6/11/2017 0 Comments Let Me Take a SelfieMy phone is filled with selfies. These selfies are taken with self-love and self loathing, all wrapped up into thousands of pixelated components that cannot even begin to convey the differences between what I see in them and what you see in them. I take pictures of myself, not out of vanity, but because after 3+ years of trying to convince myself that she is me, and I am she, there’s still this weird part of my brain that cannot comprehend the fact, nor am I sure it ever will. I spent 26 years of my life staring at myself in the mirror, noting, begrudgingly, each unaesthetic fold or lump or sag in my body that did not match the images that I saw on tv or in the magazines. I memorized that image much like I memorized Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech in eleventh grade. I can rattle off those lines in the play just as easily as I can tell you how large in diameter my thighs were at my heaviest weight. The headline of this blog is “A Realistic Look at Losing Weight.” Here is the reality: you aren’t going to break a habit that you’ve held for the vast majority of your life in a single moment. After snapping that selfie, you are going to experience a barrage of thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, that you will struggle to appropriately analyze. If you are like me, and have a type A personality, that can be very difficult. The only way I know how to describe this to a person who has not actually experienced it, is by walking you through my thoughts after viewing a photo of myself. When I look at this photo, here is a running commentary of what I see... (Fun fact: my husband took this picture at least seven times before I found one that was acceptable.) “The lines around my face make me look soooo much older than I actually am...I wish my boobs didn’t sit so low... All I can see is my gut jutting out in front of me.... Do I have cankles or is that just weird lighting? How can a person have cankles and ALSO such veiny feet?...That black strap falls in a weird place on my shoulder and makes me look like a football player...I wish my biceps looked more defined to explain why my arms are so beefy...Elbow fat...knee fat...back fat...So much booty! As I was analyzing this photo at 9:16 p.m. on a Sunday night, while my lovely husband was laying in bed, patiently waiting to see if he needed to snap yet another shot, I realized something. I had to diligently search for each of the things that I identified as “unattractive” in this picture. I had to look over it multiple times, zoom in, then out, then in again, question whether the problem was actually present or due to weird lighting, etc. If it took that much effort for me to find those problems in this photograph, who the hell else is going to find them? No one! This is applicable to every moment that I have spent staring in the mirror, no less than 2 inches from the glass, fussing over the stray hair in my eyebrows, or that tiny zit that showed up on my cheek overnight. All the time and energy that all of us spend stressing over things that no one will ever notice is time that is absolutely wasted. An image is not meant to be picked apart pixel by pixel, just as a Monet is not meant to be viewed by individual brush strokes. Look at the picture as a whole. Does it reflect the goals that you've set for yourself more appropriately than those you have taken in the past? That is the only question that you need to worry about when it comes to working on making yourself a better, healthier you. Does this mean that I won't take my next selfie 7 times? No. Old habits die hard, but the next time I catch myself zooming in on my picture to see if my gut is visible, at least I'll have the perspective of this realization to stop me in my tracks. Maybe one day I'll reach a point at which I won't even bother analyzing any longer. My fingers are crossed...
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6/4/2017 1 Comment In Praise of DiscomfortI feel my heart beating through the veins in my temples. I taste my barely digested lunch in the back of my throat. I am convinced that I cannot even so much as blink because, if I do, my eyes will not reopen. Each inhalation of air is more taxing than the last and if I were able to see my lungs, I imagine they would appear collapsed and charred, submitting to my inability to quell the anxieties that restrict my breathing. My vision is slightly blurred, and even though I look up at the clock, the numbers appear to be as familiar to me as quantum physics. The barbell that sits at my feet felt so light only 3 minutes ago, yet mustering up the energy to bend over and pick it up even once more seems as though it would be a feat of strength superior to any I’ve accomplished before...I will have to do this 19 more times, and then run 400 meters before I can say I am done. My brain shouts an internal tirade, telling me that I can’t do it, every muscle in my body rebelling against any movement that does not include collapsing to the floor… I bend over, trembling, sweat dripping from my brow to the floor despite the fact that it is just barely above 50 degrees beyond the bay door that stands wide open on the other side of the gym, a finish line taunting me from afar… “Pick up the bar, Crysta!” A voice that I cannot identify yells at me from across the room. Taking my best shot at a deep breath, I set my back, and lift the 95 pounds from the ground to my shoulders: