Why does it matter so much?

So for quite awhile now I've been planning to "lose" my photo badge for work and driver's license. But I figured I'd do that when I got to the big 1-5-0. I've been talking about this a lot. I couldn't wait to get new pictures!
Well, a few days ago my work badge broke in half. Okay its a few pounds ahead of schedule, but I was actually filled with glee. Yes, glee. I can get a new picture!!

No such luck. They refused to take my picture over. Silly me, I thought the idea of a PHOTO ID is so that they could identify you based on the picture. Trust me when I tell you that I don't look like that anymore. Silly, silly me. The dude who made the new badge even said "Wow that doesn't look like you at all." Uh, yeah.... And not only did I not get a new picture, they now use pictures twice the size of the old one. Gross.

I admit it, I had a bit of a meltdown. Tears and everything. I have been waiting for new badge day for a long time. My co-worker and friend had heard me talking about "losing" my badge for a long time. She tried her best to make me feel better.

To which I took the pieces of my old badge, hurled it on the floor, and half-yelled "I HATE HER. I don't want to be reminded of her forever." Yep, I said that. Her reply was something along the lines of 'she will always be part of you, you can't be who you are now without having been her.'

I know that's right, and really I don't hate her. Much. Maybe a little.

This just in....

Karen, my trainer, will never be referred to as The Evil One again. Ever.

Because her new name is "The Evil One-Legged Squat Monster." Please address her accordingly.

Thank you for your support. And somebody please carry me to the bathroom.

Yeah, because I'm the expert....

A co-worker started asking me questions today about weight loss, working out, etc. Yeah, because I'm the expert. Right. Anyway...
So one of her questions was "Is there a supplement for increasing metabolism?"

Why yes. It's called building muscle. Supplement your workout routine with resistance training. Thank you, have a nice day.

When are people going to realize there is not now, nor I highly doubt will there ever be, a magic pill? Dream on, sister...dream on.

Be whoever you want to be...

I'm blog happy this weekend, aren't I!? I'm going to take this as a good sign!! But I digress...

So I was chatting with a friend today, and she said something along the lines of 'I used to be a different person back when.' My response to her was something along the lines of 'So be that person again. Because the beauty of all of this is that we can be whoever we want to be.' (And then I immediately told her that was a good topic for a blog post. I'm such a blog whore!)

But seriously, that IS the beauty of life. We can be whoever we want to be. (Yeah, I guess I lost site of that for a month or two myself.) If you're shy but want to be outgoing, you can! If you're a couch potato but want to run marathons, you can! Changing who we are is not easy. God knows I can attest to that. But we CAN do it if we really want to.

Whoever it is that you really want to be, be that person. Work at it. Little by little. Even if it feels strange and weird. Do it anyway. I promise it's worth it!

Quackery....and other randomness

It's another 2-For-1 day on my blog. Mainly because I'm stalling going to bed, despite being loaded up with muscle relaxers. And partly because I haven't posted a lot lately.

Lately I have been on major 'advice overload'. I'm really a simple creature. Give my brain too much to ponder and pretty soon I short circuit. And it has been flying at me from every angle. And some of it is just freakin ridiculous. The most recent example came Friday morning at my annual girly exam. Always a pleasant thing in and of itself. Anyway, I was told "If you want to lose weight, eat 60% of your total calories for the day at breakfast."
Seriously? That's a friggin lot of calories for one meal. Which I guess is fine because I wouldn't eat the rest of the day. I WOULD BE ASLEEP AFTER EATING ALL THAT FOOD! At let's not forget the advice was preceded by the statement "if you want to lose weight." As she showed me her chart on her laptop documenting the EIGHTY SIX POUNDS I'd lost since the last time I was there. Because certainly I could have done better by gorging myself at breakfast.

Okay, then the subject turns to my workout regimen. (Yes, there was a legitmate reason to ask.) So I laid it out there. When I mentioned the spin classes, she said "I couldn't last ten minutes in a spin class." She asked me why I work out so much ("so much" being code word for excessively.) I said it was because I want to achieve my goals. The response? "Well achieving goals is all well and good, but you don't want to drop dead."

Um.

SERIOUSLY?

I've been getting comments about the amount I exercise. And comments about how much I eat (or don't eat.) So I'm just going to lay this out there, all nice and clear.

