attitude – Sweat & Sparkle

I like to analyze things. Overthinking is a hobby of mine. For the past several months, I have been doing just that: making things way more complicated than they need to be, and paralyzing myself in the process.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep, so I whispered, “Are you awake?”

My husband, who is a diehard smartass, answered, “No, I always pat your leg in my sleep.”

I rolled my eyes in the dark, patted his hand back, then spilled my guts, everything I’ve been holding in for months now. How frustrated I feel, disappointed, embarrassed about gaining weight back. How I just can’t get moving again. How unhappy I am about how I look, and how unhealthy I feel.

My husband gets right to the point and doesn’t sugarcoat anything. It’s just one reason I love him so much. When I was finished rambling, he kept my hand in his and told me, “If you aren’t happy, then lose the weight.”

I almost laughed at the simplicity. Need to lose weight? Then lose weight! Well, it really is that simple, isn’t it? I know I need to exercise more and eat less. There’s no mystery here. I just haven’t been doing it. Some things don’t need to be analyzed and thought to death. They just require action.

He added, “But don’t do it because you think I’m not happy. I love how you look right now. If you do it, then do it for you.” He told me not to worry about anyone else, or what anyone else thinks.

Do it for me? For some reason, hearing him say that made me see all of this in a different light. Doing it for me makes it feel more like a luxury, something special. Something I should want to do. Why haven’t I felt that way about it before now?

Just talking to him about it makes me feel so much better. I feel more committed to this, and more accountable. It meant a lot to me to hear him say he loves me the way I am right now, too. He has said it before, but it’s always nice to hear again.

Today, my goal is to work out for at least 30 minutes. It doesn’t matter what it is. I just want to move this sluggish old body around and work up a sweat. No more starting, then stopping. No more promises, then breaking them. No more approaching this with “I should…”, but with “I will…because I deserve this.”

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I said I would use the holiday weekend to do some thinking, and I did. Mostly I examined the question of why this time is so different for me.

Years ago, when I had decided to lose weight, I burst out of the starting blocks at a sprint, fired up, pushed myself, never let up, and didn’t stop until I had reached my goal. I had a lot going on, a lot of stress, yet I didn’t let it slow me down. Why is it that now, so much as a hangnail hurls me off track, and it takes me months to get going again?

I came up with these reasons:

1. I feel like I can’t. I lost weight before, and I even reached goal weight. But I gained it all back, which was a huge blow to my ego and has left me feeling like I just don’t have what it takes to do this. Otherwise, as the logic goes, I would have successfully done it a long time ago.

2. My goal is so far away, I feel overwhelmed. I’m not trying to lose those pesky, last ten pounds. I’m not just trying to tone up a little bit. I’m aiming to lose a LOT of weight, about 70 pounds. Combined with #1, it leaves me feeling like I can’t do this anyway, so there is no motivation to even get started.

3. I am crazily, stupidly, insanely busy. After buying a house in December, my fiance and I have a lot of plans for the house and the yard, so I spend my weekends on home improvement projects, and I’m still in the obsessed, honeymoon phase of owning a house. I want to plan, shop, arrange, re-arrange, dig in the yard, plant flower beds. On top of that, I can barely come up for air at work, I’m so swamped. I have little energy left for much else, and time feels like it is flying by. For example, it may feel like I have been off the wagon for a few days, when it’s really been a week!

4. I’m burned out. Even when I’m gaining weight and not putting in any effort at all, I subconsciously track calories and note how long it’s been since I worked out. It’s become a rote, going-through-the-motions, knee-jerk reaction instead of a valuable learning activity. Logging, tracking, counting…lord, it all makes me just want to vomit by now.

So…solutions? I am tempted to try a common sense approach, stop logging my food, since I already know how many calories are in the foods that I eat the most. I know what I need to cut back on (eating out, soda, sweet snacks), whether I log my meals or not. And it’s not like I’ve ever been instantly struck by a thunderbolt or delivered an electric shock for logging “bad” food or going over my calories by roughly 30 million, so it’s become almost like it doesn’t matter what I log, anyway.

Clearly my biggest obstacle is #1: feeling like I can’t do this anyway. Past failures have left deep scars. It’s easy to say “get over it”, but actually doing it and feeling it in my heart are very different. I’m not quite sure how to get by that hurdle.

Normally, logging and charting and tracking are motivating to me. I love that stuff. But I’m just so over all of it right now. I am going to take a break from logging my food, but I will keep tracking my workouts. It’s too easy to pretend it hasn’t been that long since my last workout. I want it in black and white, on paper, so I can’t fool myself.