once..twice...19 more times. My lead-filled legs stumble toward the door and I somehow complete the final 400m, although I could not tell you any details about the time in between. With my hands on my chest, I collapse to the floor, feeling the shallow rise and fall of my lungs, and note the time on the clock. A few people offer fist bumps and accolades as they walk by me, already recovered. And I am absolutely spent, but feel absolutely accomplished. I’m not very good at numbers, but I would venture to say that about 82% of my life has been spent avoiding situations similar to the aforementioned. Consequently, that is also why I’ve spent 82% of my life overweight and wondering why no exercise seemed to be effective in helping me change that. I remember my favorite gift for Christmas in sixth grade: a pair of flared jeans in a junior’s size 13. I was super stoked! With absolutely zero grace, I ran to the bathroom and clamored my way into one leg of the jeans, and then halfway into the other...Halfway. There was a soft knock on the door and my mom entered the bathroom to find me crying in the corner. “They don’t fit. You can take them back.” This was the first moment in my life that I realized that I was overweight. Not long afterward, my mom and I signed up for memberships at our local YMCA. My mom loved the Spinning classes, and I decided that riding a bike couldn't be all that bad, so I joined her every Monday and Wednesday evening. However, at any given moment during class, I could be caught goofing around: nodding my head to the beat of the music, making jokes about my mom’s facial expressions, singing instead of listening to the instructor. It was no surprise that I never heard her yell at me to turn the resistance up on the bike, nor that I left the class having barely broken a sweat, yet I was shocked when, a month later, I had lost no weight. Fast forward to my senior year of high school. This was one of my more serious attempts at working out. For the first time in my life I had a boyfriend, and as the end of the year approached, excitement for prom filtered into almost every conversation at school. With the realization that I might have the opportunity to go, my motivation to lose weight was sparked yet again. About three years prior to this, my mom had purchased an elliptical machine that, for the most part, sat idly in our living room, dust accumulating in the facets of the footholds. After a very squeaky yelp from the unused joints of the machine, I began a routine of spending 20 minutes on it every other afternoon. Although the dust had been brushed off of the pedals, the resistance knob and screen indicating pace and progress remained blanketed. Prom night had come and gone, but I decided to remain with this workout routine in the exact same manner: plodding along on the elliptical at a pace that allowed me to comfortably laugh at whichever midday sitcom was on television at the moment. Suddenly, I stopped shedding pounds. Then, I stopped trying. As I reminisce on these moments in my life, I can identify one stark difference between them and the scenario with which I opened this blog: discomfort. When I attempted a workout regimen in the past, I was merely going through the motions. I was moving, but staying entirely within my comfort zone. For a person who has been inactive for much of his/her life, any movement inevitably leads to progres...until it doesn’t. What I did not understand about fitness when I was younger is that progress cannot occur without discomfort. At least in terms of fitness, I generally gauge effort based on my level of exertion. At some point during my workout, I must encounter a moment that makes me question my physical capacity to complete the workout, a moment that requires me to have an inner monologue with myself to keep on going (within reason, of course). Do I feel like I could throw up? Sure. But am I going to? No. Keep on going. Does the weight feel heavy? Absolutely. But do I have the strength to pick it up again? Yes. Keep on going. Let me pause for a second here so that I’m not misunderstood. I do not advocate for pushing yourself to the point of passing out, vomiting, getting injured, etc in a workout. That is unsafe and, quite frankly, stupid. However, I AM advocating for reaching a level of smart and manageable discomfort. CrossFit Founder and CEO Greg Glassman is noted as saying, “We fail at the margins of our experience.” If I continue to take Spinning classes, but never turn up the resistance knob, I have failed. If I step on the elliptical and don’t try to go faster than what I’ve gone in the past, I have failed. The failure is not based on whether I could or could not manage higher resistance or a faster pace, but in the fact that I did not allow myself to reach a certain level of discomfort to strive for them. The margins of our experience encapsulate all of the things that we’ve already accomplished. There is merit in repeating the things we’ve already accomplished, but only with the objective to eventually expand those margins. Striving for anything less results in standing atop the dreaded “plateau” of fitness where many of us become frustrated and give up altogether. The cogent resolution to this is reaching beyond those margins of experience: moving faster, lifting heavier, jumping higher, adding resistance, and, in general, pushing harder. That can get uncomfortable, as it should if you expect to see progress. However, once you face that