Keeping the Thanks in Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving week.

I'm about to head into the kitchen where I'm making two pie crusts to become pumpkin (from the back of the can) and a bourbon pecan. By Thursday, I will contribute a vegetarian cornbread dressing (from California Cook , corn dip (from my friend, Gordon, who we will not be with this Thanksgiving), the pies, an amazing butternut squash salad (from Jerusalem by Ottelenghi).

I felt a bit anxious last night thinking about all we had to do, about work projects that tend to crop up at the holidays, about being home with my kids and wanting to spend time with them but also worrying about keeping them occupied and not on screens all day, about eating and drinking too much--it all crashed on me.

So, I decided to stop it and made myself head to bed at a reasonable time where I read my book until droopy-eyed. I refrained from list-making and worry.

My trainer convinced her other client, Merideth, contact me to schedule a workout this morning. She did and I committed so there was nothing I could do but get up and go to the gym at my usual time. (Kara says Merideth and I are very similar in our struggles with exercise and is totally playing matchmaker). We did the workout Kara set up for us and I SOOOOO didn't want to go, but am so glad we did it!

This guy who feeds me freelance work texted me very early this morning to say he got me an editing gig and would I have time and I pushed back asking for his deadline before committing (I still don't know what that deadline is). I said my kids are off this week and I wanted to focus on my family. OF COURSE, I'd get a project Thanksgiving Week! Just cuz.

I came back from the gym and finalized my grocery list and took care of that before the crowds of "amateur" cooks clogged up the aisles.

I'm going to take my tasks one step at a time and start with pie crusts, because I know it's a very therapeutic task. I'm going to cue up the "Thanksgiving" playlist I created on Spotify because I DO NOT CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS UNTIL AFTER THANKSGIVING!

I am truly blessed and grateful. I could make a list, but David Campbell and John Bocchino say it better.  If ever there should be a "Thanksgiving" carol, this should be it!

The Wagon

I jumped.

It's only Tuesday of this week, but I feel myself in the rut, in the dirt, face down in the mud. I am off my wagon. The unraveling started to happen last week. I made it into my gym, but I wasn't focused on being a healthy person who exercised. A pound or two creeps up. I missed my workout yesterday and today.

And my mind starts to tell me things like,
"Oh, what's the point."
"You aren't losing any weight."
"What difference does this all make?"
"I mean, people were massacred in Paris and Lebanon."
"Life's too short."
"You're old."
"You're never going to change."

Stuff like that.

Losing motivation is a tough thing. The old me would get to this point and that would be the end. Last week was fun. I went out to dinner with friends on Thursday that included drinks and dinner and dessert and awesome fun times. On Friday, I took it easy. Saturday I was up early with the Boy Scouts hanging door hangers so we can collect food for our food bank and then after that my husband and I took off for Santa Cruz for a quick overnight to celebrate 15 years of marriage. More drinks. More food (but, we skipped dessert...). It was fun to get away. We don't get to do that much and we realize how important it is, even if the conversation on the drive back was about financial planning and got a bit heated. We need to be able to have those conversations. Not romantic. But, so nice to be able to do it and get loud with each other without kids in the back seat or in the next room.

But, all those things have thrown me off. It was fun while it lasted. I liked not having to go to the gym yesterday and today. I know I need to get back in the groove.  

But I don't want to.

Can I just be a little bit immature right now? Waaaaaaah!

This is supposed to be the paragraph where I come roaring back with strong answers and platitudes. Rah rah rah!

But, THE ONLY THING THAT WILL SAVE ME is that tomorrow I have my personal trainer on the schedule and I'm paying her and I need to go in tomorrow and I know that if I haven't called her now I will not cancel. No matter what I ate or drank in the past week or what I didn't do today or yesterday, I will be there. That is the baseline promise I made. I'm not going to make any crazy declarations.

All I need to do is show up tomorrow.

I may be a bloated, sugar infused, gin-soaked mess, but dammit, I'll be there and back on the wagon. I saw unto you that tomorrow I will wake up, put on the gym clothes and go in there for my workout, no question.