I am not an exercise bulimic. I'm not a regular bulimic. And I'm not anorexic. I eat. Trust me. I may eat smaller amounts but I also eat more frequently. I eat all the damn time. I don't starve myself. I don't punish myself with exercise. I am simply living a healthy lifestyle. I'm willing to concede to the experts (and by experts I mean my trainer and other trainers at the gym) that with the increase in activity I need to consider eating more, particularly protein, and I'm doing that. We'll see how that works out over the next few weeks.


Now here's this for random... Went shopping today with Jessica. We were playing in the shoe department when she comes around to where I was and said "that girl just told her friend she couldn't try on shoes because 'she was having a bad foot day".

Um.

SERIOUSLY?

Okay then we were walking past a woman explaining thong underwear to her daughter. Her approximately 8 year old daughter. Yeah, because 8 year olds should be wearing thong underwear.

Um.

SERIOUSLY? (Can I just tell you, by the way, the furor that was unleashed in my family when my niece, who was about 10 at the time, came to spend the weekend at my mother's house and when she had grandma do a load of laundry, all her undies were thongs?)

Yeah. Randomness. I think I need to give in to the muscle relaxers and stop typing!

She stole MY stalker!!

So I don't have a real stalker. Just another person a little too interested in the state of my ass. And what I eat. And how much I work out. And how to get in more protein. Because you know I'm the expert. Right. Anyway...

So I've often bitched about how some people feel there are no boundaries when it comes to what information they can ask me, things they can say to me, etc when it comes to diet and weight loss. Because when you lose a crapload of weight you somehow become public property. Right. Anyway...

So Jessica gets this kinda thing a lot, too. So today, my "stalker" saw her in the gym while she was having a conversation with some other people. Said "stalker" walked by and made a comment about how skinny Jessica was getting. AND THEN PATTED HER ON THE ASS!!!

Okay this whole post could be about my jealousy that MY stalker is fickle, but it's not. Right, anyway....(Can you tell I'm in a better mood, by the way? Despite being in pretty horrific pain the last two days, I've actually got my spark back!)

On what planet is it okay to pat a complete stranger on the ass under the guise of being 'supportive'? ON WHAT PLANET?????!!!!!!!! I might add, Jessica has far more self control than I do. And no practice with the pretty pink boxing gloves. Because I'm pretty sure I would have turned and had a smack down, right there in the gym.

WHY do people think the barriers of privacy are removed because you can see our accomplishments? I don't get it. I really don't.

I am not a natural athlete..

I got the idea from a lady in my Weight Watchers meeting to keep a fitness journal. It was a great idea. I think I'm going to title it "I am NOT a natural athlete."

I'm so not genetically inclined to be an athlete. It's not natural to me. What's natural to me is picking out makeup and curling my hair and painting my nails. And memorizing the OPI nail polish names. I'm a natural at being goofy and silly and a little scattered. I'm a natural at talking to people. Anybody. Just give me five minutes to warm up and then I'm hard to shut up.

I am NOT a natural at physical exertion. I have to work at it. Hard. It seems like I struggle almost every time I get on the elliptical or every spin class to break through the wall I hit in the first ten minutes. My body really just isn't inclined to do it. It has to be finessed. Forced.

But I do it. A lot. I pushed myself through Spin class tonight when I swore I wasn't going to make it past the first 15 minutes.

I would love to think that eventually my body will make this easier. But in reality, that's just not likely. So I'll keep pushing myself and pretending.

On the other hand...

So last week was a "rest" week, per the orders of my trainer. (Rest being a relative term. I did still work out three days.) Time to recharge my body and my mind. And while the scale moved the right way this week, Im not getting my hopes up quite yet. But, I do feel better about things.

Last week over dinner after our beloved Cardio Funk class, my sage Jessica, when I started to whine (again) about how I'm a complete failure because I can't seem to control the scale right now, pointed out that perhaps I should give a little credit to the kind of workout I just did. And how I couldn't have done that a year ago. No matter what the scale says, I have made huge strides in my fitness level. Of course she's right.

If there is any lesson for me to take away from all this, and any lesson that maybe somebody reading can benefit from, it's that when things are getting hard, it's really easy to fall back in to the same patterns of thinking that made me use food as yet one more way to beat myself up. Thinking I'm a failure, that I'm not worth anything, blah blah blah. It's really easy to slip back into the old identity.

When the going gets rough, I'm not going to wuss out. I'm just not. When I'm working out I always tell myself to "finish strong" no matter how tired I am. So that's what I'm going to keep doing here.

I'm just so tired....

I'm just going to lay it out there, and if this offends people...well, you can talk to me individually if you feel I've offended you.

