want

All the time, I hear folks talking about how they don't want to feel deprived. They want to be able to eat whatever they want. They want to eat NORMAL.

Um, you can.

But it's a matter of changing what you want. 

I WANT to be healthy. I WANT to feel good an hour after I eat a meal. I WANT to sleep well and wake up feeling like I can get through my day. So you know what I want for breakfast? Some gluten free granola with almond milk. And you know what I WANT for lunch? Turkey meatballs and broccoli. And you know what I WANT for a snack? A banana.

Because at the end of the day I WANT to eat to fuel. I WANT to sit down to a meal and feel good about it, start to finish, not just for those five seconds that one bite is in my mouth. 

If you want to feel deprived, you will. That's your choice. I eat how I eat (most of the time) and I don't feel deprived because I chose to not feel deprived. 

I've said it before and I'll say it till I die....if you need to treat your body poorly on a regular basis in order to be happy........something ain't right.

what are you worth?

Back in the day, when I was in my first marriage and it was floundering and we would half-ass go to therapy once or twice every few weeks, one excuse we had was "It's too expensive, we can't afford it".

And one day, our therapist called us out on it. "Is your marriage worth $80 a month? If not, what IS it worth to you?"

I mean...that kind of stopped us in our tracks. How do you put a monetary value on your family? Of course our marriage was worth $80 a month! I know I walked away from that session feeling like an ass. And it was around that time we started going regularly. Because.....yeah. It was worth the effort and the money.

Getting healthy in any manner carries value. We all know folks who say "I can't afford the gym" or "I don't have time to work out." Maybe we say it ourselves. I'm pretty sure once upon a time I had myself convinced that a gym membership wasn't in my budget.

So what IS your health worth to you?

Is your health worth an hour a day? No? Then how much? How much of an investment are you worth? If you find yourself saying things like "I don't have the time/money for that"....maybe it's worth answering the question "Ok then....how much time/money/effort ARE you worth? What is YOUR monetary value?"

Because when you say "I don't have time/I can't afford it" to whatever it is that will help you........therapy, a trainer, a gym, a trip to the farmers market......whatever it is......when you say you can't put that in your priority list, what are you saying about yourself? Aren't you saying that YOU aren't worth an hour a day? Aren't you saying that YOU aren't worth X number of dollars a month?

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That was one of my "A HA!" moments a couple of years ago. While I was sitting on the edge of joining a gym, I was walking one night and the words of my old therapist popped into my brain..."Is your health and happiness worth spending that money?"

And I felt like an ass. Because...just the idea of telling myself "No, you aren't worth $40 a month" felt really really stupid.

It's what keeps me going right now. I'm worth the gym membership. I'm worth having an hour to myself most nights. It's worth investing in that now so that maybe I'll be able to play with my grandkids in the future.  It's worth it. I'm worth at least that much.

I think we're all worth it. Right?

7 months in

We're at the tail end of July. Seven months into the year.

I don't know about you, but over the course of 2013, I've had a lot......a lot.....of friends post on FB or Twitter or whatever social networking they are using that they are changing their lifestyle. They want to get healthy and/or lose weight. Most of them posted about it, I'm sure, to attempt some level of accountability. "Hey, if I post it in public then I have to stick to it!"

But now it's July and you probably aren't hearing a lot about those life changes anymore. Your friend who was gonna do the juice cleanse posted about her amazing burger and fries three days into it. And your friend who joined the gym has had "life happen"' and hasn't been in a month. Or maybe it's you.....you made a total commitment to walk 30 minutes every day.....but that kind of hasn't happens in about eleven....and twenty days. 

Of my friends who started some sort of new life journey, about half of them asked me for advice. Advice on what to eat or how to exercise or how to fit it all into being a mom. And honestly I feel like my advice is kind of pointless. Because anyone can say "Ok! I'm gonna eat clean!" but really...what's your plan past that? Where do you want to be? What do you want at the end of it? Where, exactly, is that end anyways?

