No shred.
I haven’t shredded since last Friday. Saturday I didn’t get enough sleep and chose to rest. Sunday it was hot outside and I mowed the lawn and cleaned up the yard, so I got some sort of physical activity in before hitting the hay. Monday was a wash. Tuesday I woke up sick and am currently fighting this sickness. I think I just now got a fever while sitting at work, I hope that I do, because that means my body is working. I decided that Tuesday I would not “fall off the wagon” as far as eating and I totally accomplished this goal even up to today. No cookies, no processed foods, eating soup and fruit and vegetables and drinking water, non-caloric lemonade or low-cal orange juice in the morning.
It’s easy to avoid the cookies and snacks in the office when I’m sick. I don’t want to eat anything, let alone the sugar-laden demons in their plastic wrappings. It is a constant struggle between thinking it’s okay to let myself indulge to reprogramming my brain to tell myself, “Don’t eat that. Eat something else.” I think that’s the misconception that’s tripping me up. Just because I can’t eat that high-calorie, zero nutrient piece of sugar and flour drizzled in more sugar with artificial flavoring doesn’t mean I can’t eat or that I’m not actually hungry. This one small square of graham cracker covered in chocolate is 110 calories. An entire pear, which is five times the volume (guesstimate, not actual science, in case you scoff), has about 80 calories. I will never demonize the natural sugar in fruit the same way I do a store bought cookie. I don’t even consider homemade cookies on the same level as store bought but it’s obviously not the same as eating a piece of fruit or a salad.
I need to stop punishing myself for wanting to eat. I feel like a failure any time I get a pang of hunger. It’s normal, it’s necessary, I will never not be hungry and I will never not eat. It’s the hardest addiction because you can’t live without food—understatement of the century. Isn’t it weird that we eat? Think about that for a moment. But the motivation to start this lifestyle change came from knowing a junkie who can’t stop. Who hit rock bottom more times than seems possible only because he should’ve been dead a long time ago. Not even the worst circumstances—losing everything, having less than nothing—has convinced him he can live without heroin or coke in his system. He does not need them to live and they will kill him. But here I am unable to turn down food and I couldn’t get off my ass to exercise because my excuse was I was too fat to exercise. Uh, duh?? Something clicked for me then as I cried and blubbered and mourned for a lost friendship that never existed in the first place.
He is up against something far greater than an addiction to eating, self-pity and self-loathing combined with a sorely lacking desire to push my body to perform the way it should at my age. So if he can’t resist the lust for cocaine, surely I can resist the temptation to eat anything I feel like eating even though it’s killing me as surely as shooting heroin in my arm, and I can choose to workout instead of sitting in front of my computer.
The result is an approaching 2 month mark for working out and eating better. I fail and slip ALL the time but I never let that convince me it’s okay to give up entirely. Tomorrow is another day. I won’t accomplish anything if I don’t keep trying no matter the setbacks, the disappointments, the impatience that nothing is working what the hell is the point I WANT A GIANT MILKSHAKE AND A WHOLE PIZZA COVERED IN RANCH SAUCE RIGHT NOW.
Instead, I drink some water, I eat some fruit, or I take a walk. It can’t work if you never do it. It can’t work if you think that because it didn’t the day before it won’t matter again today. It always matters. Forging ahead, moving on, not beating myself up for it, trying to stay motivated. And here I am, in my smaller clothes fitting even better than before. There is less flesh to grab. Running up a flight of stairs gets my heart pumping but I’m not out of breath. A 2.5 mile walk in less than an hour is invigorating and at the end of it I usually feel so good I run around with the dogs and jump around like an idiot.
My “fat” jeans, a size 24, would stay on because of my hips but otherwise are about four sizes too big from the waist band down. Now even my hips aren’t keeping them up but they’re as comfy as sweats and twice as baggy. I usually wear them on laundry day, sloshing around in the excess denim, marveling at the thought that last January they were tight and I was ready to move up a size. I’m a few more weeks from being back in a size 18 jean. It seems like it takes forever. But in reality it took less than two weeks to feek like five jumping jacks felt like the most impossible of tasks to getting out of my chair and doing them for no reason at all except that it feels good to move those muscles, to get blood pumping, to breathe deeply as I stress my body to do what I ask of it. Doing the jump rope move is also invigorating and no longer makes me think “holy crap kill me now I want to die I can’t take anymore AAAHHHHH”.
Sure, workouts suck. I hate getting sweat in my eyes and the fact that I can’t do a real pushup if my life depended on it right now is like a slap in the face for all of the progress I have made, but dammit, I’ll do that damn pushup sooner or later. I’ll even do REAL pushups, on my toes, not on my knees. Manly pushups. It feels a million miles away, but only if I don’t try. One real pushup is my goal. One day that will seem laughable compared to what I will be able to accomplish. By the end of the summer I want to be able to jog to my parents house and back, not just walk.
That’s why I write here. If I wanted to I can go back and look at my first entries from March when I began this seemingly impossible task and see how far I’ve come. The mirror doesn’t lie either even if the scale and I have broken up. (Oh, but I must note that I did lose 3 pounds from exercising and eating healthier without feeling like I was sacrificing anything. Woo! That’s 12 pounds since the start.) I am still fat. I still have the front butt, the spare tire, the back fat. But it’s diminishing. Still there, but smaller, and smaller, and smaller…until one day, hopefully, it will be a thing of the past. I feel like the proverbial onion as the layers are being removed one petal at a time. Maybe I should’ve used the flower analogy …