discomfort head on, something really quite interesting happens: you begin to embrace it, welcome it, even. Mentally, you are creating the facilities necessary to understand that discomfort and acquiesce to it. I chase that discomfort. I long for it. It is an indication that I am pushing on my margins of experience, and even if I am the very last person to complete a workout, I know that I have not failed because I’ve done everything in my power, in that moment, to make myself better. I’m an English teacher, so I’ll admit to a few things. First, I am particularly affected by words, in general. I have genuine emotional reactions to words (both positive and negative, depending…). Second, I am particularly analytical of written word. I tend to pick them apart to find complexities in the author’s meaning, rather than taking them at face value. So, when reading certain “motivational quotes” typically associated with fitness, you’ll have to forgive me for both of these tendencies, as I reveal my genuine aversion to the following "motivational quotes" that are completely counterproductive. 1. "Do it for the after selfie." There are a variety of quotes similar to this one floating around in cyberspace, and they keep multiplying. They all kind of piss me off. This is the mentality that generates more people at the gym taking pictures of their muscles than actually working on them. You should never “do it for the after selfie.” Who is going to see your “after selfie”? One of your 3,402 instagram “friends” who you’ll never meet and couldn’t care less about your personal progress? This inspires people to workout for gratuitous attention, and when things get tough in someone’s fitness journey, how far will those “likes” get them? If you do not put merit into personal motivation in the beginning of your journey and rely on gratuitous satisfaction from uninvested spectators, you will have no one to motivate you when your selfies are lost in cyberspace with the billions of other ones that no one cares about anymore. 2. "Once you see results, it becomes an addiction." At face value, I suppose there is not much harm in this quote. I see the underlying intention, yet there are two things about it that leave a bad taste in my mouth. First, just like any other thing in America, we are attaching a reward system to fitness. Why do results have to be the reason that working out is enjoyable? What happens when you stop seeing results and hit a plateau? Does that mean you’ll lose your love for fitness? Unfortunately, for most people, that is the case. We begin a workout regiment with the expectation of immediate results, and then when we don’t see them, we lose motivation, lose the results that we may have obtained, but did not notice, and have to start all over again...IF we start all over again. Here’s a novel idea: don’t worry about results. Just be happy that you are moving, and as the owner of my CrossFit gym always says, “Enjoy the process.” Second, it makes a healthy practice akin to something with an inherently negative connotation: addiction. We live in a country that more often than not glorifies laziness to the point that exercising carries a negative stigma. For example, when I tell people that I regularly do CrossFit, I usually get a sideways glance, followed by the accusation that I am “an addict” and probably “crazy.” Why does a regimented schedule for my fitness paint me as an addict? Does that also make me a workaholic because I go to work daily? Am I addicted to food because I eat dinner every night? No. Then why does the frequency at which I engage in difficult physical activity somehow consistently produces a negative reaction? Quotes that associate words like “addiction” to fitness perpetuate the negativity that our already lazy country attaches to it. 3. "Sweat is just fat crying." I mostly hate this one because it’s just stupid and teaches ignorance. Sweating is a natural means of cooling the body down when it is overheated (or a reaction to intense emotions like stress or fear). There is no direct correlation between losing fat and sweating. According to livestrong.com author Krista Sheehan, “Although sweating is necessary to help you achieve weight loss, it does not actually cause the pounds to melt away.” In fact, you might be giving a workout your all and never break a sweat. That depends on the movement, the person, the environment, et cetera. For those of us who have spent most of our lives understanding absolutely nothing about fitness, this is a dangerous misconception. It allows us to honestly believe that breaking the smallest amount of sweat means that we are doing fitness correctly. It doesn’t. I can sit still on a hot summer day and sweat, but that doesn’t mean I am doing anything beneficial for my health. Speaking as someone who was heavy, this mindset was golden: you mean I can do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and still burn fat? YESSSSSSS. Only no. Not at all. This is why some of my personal attempts at losing weight were unsuccessful. After a month of walking for 10 minutes each day yielded no results, I couldn’t help to say, “But I broke a sweat!” That means nothing. Unless you are pushing the limits of your personal fitness (safely, of course), you will see no results. Period. 