I'm not judging. I was there once. I have a few wasted gym memberships under my belt. I have work out DVDs I have watched all of one time and I think I've bought five yoga mats that saw maybe two classes each before I thrifted them.

For me, the light bulb finally snapped on in my brain when I went through 2011 as a semi-regular runner.....and I went January to December with no real change in my body. And I thought "I just went a whole entire year with no change.....do I really want to look back at every year in that way?"

So it's July. Seven months into 2013.

What did you say you wanted to do for yourself this year? What progress have you made towards that goal? 

And more importantly.....how are you going to feel if you start 2014 at the same place you started 2013? 

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My suggestion for getting back on track? Give yourself 21 days. 21 days of no cheating, no quitting, no excuses. You can do anything for 3 weeks. And they say....it takes 3 weeks to make or break a habit. All you have to give is 3 weeks. It's not even a whole month. 3 weeks of yoga or therapy or running daily or not drinking or not eating junk food. Whatever it is for you......give yourself 3 weeks. 21 days. That's nothing. That's a blink of an eye.

Whatever it is you want to do, you can do anything for 3 weeks.

And then maybe on January 1, 2014....you look back and think "Damn.....look at what I did this past year!"

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Note:

This is NOT a persecution. I am so incredibly guilty this year. I have failed myself the past few months. This is a call to myself to get back on track, to get back to being happy with myself, to make myself proud in the way I know I'm capable of and deserve. I am not immune from falling off the wagon....not by any stretch. I do not want to waste this time. I do not want to get to the end of 2013 and look back and think "Man, I could have done so much more". I'm right there with you.

hard words

I've gotten far more snotty comments for being thinner than I ever got for being fat.

Friends have insulted me to my face. I constantly see comments/pins/quotes/passive-aggressive-comments being passed around the internet about how "real women" are curvy/fat/voluptuous/not thin.

And the comments about working out? Even worse. There is currently a Jennifer Lawrence quote making it's rounds around the internet about how she wants to punch people who enjoy working out in the face. "Oh ha ha ha! Yes, punching people who work out is awesome!!!"

I post about working out and five of my friends on FB make passive aggressive posts about how people who work out are dumb/annoying/stupid. But posting pics of food or boozing gets nothing but "likes".

I hear a lot of talk about how hard it is to be fat. But that wasn't my experience. I never got treated as badly being fat as I do being not-fat.

And it's not what I witness happening on an average day. I see nothing but support for being fat....and I feel like I have to hide the fact that I take care of myself in a way that is not popular with most of society.

What I have learned over the past year is that the majority of other women don't consider me a "real" woman. And that my lifestyle choice is considered less valid than most other peoples. And that while posting endless pics of drunken escapades is ok, there is a limit to posts about work outs that most people find acceptable.

You think that getting healthy and being more comfortable in your body will make a lot of things easier, but the one thing I've found is that it makes it a lot harder to fit in. Most of the time, I feel like an outcast. I almost always feel like I can't share the things that are important to me because most people make it abundantly clear how much they disapprove of my life.

I kind of hate it. But what can I do?

For now, I just live my life in my tiny bubble and keep plodding along. I don't really know if there will ever be a balance......

For The First Time

This is the first summer of my adult life that I went swimsuit shopping and didn't spend weeks trying on suits and getting depressed.

It's the first summer I went suit shopping one day and liked every single one I put on and my struggle was picking just one. 

This is the first summer I went out in public in my bathing suit and just walked around like normal. I didn't keep a cover up on, I didn't constantly adjust myself or the suit. I went to a beach this weekend and swam with my kids and then came on shore and played with them. And then sat in a chair and ate some snacks and watched the boys play.

I do not have a perfect body. Not by a long shot. At the beach next to us, there was a group of twenty-something college kids, with a handful of very very tan, thin-ish blonde girls in bikinis. They very well may have been looking at my white dimpled thighs and mocking what becomes of the bodies of women who have children. 