I'm tired. I'm so, so tired. I'm tired of:
--feeling like I can't do this weight loss thing right anymore.
--feeling like everything I know I should do is turned upside down
--feeling that I have no control over anything anymore.
--getting paraded around like some circus oddity at the gym
--feeling like all the new people at the gym are staring at the fat girl, in total
bewilderment that she is actually working out.
--people coming up to me and telling what they eat or how much they lost last week.
--people saying the most random things to me, even if they think they're being
complimentary.
--being told I'm their inspiration. I don't want to be. Find somebody else.
--people feeling like they are on this journey with me and are therefore entitled
to every last detail. You're not and you aren't. Period.
--feeling like I don't quite fit in anywhere anymore.
--seeing how the people I've known the longest look at me differently, and not
always in a good way.
--feeling like I should be happy and perky all the time. (Clearly I'm not.)
--having people ask how I eat, what I eat, how fast I eat it, or if I should eat it
at all.
--feeling like I have one last straw to grasp at, and my grip is tenuous at best.
--feeling like my life now belongs to the public-at-large because I've accomplished
something that's visible.

I'm just so tired.

Time for some perspective....

So after having an emotional few days, I showed up for a rare Saturday personal training session. Before the session, my trainer did a body composition analysis, because I hadn't done one in three months. Wanted to see my progress. I even mentioned to my trainer, the lovely Karen, that today probably wasn't the best day to do it, because if it wasn't good, I might just lose it. (Editor's Note: Karen will not be referred to as evil in this post. Even if she tried to make me do non-sissy girl style push ups...) Nice attitude, right?

Well, she handed me the printout, and although my body fat percentage is down, and my lean body mass is a little down (which is totally normal despite the fact that I actually have more muscle now (for reasons I can explain if you care to know), one thing on that piece of paper just effectively kicked me in the gutt. There it was on paper. In the last 4 months, I've lost 13lbs. Just 13lbs. And I'm working harder than I have in my life. That is not an exaggeration. Just 13lbs. I had already been feeling like crap about myself, and that just sealed the deal for me. I started to cry, right there in the gym. One of the other trainers who was helping out mentioned the "P Word". Plateau. I had not considered that perhaps that's what I have been dealing with. And I really don't know for sure if I am. If so, all I can really do is just keep plugging away as best I know how. If not, all I can really do is just keep plugging away as best I know how.

My trainer Karen said "Are you ready to step it up a notch?" At that point I really wanted to bawl. I didn't, but I felt like I wanted to. Here is my current gym schedule:
Monday-1 hour aerobics class
Tuesday-30 minutes with my trainer, 50 minute Spin class, and usually minimum 30 minutes of elliptical or other cardio.
Wednesday-off day but allegedly will be adding a one hour kickboxing cardio class.
Thursday 30 minutes elliptical, 30 minutes with the trainer, and 1 hour aerobics class
Friday 30-45 minutes of cardio
Saturday 30-45 minutes weight training, 30 minutes of cardio and/or 1 hour aerobics class
Sunday-was doing 30-45 minutes cardio, now switching that to a 90 minute Spin class.

When I hear 'kick it up a notch' the first thing that comes to mind is, how much more do you expect my fat ass to do? Yeah, I could conceivably spend more time at the gym. But does that schedule look like I slack off now? I KNOW Karen doesn't think I do. I know that. But my brain translates it into "people think you're fat and lazy and don't work hard enough." People tell me to workout more all the time. People who don't know my workout routine, primarily. There is a lady at work who routinely tells me to workout more. She's maybe 100lbs soaking wet. And HER exercise schedule is to walk her dog every day for 30 minutes. It infuriates me when she tells me to workout more. Because despite the fact she's skinny and I'm fat, I'm pretty sure my endurance would put her to shame and I'm positive Im stronger than she is in terms of muscle strength. But people continue to assume. And I guess I continue to let them.

So the scale hasn't moved much. But I have to give myself credit here. Look at the workout schedule. Aside from my inspiration Jessica, I work out more than pretty much everybody else I know who isn't employed in the fitness industry. Its really habit now. I insisted on getting in exercise while on vacation. That counts for a lot. To me it does.

And I haven't just thrown in the towel during all my frustration. I keep working at it. I'm pretty proud of that, too.

And yeah, the scale isn't moving much, but my body is changing, clothes are getting big, etc.

So despite the scale, despite that number being the bottom line for so many people, I am not a failure or a slacker. I'm just not.