4. "Skinny girls look good in clothes. Fit girls look good naked." So, if I don’t feel like I look good naked, does that mean I’m not fit? If you are losing weight, especially a substantial amount, the fact is that you may never think you look “good” naked. Whether that is based on the inevitably skewed perception of beauty AND self image that comes from a significant physical transformation or the actual physical constraints of getting six pack abs when you once weighed 300 pounds, this mentality diminishes the hard work that a person does to become a healthier version of him/herself. Guess what? I’ve lost 150 pounds and the simple fact is that I will never have a flat stomach or thighs that don’t jiggle. Society tells me that does not look “good.” But am I fit? Hell yes, I am! 5. "Pain is weakness leaving the body." These types of sayings, to me, are the WORST of them all. (Yes, I intentionally chose the version of the latter quote that uses My Little Pony as the background image, just to emphasize the ridiculousness of this statement.) If you have never been physically active before, it can be very difficult to understand the difference between being sore and being in pain. Being sore is normal, but pain is your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong. When I first started losing weight, I absolutely convinced myself that if I felt pain, my subconscious was making excuses to not workout, just like I’d done for so many years. I hope I am not alone in this, but I feel like this is pretty typical psychology. Unfortunately, only you know how you feel, and only you can tell if you are experiencing actual pain or making excuses. But when you make the decision that it is, in fact, pain, there is absolutely no shame in listening to your body and alleviating that pain rather than exacerbating it. Pain leads to injury, and injury leads to a losing momentum in your progress toward being a better you. 5/20/2017 0 Comments Dirty, 4-Letter D WordEveryone has uttered the same fatal words upon struggling to pull his/her zipper from the opened position to closed: “I need to go on a diet.” You might be questioning my word choice right now. “Fatal? How can the recognition of a problem be fatal?” It is not the recognition that I find problematic here. It is that dirty, four letter D word that always pops up when we start to feel ourselves exceed our ideal weights: “diet.” The word “diet” has been lingering in the dark shadows of our language for quite a long while, but it’s first recorded emergence was in the 13th century. It can be traced back to Middle English (diete), Medieval Latin (diaeta), and Greek (diaita). Etymology of the word suggests that it originally meant, “manner of living,” a general term associated with all aspects of life, but often attached to the food one habitually consumes. Modern dictionaries cite the primary definition of the word as, “food and drink regularly provided or consumed.” So, the denotation has shifted ever so slightly from indicating a general way of living, to specifically regarding the way one eats to live. If one abides by the denotation of the word, a diet could consist a whole variety of foods. When I was 300 pounds and eating macaroni and cheese with pizza for dinner once a week, that was my diet. However, human beings are very rarely 100% literal, thus the reason that particular words can mean exactly the same thing, but carry positive, negative, or neutral connotations. When we hear the word “diet,” we understand it to indicate restrictions in the way we eat, often for the sake of losing weight. Be honest; when was the last time you told yourself you needed to go on a diet and didn’t groan at the prospect? For a person who is used to eating poorly (regardless of weight), it is perceived as a negative thing to have to “go on a diet.” This negativity reveals itself in a variety of reactions, depending on the person: fear, anxiety, denial, etc. “Dieting” also suggests a temporary state of being. If you follow the connotative definition of “diet,” and restrict your eating habits in attempt to lose weight, what happens once you’ve achieved that goal? Do you go back to eating macaroni and cheese with pizza once a week? Those are the eating habits that got you, and me, and so many other people to an uncomfortable weight in the first place. Therefore, you can likely assume that resorting to those old eating habits will offer the same results that they had in the past. It is based on these connotations, then, that I find the word to be so fatal. When we begin a “diet,” we look at it as a temporary restriction on our eating habits. The negative emotions attached to the idea of restriction inevitably lead to avoidance, which explains why starting to change one’s dieting habits is so difficult, and the transient nature that we adhere to them once we muster up the courage to do so is often why so many people have a hard time keeping weight off once it is lost. I am a walking, talking, breathing example of this. Throughout the process of each of my “unsuccessful” attempts to lose weight, I viewed my diet in this way. There was always an “end of the road,” an “I can’t wait to eat normally again,” a “won’t it be great when I don’t have to eat salads at every meal?” So, when I stepped on the scale and saw that I had lost 5 pounds, 10 pounds, or once even 20 pounds, I was so satisfied with myself that I decided I did not need to diet any longer! And then I’d gain 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 30, 40, 50… . My final attempt at weight loss was successful only after I finally accepted the literal definition of the word “diet” and stopped motivating myself with the illusion that I would be able to return to the unhealthy eating habits that I had when I was overweight. To do so would be fatal to the progress that I had made. If you take one message away from this particular blog, I hope it is this: There is NO finish line when it comes to nutrition. If you want to lose weight and then maintain that weight after it is lost, you will never be able to eat the way you once ate. This is not a temporary change. This is a lifelong pursuit of habitually eating healthily. Period. 