Even though my body isn't the definition of perfect, I'm really proud of where it is. Strangers may look at me and not realize that I worked really  hard for this imperfection, and I guess that's ok. At least I know.

Being not self-conscious for the first time makes it all worth it. 

Value in Nothing

One comment I hear over and over. And over. And over when people talk about "dieting" or how I generally chose to eat is "I don't want to feel like I'm depriving myself!"

I've thought about that idea a lot over the past year or so. I sit here writing this and I'm hungry. What the past year has taught me is how to respond to my hunger.

I think that for some reason we are culturally trained to think that when we feel the sensation of hunger, then something is wrong. How many times do you hear someone say "OMG I am so hungry, I need food now!"

Or, how many times do you see someone get really hungry and to compensate, they eat an enormous meal.

Just because you get more hungry doesn't magically mean your body needs more calories. What is means is that your body needs calories more urgently than it did, say, an hour ago when you were merely a touch hungry.

And being hungry isn't an emergency. The feeling you feel in your stomach is sometimes your body telling you "Hey, I need more calories to fully function for the rest of the day". But, honestly, sometimes it's your body just telling you "I'm dehydrated".

I've learned over the past year to sit a minute with my hunger. Drink a glass of water. Think about what I ate and what I've done.

Being hungry isn't an emergency. And it doesn't mean you're deprived.

It means your body is working.

Being hungry doesn't mean you need to gorge yourself. It means you need to refuel.  With great hunger, you could still eat a normal sized meal and a half hour later, you'd probably feel better than if you over did it.

If you feel like you're depriving yourself...well, that's your choice to view it that way.

What Goes In

If all you put into something in crap, all you can hope to get out is crap.

I think that counts for everything....everything....we put into your bodies. Not just food. Music, video games, TV, media, conversations, experiences....everything you put into yourself is going to affect what you are able to get out.

It's why I don't read the news. I'm aware of what a horrible world it is out there. I don't need to overdose on it daily (and yes, I think lots of folks overdose on news and don't realize it's a problem). I don't need to deliberately put bad things into my brain, my soul. I knew a lady who, apparently, would get up and read the news every morning (as many folks are apt to do) and then she would spend the day posting crappy news stories on Facebook, usually pertaining to horrible things happening to kids. She was one of the most high strung moms I knew. I don't think those two things were coincidence.

It's why I don't let my kids listen to certain music or watch certain TV shows or play certain video games. There really is no reason my kids need to "pretend to kill" anyone when they are 5 and 9. There is really no reason my 14 year old needs to hear music with sexually explicit lyrics. I don't believe it's all harmless. It all builds who we are. It all affects our thoughts. It all builds up and completely impacts not only what we put out into the world, but what we put into our lives and our relationships and our families.

Everything you put into yourself affects what you get out of yourself.

Everything is entangled with everything else within you. It is not separate.

I think we kid ourselves into thinking we can compartmentalize our bodies. We chose to keep anger, and somehow justify it because "they deserve it" and think we can put that anger into a tiny box in the corner of our brains and not let it affect the rest of our thoughts and feelings and interactions. But it does.

The same goes with our physical bodies. We say "I'm going to treat myself because I worked hard" and the treat is something that has no benefit to our bodies......candy, junk food, cupcakes...whatever. And we lie to ourselves, telling ourselves that one little treat won't matter, denying/ignoring the damage it can do. Denying that we are really just keeping up habits that got us to an unhappy place with our bodies in the first place.

And it goes for the tie between our physical body and our souls. We say "I'm going to work out really hard so I can go out tonight" and we spend half the day being healthy, thinking it will negate unhealthy behaviors....binge drinkings, sleeping around, doing other emotionally unhealthy things. We think because we treat our body well that it doesn't matter how we treat our soul or vice versa.

But it's all connected.

You cannot love yourself unless you love ALL of yourself. And if you treat one part of yourself badly, you are treating your entire self badly, no matter what you want to tell yourself.

