Day 6: Treat. Yo. Self.

These last couple of days have been rough. I have been on a roller coaster of emotion. One minute being strong and excited and the next a ball of nerves unable to get out of my head. I also haven’t been getting more than 4 hours of sleep at night. I felt the crash coming and it was scaring me.

Let me explain. I don’t “talk about feelings” with people. Ironic coming from someone chronicling a 90 day transformation journey, I know; but that is one of the reasons why I am doing this. I am forcing myself to open up, be venerable and work through my issues. Writing is a lot different for me than talking. With writing, I don’t have to see the concern in the face of a person or hear the pity in their voice once I confess my weaknesses. I can control what I release by pressing the delete button.

I do however, occasionally wear emotion on my face... which is the worst. Then people ask me what the hell is wrong because I am not smiling or joking around like normal. I usually just brush over it or make something up to satisfy the question and force a smile. Until today. This morning I was training with Q and towards the end she mentioned she noticed my energy level seamed low.  I said “yeah, it is. We’ll talk after the session”. In my head I just planned on telling her I wasn’t sleeping and wanted some advice or supplements to take. What actually happened was I finally opened up to someone about my physical insecurities. I think Q may have missed her calling as a therapist. She listened, said some very insightful things and gave me a lot to think about. It was a much needed release and I am grateful to have found someone I feel safe enough to talk to about the journey.

I left the gym with a more stable outlook and went to my studio and started tinkering around. Overall, I had a very productive day (something I am noticing is a definite side effect of working out). Another side effect to working out is being able to fit into your clothes better and walking with more confidence. I found this out at 5 o’clock when I started getting ready to go out to a cabaret in DC. My skin was clearer, my face was brighter, and my legs were stronger.  I put on a little black dress, heels, and hair, and celebrated life and a week well done with my husband and friends.

 

I had a glass or three of wine, let all of my negative emotions and self-doubt go, and indulged in the decadent and opulent atmosphere of SAX DC. I had the best time I have had in months. I felt sexy, loved, and free. I am ready to tackle next week. 

So cheers to you friends, and remember to Treat. Yo. Self.  It is good for you. I will talk with you tomorrow. 

Day 5: The Struggle is Real

Have you ever thought you might be legitimately crazy? Have you ever had so many thoughts swirling around in your head you become nauseous? If not, you’re lucky. If so, welcome to the party. We should start a support group. As I type this I feel manic. My heart is pounding, my eye is twitching, and it is taking every ounce of self-control I can muster not to walk downstairs and grab a bottle of bourbon.

This morning my will power was strong, I was still high off last night’s accomplishments.  I woke up early, made a delicious breakfast and headed to a class I was actually looking forward to. I was taking a Pilates Rehabilitation where we actually got to use Pilates machines. I have seen the machines before, but never paid much attention to them. Let me tell you, when I first really looked at them, the first thing out of my mouth was “are we about to be water boarded?!” It didn’t help that when I walked over to my machine this notice was on it:

 

This is the actual machine:

I always knew the gym would try and kill you if you gave it the chance. This just confirmed my suspicion. Thankfully, Vicki was instructing and she didn’t let the machines come to life and exterminate their prey like I'm sure they wanted to. I think they trust her as one of their own.

I have taken several classes with Vicki, she is the Director of Group Fitness at ETC and responsible for the group signature classes that I absolutely love. With her I have been lucky enough to take Pound Fit, Body Pump, Pilates, Pole Fit and my absolute favorite, Air Fit (this is the silk scarves that are hanging from the ceiling that you do Yoga with). Vicki has a beautiful way of empowering your femininity that is good for your soul. I will never forget the first time I had a lengthy conversation with her. We had just started S Factor Pole Fitness as one of the group classes at ETC. I had no intention of taking it because I didn’t think I could get my big ass up that pole. Then she started telling me about the philosophy behind S Factor and I was so moved, I was teary eyed. Sure enough, I signed up and was in class the next day. Ladies, I will tell you one thing, if you want to get in touch with your inner goddess, go take an S Factor class. I felt so empowered. It is a beautiful class in a completely judgment free zone. There are ladies of all shapes and sizes and all fitness levels. It really is a lot of fun. It’s good for your soul.

That is one thing I am learning on this journey. You can’t just go hard and train, train, train. You have to do things you enjoy or you will collapse. I needed this Pilates class today for so many reasons. 1. Because I needed to deeply stretch my muscles after these last few days 2. Pilates is an incredible full body workout. 3. It corrects your posture and encourages spine elongation, which I desperately need. 4. It helps you learn how to breath during exercise which I need serious work on. 5 (and most importantly to me) I wanted to be there. I was looking forward to it. The mind/body connection that I feel during Pilates (and yoga) is healing.  I felt awesome when I left the gym!