5/13/2017 0 Comments Getting StartedI reach hesitantly for the door handle. It feels like it takes forever for my hand to make that connection, to grasp the cold metal and pull. But finally, it is done, and I have no choice but to follow through. Only a crazy person walks up to the door of a business and then walks away without entering, right? I’m stuck. I have to go in to save whatever small bit of positive self image that I have at this point. I might be fat, but I am NOT crazy. I give my name at the front desk, along with my I.D. and an inconspicuous tug on the t-shirt that I hope hides the monumental size of my protruding stomach. Once I survive the check in process, I look at the world around me: there’s a running type machine, something that looks like a bike, and another item that vaguely resembles a staircase. I’m paralyzed. I don’t really know how to use any of this equipment, and the people who are already utilizing it sniff me out and set sights on me the moment that they smell my insecurity. They are staring me down, making silent bets between them: “Let’s see if fatty knows how to use the treadmill.” No matter how detailed I make the above scenario, I will never be able to convey the suffocating, debilitating feeling that comes with walking through a Globogym when you are overweight. Even if you try to play it off as though you know exactly what to do on any given piece of machinery, your prior lack of dedication to fitness is written all over your body and judgmental eyes are reading you, attaching wild accusations to your story to try to fathom how you let the one thing over which you have absolute control go to waste. Perhaps you are just imagining their silent condemnation and disgust. Perhaps you are not. Either way, this perception is embedded in the heart of any person who has tried to tackle the most difficult part of losing weight: getting started. I can’t say that I have all the answers to quell your fears about starting this process, but I can explain the things that helped me overcome them. 1. Forget about past attempts and failures This, in my opinion, is likely the most essential part of getting started. Throughout my life, I have actively (and honestly) tried to lose weight on a variety of occasions. I did all of the things that I thought were right, and they didn’t seem to work. So, when anyone would question me about what I was doing to try to lose weight, reiteration of those failed attempts was the first thing out of my mouth. Dwelling on those failures became my strongest defense mechanism. I could provide evidence of my endeavors and attach them to the logical response anyone would have if a particular method of reaching a goal didn’t work. You wouldn’t continuously jump off of a roof in an attempt to fly. After a few failures (and broken bones), you would likely give up. The problem here is that I was giving those failures all of the power and not looking beyond them. If you truly want to fly, and jumping off of the roof does not seem to be working, you don’ just quit. You look for another method of achieving the goal. Just because you may have attempted to lose weight in the past and failed, doesn’t mean you will inevitably fail again. Maybe it just means that the methods you were using did not work for you. Reevaluate what you did then, decide what may or may not have worked, and try again with the appropriate adjustments. And what if those adjustments don’t do the trick? Well, if you haven’t noticed, exercise and diet fads are kind of a thing. Try something else, and something else, and something else until it clicks. A bird must learn how to flap its wings before it can learn how to fly. 2. Set a goal I remember sitting in a colleague’s classroom the Monday after my best friend’s wedding, crying into my shirt like a child who just had her puppy dog taken away. I was truly happy for my friend; she had found the love of her life and looked positively stunning on her wedding day. However, being at her wedding made me realize how soon I would be the one wearing a wedding dress. That was an image that I could not stand. I did not want the photographs that would be on my wall for the rest of my life to show the person who currently sat blubbering in a student desk in which she barely fit. So my colleague asked me bluntly, “Have you set a goal for yourself?” I had not. “You need to set a goal. How much weight do you want to lose?” I laughed while I said, absolutely unconvinced of the possibility, “100 pounds.” “Okay, that’s your goal. Now what are you going to do to get there?” That goal was a joke in my mind. I told her that I intended to walk 3 times a week and limit my calorie intake to 1800 calories per day. I really had no idea what I was doing, but this seemed reasonable to me. The next thing I knew, I had lost 10 pounds, then 10 more, and then that goal was no longer a joke. Fast forward a year, and I had reached that goal. Guess what I did next? I set a new goal. You can’t make make progress if you haven’t defined what progress means to you. That requires setting a goal. That goal will be different for every single person, but it must exist if you want to see progress. 