Keeping motivated is so hard. There are way too many distractions (read: delicious food and comfy couches) out there to make having a healthy, active lifestyle an easy choice. For me, the best possible motivation is success - once you start to see changes in your body it's so much easier to keep going and make sure you push extra hard at your next workout and make healthy food choices. That's why it's so hard to kickstart yourself into a healthy lifestyle; you're starting from scratch with no successes to prove to you that it's worth it and it's working. But once you make a promise to yourself to do it and get your butt in gear, the motivation will start to creep in with the successes - and it's a great feeling.
The past week or two I've been feeling really motivated - super pumped to get to the gym (even at 6:00 AM!!!!), actually excited to eat healthy and make good choices, and not feeling AS pulled in by temptation (don't get me wrong, I'm still tempted by anything and everything, but the last little while I've been noticing it less and less). That's the thing about a healthy lifestyle - in many ways it's like a big snowball that keeps building and building: you have a great workout and you want to back it up with a good meal, you have a great day at the gym and in the kitchen and you want to make sure tomorrow lives up to it, you see pounds dropping on the scale and you want to make sure they continue to drop.
I'm so happy where I am right now: feeling really motivated, happy and content with my successes the last few weeks. So I am going to embrace it, because goodness knows in a few weeks I could be in another fitness rut. I'm also trying really hard to be easier on myself and tringy to get rid of the enormous food guilt I feel everytime I take a tiny bite of something bad for me (or, in most cases, a big bite...). It's hard and I'm a work in progress. I'm trying to embrace the guilt to make it work for me because I know my problems before were that I wasn't feeling guilty about eating an entire bag of chips in one sitting and that made it really easy to keep doing it (and consequently put on a lot of weight). Now, I try to embrace the guilt and use it as a motivator to either put the bad food down (after tasting it, of course), or better yet, to get to the gym the next day and kick my own ass! I feel that if I didn't feel guilty about eating a Cadbury Creme Egg (like I did yesterday, and it was delicious), it would be way too easy to continue eating them, not work out the next day, and wake up 3 months later with 25 pounds of weight back on - and I refuse to do that! So, I make the guilt work for me. But I am trying to tell myself that an occasionally indulgence doesn't warrant guilt - good food is one of those things that makes life worth living.
Obviously having some success on the scale and in the way my clothes are fitting makes it a lot easier not to feel guilty about a small indulgence (imagine if I'd recently put on weight and indulged in a Creme Egg? Guilt for days, I assure you), and that's why success, to me, is the ultimate motivation. It's a great feeling to see positive changes in your body and to realize your goals (and even better if others begin to notice too!) and it makes you want to keep going, to keep getting to feel those fantastic feelings again and again.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Changes and struggles
I haven't blogged in awhile - it seems as though I've been creatively stifled as well as feeling stifled in my fitness/healthy eating plan. The last week or so has been super hard for me; a lot of temptation, a lot of excuses and a lot of laziness. I started to feel like I should just be happy where I am and go into maintain mode - I mean, I'm pretty happy where I am, I have a lot more confidence, so why can't I just say 'okay, this is it, the final outcome' and be happy with that? Because it's not, truthfully. I know I have more to lose, and I know I have a lot more to learn and to go through in my struggle to be fit and fabulous. I have a Victoria's Secret bathing suit catalogue sitting on my desk at work as a daily reminder of all the super cute bikinis I want that I need to feel confident and sexy in, and I'm almost there, but not quite. So, despite a few days of mental struggle, I have decided to keep going and to try and kick it into a higher gear...Wish me luck!
The moment when I realized I could still do this, I was still capable of changing my body and seeing results, came this morning when I weighed myself at the gym. I've recently changed my thoughts about weigh-ins. I've decided monthly weigh-ins don't keep me accountable enough on a day-to-day basis - it's easy to say "oh, just have this one chocolate bar, it's fine, you don't have to weigh-in for another 2 and a half weeks!" It's REALLY easy to say that - I was saying it a lot. I finally realized one way to stop this was to weigh myself more frequently - not necessarily hoping to see big changes (because I know, especially at my current weight, that that is just not going to happen), but to make sure I'm staying on track and not gaining any weight. So, a week and a bit after my February weigh-in I hopped on the scale again, fresh off a spin workout that had me wanting to die. I'm excited to report I've passed a really big milestone - I'm in the 120s! 129 to be exact. Now, if this we're a digital scale, it likely would have read 129.6 or something because that dial was just below 130, but it was below it! I've decided to call it a moral victory and run with 129. I don't think I've weighed this much since I was 12 or 13.
