overwhelmed – Sweat & Sparkle

Deep Thinking

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.

Tired and Grumpy

I haven’t abandoned my blog. Really. Every time I have started to write something, I have been interrupted. This week has been, quite frankly, hell, and I’d give anything for it to be Saturday morning and finally my day off!

I am working nearly 70 hours this week between my two jobs. By now my brain is a fog, my feet are so sore I can barely walk, and let’s just say I just might be a tad bit on the grumpy side. I really need some solid sleep.

I gave up on even entertaining the notion of workouts this weekend. Not gonna happen until my day off on Saturday. Unfortunately, with my all-or-nothing thinking, that has also led to giving up on my eating. Well, why bother? If I can’t incorporate one healthy habit, they may as well all go to shit, right? Yes, that is how my brain functions! It’s a self-defeating mentality, but one that is hard to shake.

I have managed to log my food this week, at least. What I’ve been eating may not impress anyone, but at least I tracked it. My plan is to finally work out on Saturday (no alarm, though, definitely not a morning workout). If I’m working Sunday, I will either work out after work or track my steps/activity at work (it’s at a store, so I’m constantly in motion) and see which way makes the most sense for how I feel that day.

It’s actually been driving me nuts that I can’t work out this week. I’m looking forward to my schedule easing up just a bit next week so I can get back to at least 4-5 days of exercise for the week. My exercise ticker has been stuck at 35 minutes all month! I set a low goal of 600 minutes for May and am determined to reach it.

The Next Seven Days

It’s amazing how fleeting motivation can be. Just a few days ago, I felt energized, revving to go, eager to track my activity points on Weight Watchers, and I bought fruit and vegetables so my food tracker looked more impressive. Today? Whatever, blah, ho-hum.

How does it leave so fast? And why? It would be great to have those answers, but bottom line, whether I feel motivated or not, I need to just do it. Track. Exercise. Drink water.

Problem is, I let myself get overwhelmed with the big picture. I can track points and work out…today! But then I realize I need to do this tomorrow. And the next day. And for days, weeks, months after that, because I have so much weight to lose. That’s when I feel overwhelmed, and that’s when I start to doubt myself, start to think I can’t keep this up for that long, so why bother?

At a safe one to two pounds a week, it is going to take me most of the rest of this year to lose this weight and reach my goal. That feels like an eternity. That is a very long time of analyzing everything I eat and making myself work out when I don’t want to and avoiding eating out because it’s such a trap and a trigger for me. May as well quit, give up, eat whatever I want, and just forget about it, right?

NO! I know better. That’s a stupid way to think. It’s what was tumbling around in my mind this morning as I got ready for work, though, and suddenly I had what seemed like such a simple idea that just might work: I will focus on one week at at time. I will focus on nothing but the next seven days. I will set a goal for that week and refuse to look farther than that until I reach that goal. Then I will move onto the next week. And I will do that for as many weeks as it takes to reach my goal.

I love charts, tables, lists, etc., so I created a chart with the date for each Saturday from now until the end of the year on it. I filled in my starting weight, then filled in a goal weight for each week, all the way down to my goal. Each week, I will focus on doing what I need to do for the next seven days to lose that pound or two pounds. Then I will move onto the next one. If I don’t hit that goal one week, then I just need to step it up and work harder the next week.

I can’t put in the work only on days when I feel like it. I need to make each day count.