3. Get a workout buddy My workout buddy was a 60 year old English teacher who taught in the classroom next to mine. She was very charismatic, incredibly blunt, and a little pushy. She was exactly what I needed. When I said something about wanting to start exercising, she said that she’d like to start as well. So, we decided that we would walk the side streets around the school three times a week after students were dismissed. On the first day that we were supposed to walk together, she marched into my classroom in the morning and said, “You better have some walking shoes, otherwise I’m making you walk in those.” And she would have. She held me accountable to follow through with the commitment I had made to myself. There were even days when I “forgot” my workout gear and she waited at the school until I went home, changed, and returned. We walked in the rain, the cold, the snow, when we were tired, and when we were too busy. With my initial mindset, I had no intrinsic motivation to begin exercising, let alone sticking to a regimen. My workout buddy not only held me accountable in those first several months of my journey, but also gave me the tools and confidence to hold myself accountable in the future, a crucial element in reaching those goals AND maintaining them. 4. Track your food intake honestly Without tracking my food, this was a healthy meal plan for me: Breakfast: One banana, a few tablespoons of peanut butter, and a cup vanilla yogurt Lunch: An Uncle Ben’s instant brown rice pack, a turkey sandwich on wheat bread with cheddar cheese, and a sandwich bag full of baby carrots with ranch dressing. Snack: 100-calorie microwave popcorn Dinner: A big old chicken taco salad with all the fixins' Dessert: A Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich At first glance, this doesn’t sound like an absolutely appalling meal plan. It’s not like I was eating Grande Meal from Taco Bell for a snack. And actually, for someone with a high metabolism or an intense workout regimen, this might be a pretty typical menu. However, I was not blessed with a great metabolism, and I did not workout to the intensity that such a meal plan would require. So, I recorded every last crumb of the meal above, and here is what it looked like: If my goal was to stay under 1800 calories per day, I’d just exceeded that goal by nearly 1,000 calories. I was stunned. I thought I was making good decisions in regard to my eating habits. I never would have predicted how far off track I was, mainly because I had never taken the time to observe nutrition facts. It was an honest mistake, and one that is common to make.
I faithfully tracked my food intake on a daily basis from the point on. It gave me perspective about the foods that I was consuming, and being able to see it broken down in this way allowed me to learn more about food than I’d ever known before, as well as how to make much better decisions for myself. (If you are looking for an easy way to track food, I recommend MyFitnessPal.) 5. Avoid your vices I love Doritos so much that I could eat an entire bag by myself, even now. Therefore, you will not find them in my pantry. The fact is that if I’m at home for the evening, already in my PJs, and looking for munchies, the likelihood of me craving Doritos SO badly that I would put on clothes and go buy some is pretty low. Whew! Dodged a bullet there, huh? Not really. If you know that a particular treat is too tempting for you to avoid, don’t buy it. It really is THAT simple. 6. Allow yourself to have treats (in moderation) It is likely that most doctors or nutrition specialists will disagree with what I’m about to say here, and they have all kinds of degrees and certifications to back up their reasons for dissent. I am merely speaking based on experience. With that said, you have to decide whether this particular tip is right for you or not. Throughout the entire process of my weight loss, from day one until now, I have allowed myself to have treat (in moderation). There is a reason that I gained as much weight as I did in the first place: I love food. I love pizza, burgers, cake, ice cream, potato chips, macaroni and cheese...yummmmmm-O! I could not expect after 26 years of indulging in these types of foods that my cravings for them would simply disappear. One of the reasons why people tend to fail at “dieting” is that they expect that they will suddenly fall in love with healthy food and salivate whenever they see a salad in front of them. That’s unrealistic. Being healthy isn’t about deprivation, it’s about developing an understanding of how your body reacts to a particular way of eating and moving. There is no standard to determine this, nor does it stay constant for an individual. When I first started this process, I allowed myself a “cheat meal” every fourth day IF (and only IF) I strictly met my calorie intake goals on the other three days. This worked for quite a while, and it allowed me to continue to have those treats without completely sabotaging the progress that I had already made. As time went on, and I lost more weight, I had to change this. Instead, I had cheat meals on the weekends only. Now, I have cheat meals once a week. There have been times when I’ve only had cheat meals once a month. Regardless of the method or frequency of them, allowing myself treats as a reward for being honest and true to my nutrition plan kept me from falling off of the wagon altogether. And honestly, it has also helped me determine which of those foods are truly worth my time (sorry, but some foods are no longer on my list--I think I’ll be content to never have another Big Mac in my life), and to savor them even more so when I can have them. 7. Be flexible I’ve never been able to figure out why, but lots of people treat their diets like it is a religion: once they establish faith in it, they see any other methods as heresy. The problem there is that diets are not deities and abandoning one for another will not condemn your soul to eternal damnation. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. Inevitably, at some point you will hit a plateau in which your weight loss comes screeching to a halt. This could last a few days, a few weeks, a few months...and after the loads of compliments that you’ve likely received as people have noticed the weight you’ve lost, suddenly not seeing results can feel like an open handed slap across the face. For some, this could cause complete loss of motivation. Although I might normally cringe at using a cliche, there is some merit in saying that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” If you hit a plateau, maybe it is worth considering a different type of nutrition plan. Is there a possibility that it won’t end your plateau? Sure. But there’s also a possibility that remaining with the same strategy won’t either. 8. Plan meals Unlike any other species on the planet, human beings have a gift for expertly crafting excuses, and then mentally justifying them. Sometimes we do this without even realizing that we are doing so, especially when we are faced with the common and incredibly dangerous combination of being hungry, tired, and rushed. When it is 8:00 p.m., you’ve worked a very long day, and you know that you need to be in bed by 10:00 p.m. to effectively function for the events of the following day, it is easy and entirely justifiable (or so we convince ourselves) to order a pizza for dinner instead of making something that requires you to dirty multiple pots and pans. But imagine the same scenario in which a healthy meal is already prepared for you and requires only that you put it in the microwave for 5 minutes. Suddenly, you have no excuse to order that pizza, and you can revel in the pride of not ruining your diet for yet another day. So how does such an ideal situation come to fruition? By planning your meals in advance. For the last several years, I have made Sundays my "food prep" days. I sit down with my MyFitnessPal app and I plug in all of the foods that I intend on eating throughout the week. Then, I do whatever I need to do to be sure that those meals are easily accessible. Sometimes that involves cooking 4 pounds of chicken on the grill and packing it up in the appropriately measured increments. Or maybe it means making a huge bowl of salad with the tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers already mixed in. Does this take some time out of my day? Of course. However, once I started doing this, it became a science, and my “prep sessions” consumed less of my time on the weekend. Furthermore, those few hours on Sunday save me tons time for other things during the week, and, most importantly, prevents me from feeling the guilt of making unhealthy meal choices when I’m in a pinch. 9. Be firm, but fair There has to be a good balance between these two things. You have obligated yourself to a particular workout regimen and meal plan. You have to be able to recognize when you are making excuses to avoid them, and be firm enough with yourself to ignore the excuses. I cannot tell you how many times, even in the last week, that I could have told myself that I was too tired or too stressed out or felt too icky to go to the gym. However, I made myself go anyway, and every single time, I felt better afterward. Had I told myself that those excuses were sufficient reasons to skip the gym on any of those days, what would prevent me from using the same excuses tomorrow? When you allow extrinsic motivations like these to outweigh intrinsic motivations like holding yourself accountable for your own well being, it becomes habitual. So, you must make a determination: perhaps you are tired, but are you TOO tired to try? Perhaps you have a staggering pile of paperwork to complete, but is it so much work that you can’t afford to step away from it for an hour? Most of the time the answer to these questions is, “no.” With that said, you must also be fair with yourself. There ARE times when you should give yourself a break. Aside from work obligations, I’ve only skipped my regularly scheduled gym programming once in the last 6 months, and it was because I felt like I was legitimately going to vomit every time I stood up or moved. I feel like that was a pretty valid reason to not go do a bunch of burpees. However, if I had determined that it was just an uncomfortable bout of heartburn, I likely would have still gone. Personal excuses are an extremely powerful source of persuasion, and when you’ve spent much of your life using them avoid particular things (like physical fitness), it is dangerously easy to continue the pattern. You have to learn how to make the determination between legitimate reasons to leave the obligations you have set for yourself unfulfilled, and excuses to avoid them altogether. More often than not it is fair to say that they are excuses, and you should be firm enough with yourself to ignore them and do what you need to do for yourself. Excuses don’t produce results, only negative habits. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…” If you choose the path toward being a healthier you, it will require effort, you will experience pain, and it will be difficult, particularly in the beginning. But, true to Roosevelt’s words, it will also be worth it in more ways than you can ever imagine. 5/6/2017 3 Comments Grieving the GainOn any given day in 2009, I might have experienced the grieving process anew and in full. An interesting thought: 365 days of grief. Ironically, this grieving process was not in reaction to loss, but to gain. Day by day, I watched myself gain more weight, and day by day, I grieved for that extra pound. I began my day with denial, as you might expect. “I’m not fat, I’m voluptuous.” “Big is beautiful! I’ve got a rack and an ass. Skinny girls get jealous of that.” “My meals are healthy! I’m making progress. Rice is good for me.” “I think my pants feel a little looser today.” The anger was mostly directed at myself. After gorging myself with a lunch (usually consisting of a sandwich with some sort of fat-filled deli meat, cheese, and white bread, along with a poorly measured “serving” of rice, a can of Dr. Pepper, and some sort of chocolate), I generally took one of my regimented bathroom breaks. The mirror was cruel. “God, you’re such a cow.” “What a worthless human being--you should be ashamed of what you just consumed.” “Better hope you can fit comfortably in that bathroom stall today; your ass isn’t getting any smaller after that meal.” There’s a reason that bargaining comes next in this process. How could I continue my day with that mentality? I needed to justify my actions if I hoped to make it through the rest of the day. Unfortunately, the bargaining stage is where I spent most of my time. It was comfortable for me to bargain. I am generally quite good at debating, and doing so with myself just felt natural. “Your eating habits don’t affect your weight-you’ve tried to change your diet before and didn’t lose a single pound.” “You have to eat to have energy for the day.” “You are hypoglycemic! If you don’t eat, you’ll pass out!” Then the depression sunk in, and paired with it, self-deprecating thoughts that, if revealed to a mental health professional, would set their red flags at full mast. (I won’t detail those, as I’ve done in the previous sections. It is counterproductive.) Of course acceptance was the final, and most confusing, part of this process. When grieving due to a loss, acceptance can really only be defined in a singular way: acquiescing to the circumstances, realizing that nothing can be done to change said circumstances, and moving on. However, if we can first accept that the grieving process is applicable to situations outside of loss, situations over which we actually have some control, we must also recognize that what it means to accept something can shift. Now, acceptance can mean taking ownership of the situation. Now, acceptance can mean realizing that the past, though it cannot be changed, does not determine the future. Now, we can choose to change the negative paradigms that have caused us to be in this situation of grief in the first place. What a freeing realization! We have control. We can affect change. Unfortunately, this realization in and of itself is not enough. As senseless as it sounds, sometimes bridging the gap between realization and reality is the hardest task that a person can undertake. The fact of the matter is that humans are more often than not inclined to choose the more traditional path of acceptance, and I am included amongst those who do so. However, acquiescing lends itself to repeating bad behaviors. At the end of each day in 2009, I went to bed accepting that it was my fate to be overweight and unhealthy. Nothing that I did could change that. This, in turn, allowed me to repeat this grieving process over and over and over again. Think about it: I knew that choosing this form of acceptance lead to further grieving. I chose to be unhappy with myself every single day. Even after realizing that I had the control to follow a different path of acceptance. Why? It was easier. It took less time. It was cheaper. It was less stressful. I had no confidence. There were a million reasons. Singularity of vision leads to oppression in terms of government and politics, but also in terms of our own personal goals, especially if we are aware of visions that can lead us to improve ourselves. The moment that I realized that my continuum of grief about my weight was self-inflicted, I could not stand to abide by that traditional definition of acceptance any longer. I created the grief within myself. So, too, could I end it. And end it I did. It doesn’t really matter how much weight I lost or how or why. What I want people to understand is that grieving about an unhealthy lifestyle only begets more grief. Yes, you must reach acceptance to overcome grief, but not acceptance as we traditionally define it. Understand your circumstances, realize that they must change, and take the appropriate actions to make it happen. |
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August 2017
CategoriesAll CrossFit Diet Fitness Grief Healthy Life Inspiration Motivation Weight Gain Weight Loss |