Funny story about the 120s - all through highschool and University, 120 was the weight I always thought I should be. So, although in my head I knew there wasn't a chance in hell I was anywhere near that, whenever people casually asked me what I weighed I'd casually respond with "oh, you know, like 120, 130." For some reason people believed me (or maybe they didn't I they smiled sadly at me later, who knows). So to actually be able to say that, and not have it be a complete and utter lie, is an amazing feeling. It makes me feel like I get to go back to that slightly chubby teenager and tell her "you did it!" And that's wonderful - that's what losing weight and becoming healthier should be all about. As much as it's important to have a goal outfit or to want to look smokin' in a bikini, those are all superficial indicators of a deeper change going on inside. We've all had moments of hating our own skin, and looking out and not loving what we see. To be able to put ourselves back in that place, and tell that person we used to look like that we did it and we changed is so gratifying. It's what it's all about,
really. Pounds are just numbers and clothes are just accoutrements - real change happens inside, and I truly believe that we all have a little chubby girl inside us who we get to silence forever when we get to tell her that we did it, we don't have to have muffin top anymore, we don't have to drop out of social outtings because we hate the way we look, and we can finally feel confident to rock those skinny jeans! And that's a pretty good thing.
The moment when I realized I could still do this, I was still capable of changing my body and seeing results, came this morning when I weighed myself at the gym. I've recently changed my thoughts about weigh-ins. I've decided monthly weigh-ins don't keep me accountable enough on a day-to-day basis - it's easy to say "oh, just have this one chocolate bar, it's fine, you don't have to weigh-in for another 2 and a half weeks!" It's REALLY easy to say that - I was saying it a lot. I finally realized one way to stop this was to weigh myself more frequently - not necessarily hoping to see big changes (because I know, especially at my current weight, that that is just not going to happen), but to make sure I'm staying on track and not gaining any weight. So, a week and a bit after my February weigh-in I hopped on the scale again, fresh off a spin workout that had me wanting to die. I'm excited to report I've passed a really big milestone - I'm in the 120s! 129 to be exact. Now, if this we're a digital scale, it likely would have read 129.6 or something because that dial was just below 130, but it was below it! I've decided to call it a moral victory and run with 129. I don't think I've weighed this much since I was 12 or 13.
Funny story about the 120s - all through highschool and University, 120 was the weight I always thought I should be. So, although in my head I knew there wasn't a chance in hell I was anywhere near that, whenever people casually asked me what I weighed I'd casually respond with "oh, you know, like 120, 130." For some reason people believed me (or maybe they didn't I they smiled sadly at me later, who knows). So to actually be able to say that, and not have it be a complete and utter lie, is an amazing feeling. It makes me feel like I get to go back to that slightly chubby teenager and tell her "you did it!" And that's wonderful - that's what losing weight and becoming healthier should be all about. As much as it's important to have a goal outfit or to want to look smokin' in a bikini, those are all superficial indicators of a deeper change going on inside. We've all had moments of hating our own skin, and looking out and not loving what we see. To be able to put ourselves back in that place, and tell that person we used to look like that we did it and we changed is so gratifying. It's what it's all about,
really. Pounds are just numbers and clothes are just accoutrements - real change happens inside, and I truly believe that we all have a little chubby girl inside us who we get to silence forever when we get to tell her that we did it, we don't have to have muffin top anymore, we don't have to drop out of social outtings because we hate the way we look, and we can finally feel confident to rock those skinny jeans! And that's a pretty good thing.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
A new month, a new weigh-in...
Where did February come from? I swear it was just Christmas! Anyway, along with the new month comes my monthly weigh-in - and I have been really dreading this one. I figured an early morning weigh-in after a particularly sweaty spin class would be just the thing, so I hopped onto the scale with a mixture of dread and excitement (heavy on the dread). I know the last month has been especially hard for me; I have slacked a bit at the gym (example: taking too many entire weekends off) and nutritionally (weekly pizza nights, extra cheating on weekends, chocolate after every lunch [I may or may not have a mini chocolate bar stash in my desk drawer at work...]) so I was particularly dreading this weigh in. I know that I haven't put on a lot of weight, my clothes can tell me that, but I just don't feel like I've lost anymore.