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If you are struggling with your body.....if the weight isn't coming off or you are struggling with a health issue that just will not go away even though you are doing all the things you're supposed to be doing....

Look at the other parts of your life. 

Are you treating your entire self well? Truly, truly well?

I've found that, for me, when things with my health start to go south, other things in my life are going south. My finances, my relationship, my patience, my happiness. 

We want to tell ourselves it's not linked....but it is. It's all clear as day, and yet most of us chose to ignore it.

It's all connected.

Everything you put into yourself affects everything else. Every food, every sound, every effort, every interaction....it all makes up the total of who you are and what you can return back out. 

progress breeds motivation

I had one of those crazystupid "aha!" moments the other day.

So....I haven't lost any weight in several months. I stopped counting.

In fact, I gained weight. I gained what, in my opinion, is a lot of weight (7lbs if you're wondering).

I plateaued for a long time right around 144/145. I was steadily, constantly going down and then it all just stopped. For a while, I was content to maintain around that weight and figured that at some point I would put in the effort for my final push, to get to 136. And in that contentment, I think I got complacent. I slipped a lot in my diet and work outs. I went on a anniversary trip with my sweetheart and gained, like, 5lbs in one weekend.

And then it just started getting depressing.

I cleaned up my diet (ish) for a whole week. And gained another pound. I went to the gym every day (kind of) and gained more.

I started having thoughts of "well maybe my body isn't meant to be that small" or "maybe I should just give up and toss out those size 6 jeans that are now too tight".

But those thoughts just made me feel like it would be all too easy to just go back to where I was two years ago.  And as frustrated I was with myself for gaining back 7lbs, I can't imagine what I would think of myself if I gained back all the 40+.

I got really honest with myself about my diet (too much sugar, too much booze, even if it did technically fit into my calories for the day). And I got really  honest with myself about my work outs (not really pushing myself very hard, not doing anything new, not working out for much longer than a half hour).

If I wanted to see results, I had to put in 100% effort. 80% wasn't cutting it.

I thought back to where I was over a year ago and what the difference was between a year ago, when I was on fire to keep going and now.......where I was getting complacent to gain. It was the progress that was the difference.

And I had one of those stupid "AHA!" moments.

THAT'S how it's so easy for everyone (including me) to give up. You put in what you feel like is a lot of effort for a week and see NO results? That's discouraging. You do that over and over? You feel like you are just MEANT to be unhealthy. And it's pretty easy to just get stuck there.

The crappy part of that is that means I have to create my own motivation  Because what motivated me was progress. I was on fire because I was on a roll. I was constantly losing.

And, yeah, the less you have to lose the harder it is. And so I have to be smarter about my food and smarter about my work outs and remember how it is I want to treat myself. I have to create the motivation to get me back on track.

So I'm eating cleaner. For reals. And putting more effort into work outs. Seriously. No half-assing it, no lying to myself, no cheating. Because I  need to see some progress.

Even if I never see the 130s, I really liked how I looked and felt in the low 140s. And I know I can get there. It's super frustrating to have been there and lost this weight already and have to lose it all over again. But it is what it is.

Sometimes you just have to be your own motivation.

Step 1: get your head on straight

Over the past couple of years, I've lost over 50lbs, over 40 of that in less than a year. So I get asked a lot how I did it.

I can tell folks are almost always disappointing when I tell them "diet and exercise". It's a boring explanation.

But the truth is that I would have never been able to do it without getting healthy on the inside first.

Sure. Other people lose weight  and they are still super fucked up in the head and/or are still generally unhappy people. We all know those folks. It's proof that merely getting skinny doesn't make life any better. 

A lot of those folks end up unhealthy on the outside again. Lots of them are the yo-yo dieters or the people who develop eating disorders or the people who no matter how much weight they lose, they still don't look especially great. 