I spent the next few hours doing things I love. I went and dropped off all the furniture for my client in Arlington, then I decided to treat myself to a stroll around some of my favorite home furnishing stores to see if they had anything new. I came home, grabbed a salad and sat down with my laptop. That is when the crazy came.

I started a battle with Bloggers comment software (the site that hosts this blog) that turned into an all-out war. When it comes to computers, I can figure out a lot of things and ease my way around pretty swiftly; but I kept getting errors and I was doing everything I was supposed to. On queue, I started to panic and go into a tail spin. Thank God Ryan got home, jumped on his computer and fixed the problem. Now, thanks to the Obi-Wan Canole, I have a working comment section. You would think that would have stopped my tailspin… but it didn’t.

When I get into my head like that, I spin and end up going down a rabbit hole of failures. I failed to fix this insignificant problem and all of a sudden I’m failing at everything, being a wife, being a small business owner, being a friend, and succeeding in the challenge. It is all very exhausting and very much bullshit. This is just my demons raising their head trying to keep me down. Well fuck that. I am stronger than that and I refuse to accept failure. There are too many people in my corner and I owe it to myself to be mentally and physically healthy. 

On that note, cheers to you friend, here is to staying awesome and living to see another day. I’ll chat with you tomorrow.

Day 2: Let the Games Begin

Meet Q, a goddess among women and a possible sadist. She is my trainer and a potential murderer.

I am really questioning my sanity at this point. This morning I woke up at 8 to be at the gym by 9 for Q to try and kill me. At least that what I think she is trying to do.  For the life of me I can’t quite figure out why anyone would subject themselves to this kind of torture. Except for maybe this one thing. It is only 3 o’clock right now and I have been more productive today than I have in months. Is this a side effect of working out? Becoming a productive member or society?  This would certainly be a welcome consequence…I am sure I will discuss this in a future posting, but for now, I digress.

Oye, this morning’s workout. Q was funny. She says “Well, I originally was going to start out having you do a full body workout each day, but I reevaluated and decided we are just going to work your legs and core. I don’t want you to be too sore on Thursday.” So in my head I am thinking SWEET! She is going to take it easy on me. HA! Ha. Haaaaa. WRONG. This woman had me so tired I fell over, twice… but I will get to that.

I started out nice and slow doing 15 or so minutes on the treadmill in order to "get my body warm" and then went into two sets of torture: leg presses, getting up and down on this box thing with weights in my hand. (Side note; Q hilariously says: "this box is probably too small for you since you are so tall. We will switch to a taller one next set". Um, excuse me, WHAT?! No. I promptly informed her that no matter how much I appreciate her vote of confidence I think she is drastically overestimating my physical endurance or ability to balance on anything more than say 6 inches off the ground. As it turns out, I was right, she let me stay on the smaller box, which is only 2 feet off the ground versus 2.5 feet. It is the small victories)

Anyhow, back to the initial set. After the boxes came these things called “Frankenstein” which would only make sense if you saw how it looked. Really, it looks more like you are marching in the Red Army, but I suppose Frankenstein sounds better than Communist. After this set is when I fell over the first time. There is a beautiful boxing ring in our gym that I just knew was soft (it's not). So in a fog of sweat and panting, I clumsily stumbled over to it and gracefully lied down flopped like a fish on to the ring. That lasted all of 10 seconds. She laughed, then yelled at me to get up. I wasn’t done.

The second part consisted of two more sets of leg presses with more weight, pushing a sled through the gym, holding a medicine ball above my head and lifting my legs to meet it… At this point, I really considered dropping the medicine ball on my head and breaking my nose so I could get out of this. I ultimately decided I did not want to spend the rest of my day in the ER, so I best just suck it up. To finish everything off, we did one armed planks where I had to play patty cake with Q while planking. Man, who comes up with this stuff?! This is when I fell over the second time. After that last round of patty cake I laid my big ass on that floor panting praising the good Lord for getting me through it.

On a more serious note, I had an interesting conversation with Q while I was warming up on the treadmill. I was telling her that I am considering going to a therapist to see if they can help me get over the mental blocks that always pop up when I try a traditional diet or exercise routine. She told me some personal stories from her own life, then asked me few questions that I am going to be exploring over the next week or so... And since you are on this journey with me, I will ultimately be talking to you about all of this too. Here are the questions:

1.  Where were you emotionally before you became overweight?

2. What do you think is the underlying reason that caused you to gain the weight?

And my favorite loaded question (these are more my words than hers, she is a little more tactful than I; but ultimately the same…)

3. Why are you “okay” with being fat?

Did I mention that Q is not only a specimen of physical perfection, but also incredibly insightful?

On that note, I have lived to breathe another day. I will talk with you tomorrow.