And therein lies the problem - how I feel! And this obsession I'm beginning to see within myself with that number...that three digit number that is starting to signify, at least in my mind, my fitness success. I know I am getting smaller, and just like on The Biggest Loser, it gets harder to 'put up big numbers' at each weigh-in. In some part of mind I knew that losing 4 pounds a month could not go on forever...I guess I just wasn't prepared for it to stop now (and especially in a month when I am wracked with guilt over my diet). So I lost 1 pound (about, as I did not weigh myself on a digital scale this time so I don't know the EXACT number) in the last month. Certainly better than gaining weight, and I know I should not complain, but I can't help but feeling a little down on myself. I know I could have done better if I was just that little bit more dedicated or worked just a little bit harder (I know I am starting to sound like one of those Biggest Loser contestants who loses 5 pounds in one week and starts crying on the scale because they felt like they let themselves down. I always scoff at those people and yell "you lost 5 ppunds - rejoice!" and now I've become one), so I am feeling a little down in the dumps today. I was really hoping to fall below that 130 level into the 120s, which I know for my height/body type is where I should be, so it's just frustrating knowing I have to wait another month to do so.
But perhaps the most frustrating thing is knowing exactly how to fix it and get back on track and just not wanting to. I know I need to, I know I have to or I am only letting myself down, but I quite enjoyed splurging on pizza and chocolate and dinners out and delicious drinks. I loved it. I wasn't as strict with my food diary and it did give me a kind of freedom (if I don't write it down I didn't eat it?!). I know that fixing these things and setting myself back on the right path will produce results because it has in the past, but part of me just wants to sulk and pout and say "screw it!" Is this productive? No. Will this only lead to more pain in the end because I will be that much further away from my goals? Of course - but the mind is never rational (in fact, my mind is quite a treasonous biatch if I may say so...); the mind always wants the easy way out. And it's frustrating to be battling your own body and your own psychological limitations along with battling self doubt (is this it? Have I plateaued?), cravings (mmm pizza...) and a lack of motivation.
Does anyone have any ideas of how to make this month my come-back month? A month where I kill it in the gym and rock it on the scale? Anyone? I've thought of changing up my workout routine (more classes) or even signing up for CrossFit (it's on Dealfind today!), but I just don't know if these things will work or only push me further down into my lack-of-motivation vortex. No one ever said this would be easy, but being confronted with cold, hard numbers proving it isn't just sucks.
And therein lies the problem - how I feel! And this obsession I'm beginning to see within myself with that number...that three digit number that is starting to signify, at least in my mind, my fitness success. I know I am getting smaller, and just like on The Biggest Loser, it gets harder to 'put up big numbers' at each weigh-in. In some part of mind I knew that losing 4 pounds a month could not go on forever...I guess I just wasn't prepared for it to stop now (and especially in a month when I am wracked with guilt over my diet). So I lost 1 pound (about, as I did not weigh myself on a digital scale this time so I don't know the EXACT number) in the last month. Certainly better than gaining weight, and I know I should not complain, but I can't help but feeling a little down on myself. I know I could have done better if I was just that little bit more dedicated or worked just a little bit harder (I know I am starting to sound like one of those Biggest Loser contestants who loses 5 pounds in one week and starts crying on the scale because they felt like they let themselves down. I always scoff at those people and yell "you lost 5 ppunds - rejoice!" and now I've become one), so I am feeling a little down in the dumps today. I was really hoping to fall below that 130 level into the 120s, which I know for my height/body type is where I should be, so it's just frustrating knowing I have to wait another month to do so.
But perhaps the most frustrating thing is knowing exactly how to fix it and get back on track and just not wanting to. I know I need to, I know I have to or I am only letting myself down, but I quite enjoyed splurging on pizza and chocolate and dinners out and delicious drinks. I loved it. I wasn't as strict with my food diary and it did give me a kind of freedom (if I don't write it down I didn't eat it?!). I know that fixing these things and setting myself back on the right path will produce results because it has in the past, but part of me just wants to sulk and pout and say "screw it!" Is this productive? No. Will this only lead to more pain in the end because I will be that much further away from my goals? Of course - but the mind is never rational (in fact, my mind is quite a treasonous biatch if I may say so...); the mind always wants the easy way out. And it's frustrating to be battling your own body and your own psychological limitations along with battling self doubt (is this it? Have I plateaued?), cravings (mmm pizza...) and a lack of motivation.
Does anyone have any ideas of how to make this month my come-back month? A month where I kill it in the gym and rock it on the scale? Anyone? I've thought of changing up my workout routine (more classes) or even signing up for CrossFit (it's on Dealfind today!), but I just don't know if these things will work or only push me further down into my lack-of-motivation vortex. No one ever said this would be easy, but being confronted with cold, hard numbers proving it isn't just sucks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)