And I mean it.

Here we are, November 18, 2000 where I made a really BIG promise to do something positive with my life and kept it.

Filtering Out the Noise

I haven't gone all that public about my exercise plan. I hate going public about diets or anything. Whenever I have, tons of people start lobbing bombs of advice. They are well-meaning, but it ultimately undermines my efforts and helps beat me down and give up.

Sorry, people who love me, it's true. As someone who also feels she is an expert on everything, I KNOW I've lobbed my own bombs of unsolicited advice as well.

I apologize.

The advantage to deciding to pay someone to help you do something is that it creates a safety wall between you and the rest of the world. Maybe it's just me, but once I decided to fork over the money for this to a recommended professional, I feel like I need to trust her more than 20 years of experience over the latest article someone has read. I'm not saying I'm getting bad advice, but it gets confusing and frustrating.

I'm better off taking small steps and working through that.

As I explained, my first plan was to get beyond just starting. I was so sick of starting from square one. Just getting the exercise clothes on and going through the door of the gym was enough for me. I told myself if I walked into the door of the gym, I had accomplished my objective. So, in the early days, if I went to the gym and played on my phone, THAT WAS ENOUGH. I had won.

The awesome thing is, once I get in the door of that gym, I am going to exercise. Might not be the best exercise or the latest and greatest, but if I walk through the door, the major part of the battle is won.

My initial commitment was to simply make my training sessions and it took another full six months to ramp up to go on days other than the ones with the trainer. Honestly, I don't even know how I manage to do the other days. It's unprecedented. So, you see, I'm WINNING this.

When my labs came back with no change or in some cases worse, I had a little freak out. And Kara was so awesome. I'm paying her to look at my situation, evaluate and advise. So she did her job and when she saw the numbers, because she's a professional, because she's MY professional, she said, "You need to do more cardio. So, whenever you come into the gym when we are not going to train I want you to do a minimum of cardio and I don't care what it is: treadmill, elliptical, bike, etc.

It was awesome because the hardest part was getting there. After that, I knew that I could get on the treadmill for 30 minutes. And it was more awesome, because I got on that DAMN machine and did 45 minutes to an hour each session, wearing the heart monitor, shooting for 300-400 calories burned.

The two training sessions amounted to about 800-1000 per week. By adding two more sessions, I increased that to 1600-2000 a week.

And a little bit of weight peeled off.

And a little bit of blood pressure lessened.

Miraculous.

Motion Traxx: Great Virtual Training Sessions

I started digging around for workout music when I got tired of my own stuff and stumbled upon the podcasts for Motion Traxx. The podcasts were great samples of what they have to offer and they are free. 

I then decided to download the app and if you register, you get five free workout sessions. I did two (even tho they said I did THREE) and they were great. I did a 20 minute cycle and a 20 minute elliptical. I'm not ready to go 20 on the cycle, but the 20-minute elliptical was challenging, but I could also get through the entire thing. 

I like that it can download data into the ipad's health app. Tho, it would probably be more useful if I could pull it into My Fitness Pal!

I may consider subscribing. The trainer "djs" are nice for a push and I especially liked Tom Howard's voice in my earbuds.

The Cost of Getting Lean

In line with my last post, I found a great blog post from Precision Nutrition that shows a nice graphic on the different fitness levels and gives a GREAT breakdown of what you would need to do for each. I love this realistic approach. It gives me a good sense of what I need to do to get to where I realistically want to be.

Check it out!

The Bare Minimum

For people like me, we are not interested in looking like this:

I mean, she's ugly, right.

Hahahaha, just kidding.

But seriously, I know that I can't have that body and nor do I even care about looking like that.

What I want (and many people, I'm sure), is to feel a little better and look a little better. In my case, I'll take what I struggled with 10-15 pounds ago! I'll take that NOW.

What's really confusing for me is trying to figure out what is realistic and what will get me the best results. Or, in other words,

THE BARE MINIMUM.

