to find or make clothing that fits properly. This term must have gotten stuck in my brain, because last night as I was getting in the shower, I started noticing that I have actual saddle bags; these really not-fun little fatty pockets on my hips that I’d never really noticed (or chose to ignore) before. Some of you may be thinking, “WHAA?! No! LIES!”, but they’re incredibly easy to disguise by simply wearing some kind of clothing! So of course you wouldn’t have ever noticed them in the photos I post here, or even in real life if you saw me – because I’m generally not nude. But what I also noticed is that I’m starting to slim up and firm up everywhere except where I most need/want to, which of course is my lower belly/hip area. These are always the last fat stores to go – especially in women of child-bearing age. Whomp, whomp. But there IS progress happening.

I keep thinking to myself, “Self, just commit to your strength training and HIIT and be a little smarter with your food choices – the fat will burn off.” And just about every weekend I think to myself, “Starting this week I’m going to avoid processed food and be really on point with my diet.” – and then I’m not. But I also realized that eating for my training is much like my wanting to quit smoking or wanting to get more sleep at night; I wanted and “tried” to do these things for several years, but it really just didn’t click for me until this year. “Dieting down” may not click for me for a while longer, and really the most disappointing part of that is I will have to purchase shorts in a larger size for this summer. I’m trying really hard not to let that push me into a deep depression, because it’s really nothing worth being depressed over right now. I’m on the right track. I need to just let this serve as reminder to keep on top of my diet/exercise moving forward, and not give myself a 3-4 month “break”. I honestly think the largest part of this equation is going to be returning my focus to lifting and move away from steady-state cardio. Last spring/early summer I was exercising less than 3-4 times a week, doing minimal cardio, and lifting lots of weights – this seemed to agree with my body, although it was around the same time that I started falling into a really deep depression. I think once I wrap this 5k, my runs will be strictly for fun/mental health, mostly intervals, and mostly short distance. This will better benefit my strength training and fat loss while still offering me the mental health benefits of a run.