So when I really talk to people about what I did, I will always mention that the first step was internal. It was getting my head and my heart straight. The first commitment I made to myself was 6 months of going to therapy. No excuse.  And not half-assing it........not going once or twice over the course of 6 months and caling it good. Not saying "Ugh, I can't afford it this week" over sips of my Starbucks mocha. Not calling and canceling because I was too tired to go. No. Six months of going. Weekly. And taking those sessions and stewing on them. Digging in to them. Getting homework from my therapist and doing it.

None of this started being about losing weight. I had accepted my weight. I was fine with it. I figured I was who I was and I should learn to love it. And I did. My bigger problems were in why I got in my marriage and why I stayed in it and the relationships I had with people and what kind of parent I was. THOSE were the things that needed fixing. Not my waistline.

But once I truly tackled those and began the hard work of fixing my  heart and soul........all of the sudden I loved myself enough to be truly good to myself. Because I realized I really was worth it.

my story, part 1

My story isn't unusual. And I've heard worse. Sometimes I hear the stories of others and I feel lucky my own story is only as bad as it is.

I was born to unprepared, young, poor parents and raised accordingly.

Well, maybe that's not true.

See, my mother hated me. No, really, she did. She told me nearly every day. Can you imagine looking at your 4 or 8 or 14 year old daughter and telling her you hated her? I can't.

I was raised to have an impaired self-esteem. It was evident early on. Evident to the girls in school who bullied me and evident to the boys who either wanted nothing to do with me or who merely wanted to use me.

I did what lots of damaged people do.....I became an adult and developed some very bad habits. Bad relationship habits, bad health habits, bad everything habits. But, hey, I was an adult and it was my choice, right?

I got into an unhealthy marriage with an unhealthy person. And it's really easy to start blaming things on other people when you have another adult around. When you look at pictures of me from that time in my life, I look terrible. And it wasn't just the weight. I didn't start my marriage heavy, but I looked bad. I looked unhappy. I looked unhealthy.

Getting out of my marriage was my turning point. That was my personal rock-bottom that everyone talks about. Actually, it was the year immediately following the split-up.....the worst year of my life.

I have no idea what it is that was the exact trigger, and I don't even know that I had any profound specific realization. Something inside me just knew that being that unhappy sucked. And I was treating myself really REALLY badly.


I did not start this journey by saying I wanted to be skinny or a size six. I just wanted to be happy. I was so desperately unhappy and I was so tired of it. There were no body goals...just soul goals.

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My first step was going back to therapy. I am a firm believer in good therapy. I make no bones about my personal bad experience with "counselors".....I will always tell my friends to find a good psychologist or psychiatrist. Not for the drugs, but for the goals. 

From therapy, I learned I would have to change behaviors. I had to stop treating myself badly. I had to stop telling myself I was not worth good things. I did some very cheesey things. I subscribed to positive newsletters. I wrote down inspirational quotes and taped them to my mirrors. I prayed every morning. 

It's amazing the power words have. Even words you say to yourself day in and day out. 

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My journey started with treating myself better. Every day. Until I started to realize "hey....I deserve this. hey....it feels so much better to be happy". 

There were small "ah-ha!" moments in which I saw progress. Telling myself something over and over every day started to sink in. Chores I made myself do became habits I enjoyed and took comfort in. I started re-mapping my brain. 

And then it happened. I loved myself. Warts and fat and all.

Oddly enough, what came out of finally and honestly loving myself was realizing that I was worth being treated better than I had been treating myself. And then it was just a domino effect...I started treating myself like I deserved, I started getting healthier. I started getting healthy on the inside, and I started looking healthy on the outside.

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This is going to be about my journey. I don't think that I'm especially special or that I overcame anything that you can't overcome. I hope that in sharing this story, maybe other people, especially other women and moms, will realize they are worth more than they think. They are worth more than how they treat themselves.

I'm writing this as if you were my friend. Sometimes it might be uncomfortable, but friends just don't sit by and watch friends do harmful things, right?