When going from doing practically NO exercise and eating whatever the hell I want, I want to know the pivot mark that starts to affect change. What exercise do I need to do to improve cardiovascular function, muscle tone, and burn fat? What do I need to eat/not eat to start losing weight without uprooting my entire existence?

From my own research on my own body, I have learned a few things that are not really surprising, but don't make book deals.

I learned that it really isn't THAT much.

Forget all the fad diets! Forget killing yourself at the gym.

The best way to get on a healthy track is to work slowly. Commit to what you can manage and go from there.

When I had success with Weight Watchers, it was usually when I was SERIOUSLY tracking. Not when I was depriving myself. I remember sharing this many times. If I was honest with the tracking, I was able to compare a "bad" week to a "good" week and learn that the difference was not 1,000 calories per day, but perhaps 200-300!

I tracked last week using My Fitness Pal and lost about a pound. I didn't feel deprived. I had cake. More than once. I drank some wine. According to the reports on MFP, I was near the red line of where I needed to be: sometimes below, sometimes above.

And I lost a pound.

Exercise was decent. I made it into the gym three days. Because I'm having some back pain issues, I didn't exercise as rigorously as I have been.

Blood pressure was up a bit.

So there you have it.

What do I need to do next week to make things a little better?

Not all that much, apparently.

So, instead of going to the gym for three days next week, I'm going to shoot for four.

And, I'm going to try and stay at or below the MFP for at least three days.

I'll report back and we can see what happens.

If You Hang in There, You'll Get Somewhere

I believe that the hardest part of becoming a person who exercises is simply starting. We are bombarded with so much information. For me, taking that first step became harder and harder as each day passed. We are bombarded with so much information regarding what we should do. Maybe it was just me, but for me, I had a lifetime of going to the gym on the first day. A lifetime of starting. So, I made myself do the hardest step, over and over and over and over.

In other aspects of my life, I am a very creative type. But, in the same way that I never exercised, I also never do art. When I make art, like exercise, it's in fits and starts and frankly, I never get anywhere. I'm trying to change that, too.

I've become a great admirer of the artist Chuck Close. I really love his art, especially his gigantic portraits. I am deeply moved by something he has said about inspiration.

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.

I so wish I would have heard these words when I was younger, because I think it really goes against what we are told as children. In children, in our culture, we focus on "talent." You either have it or you don't. While I think there might be a bit to that, as I get older, I'm starting to think that it's work ethic that really helps you produce good work. I think this can apply to exercise and taking care of yourself as well.

Chuck Close has used his adversity to overcome obstacles and turned it into art. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. He is most famous for doing these extremely large paintings of faces.

What's interesting about the these huge portraits is that he suffers from prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. By painting portraits, he is better able to recognize and remember faces. Close has said, "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty recognizing faces." 

So, let's not look for inspiration to get started. The HARDEST part is just that. Getting to the gym, putting on the clothes, facing the equipment or the track or the sidewalk. It doesn't matter. But, if you do it every day, you don't have to worry about six pack abs, or that marathon or whatever. You simply do it each day and "if you hang in there, you'll get somewhere."

Pain Management

One of the pitfalls if becoming an exercising person, is dealing with pain. I don't say this to complain, but LAWDY, my back has been hurting. The advantage to working with a good professional trainer is that they can usually determine if it's the "good hurt," or an injury and isolate an injury to heal and move on.

Thankfully, Kara has taken my pain seriously. I have really appreciated that. You see, when you are a person that never did anything athletic, really, you are probably a person who has not had much injury. From the little exercise I've done in the past, I know what tired muscles feel like and I know that is a "good hurt." But, back pain is not a good hurt at all.

It looks like embracing some running and high impact cardio has dealt me a little setback. It's too bad, because I actually like the treadmill. I love getting going and zoning out. But, it seems like the pain I'm experiencing is due to that type of exercise.

The old me would just give it all up. Well, actually, the old me wouldn't have gotten this far, so let's get that straight! Ok, so the old me who may have exercised in theory would have taken back pain as a sign to stop, stop it ALL.

This past week I have woken up and a stiffness sets in and it really is unpleasant. Kara has been doing some body work to help work it out and as I get moving it gets better, but the pain has been pretty constant. I was kind of anxious and feeling overwhelmed this morning and I was so close to just not showing up. But, I did. One thing I KNEW when I signed up with a trainer is that I'd commit. I know how to commit to others. So I didn't cancel. I have to trust my trainer that she has the experience to know how to redirect my fitness time and I believe she is.

I showed up. And, even though as I write this I'm still experiencing the back pain, I feel better knowing I kept my appointment. Currently, it feels as though this pain will never go away. Kara says that is not true. I hope she's right!

The Next Step

After about six months of working out with my trainer, two days a week, I felt much better psychologically. Stress seemed to be less and my sleeping patterns were improved. I have never really had much trouble with sleep, but I was going to bed a bit earlier and feeling more refreshed than usual in the mornings. I think the exercise made me tired at bedtime. And I wasn't really experiencing any pain. After that first day, it seemed to be the right amount of the "good hurt" and none of the scary hurting. I was feeling good.

I was also stronger. It was subtle, but I was. And I know my abilities were better in the cardio realm. For example, my daughter takes ballet in town and the studio is in an old building, up this steep set of stairs that I would refer to as "The Steps of Doom."

Here they are! The dreaded "Steps of Doom."

A few years ago, when my daughter started ballet, these things were bad, but I had gotten to the point where I'd look upon these with shear dread. And, as my son, who is two years older than his sister, grew to the age where I could send him up to get her, you can better believe I sat in the car whenever possible.

But, within two months, those steps were not even a thought to me. I go up and down them twice a week now and I don't even think about it and the other day, I actually trotted up. A TROT.

It's a big deal.

So there was that. Kara, bless her heart, took my measurements in June and even she seemed disappointed and shocked that there was no change. Nada. I thought, well, I'll go to my doctor and have my labs done. During this time, my blood pressure started creeping up and this was like the last straw! I thought that would be the one thing that would change and it got WORSE! The HELL???

I went to my doctor and got labs and the results were nothing. No change.

I joked that she'd say, "Hmmm, I think I need to recommend the bacon and cigarette diet for you."

It was then that I realized that all the bullshit people write in articles are probably meant to be motivating, but the changes that everyone said I'd see IMMEDIATELY: weight loss, losing inches (because you're gaining MUSCLE), lower bp, lower everything. It was not going to happen seeing a trainer twice a week. I know I had made some gains, but without seeing the data, I ain't gonna lie, I was pretty discouraged. My doctor, who had lowered one of my meds, made me go back up. Kara looked at my labs and her reaction was, "It's not that bad." And, "These numbers tell me you need to do more cardio."

So, I stepped it up.

I started going to the gym on the other days and focused on cardio. I even started running/walking on the treadmill. I wear a heart monitor and went from burning about 1,000 calories a week with my training sessions to about 2200-2500 a week.

We are NOT talking about running marathons here. I still don't like running all that much. I still can't run out in NATURE for more than a minute or two. Things hurt. We are not talking about anything remotely what other people see as "normal cardio" or whatever. I don't even know if I can get there. But I made that cardio happen.

And things started to change. SLOWLY and to regular people, not enough to say, I NEED TO DO WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Not in terms of "fat just melting off" or like that. But to me, needing to celebrate ANYTHING...Pretty significantly, in my opinion.

So...

Blood pressure has dropped (with still taking the upped medication). But, I like those numbers and my doctor says that if I keep it up, I could go down to one medication for that.

And, my weight shifted. Without changing the eating, I dropped about five pounds.

Ok, so nothing that will get me a book deal, but OH MY GOD, after all that, it was a triumph to see a shift.

Let's face it, I'm not shooting for model status here. I'm simply trying to figure out what I can do to improve my health and this little tiny sliver of change was a big deal to me.

Now, I've consistently set time to exercise (not just a leisure walk) 4-5 times a week for the past two months and counting. This is unprecedented in my life. UNPRECEDENTED. I am not kidding.

And now, Kara and I are talking about the next step...DIET.