Measuring Success

It's not a big secret that I'm a goal-oriented kind of girl. I do ridiculous things like register for marathons to motivate myself to stay active. As such, it's really, really important to me that I see progress on my way to accomplishing my goals. But progress is so subjective...

I am trying SO hard to get off the weight I gained when I got hurt. Until recently, I had a lot of mental hurdles I needed to overcome to get to a point where I felt more in control of my eating. Well, this past week, I really felt like I was on top of things. I had calorie deficits all but one day, I walked or ran five days out of the week, and I even passed on dessert when I took my mom out for dinner on her birthday.

Needless to say, I was actually excited to weigh myself yesterday morning to see how much progress I had made. Turns out that it wasn't that much. I was down about 0.4 pounds. Now, at least I was down, but still, I put in an awful lot of effort to see the scale "only" budge 0.4 pounds.

So what happens when you don't see the fruits of your labor? When your hard work doesn't show up in the outcome? I could easily throw my hands up in the air and give up. I want to do that a lot of times. But I have to remember how far I've come and I have to keep my goal in mind. Maybe I didn't make much progress this week, but all the small steps along the way lead up to big, measurable results as long as I don't give up my efforts.

On the plus side, I ran seven miles on Sunday and my pace was under 11 minutes per mile (down 27 seconds per mile from the week before). I might not see progress on the scale, but I am seeing it on the trail at least!

Mid-week Check-in

Hello, friends.

This will be a quick post, just to let y'all know (all three of you!) that I've more or less stuck to my plan this week. Well, aside from not doing anything Monday to give myself a rest day after running SEVEN miles Sunday, and not actually getting up most mornings, I've stuck to my plan. I went running Tuesday morning and last (Wednesday) night. I did get up to take the dogs on a walk this morning, but because one of the dogs is a nine-week-old puppy that I'm fostering for a few days, we didn't go very far... or very fast. But she's cute, and we took a long walk last night, so maybe the two combined equal one regular morning walk? I don't know. She did stop and whine and I had to carry her for a little while, so I got the added bonus of doing some upper body strength training! :)

I've been eating better this week, too. I'm not sure what changed, but I started believing in myself again this week, which I think gave me the determination to say no to things I knew wouldn't help me meet my goals.

I've also started asking for help when I need it. Last weekend, I went out to dinner with some friends and then they were planning on getting frozen yogurt afterwards. I let one of the girls know what I was planning to eat ahead of time and told her I was going to skip the yogurt completely. Know what? It helped! It's hard to admit that I struggle with certain things, but God definitely blesses those who are open about their struggles and ask for support. Every time I see the rewards, it gets a little easier.

So now the challenge is to continue to build the momentum. Having a good week is amazing, but I need this to lead into a good second, third, and fourth week, too.

Committing

I have a confession, friends. I have not been fully committed to regular runs, strength training, or a healthy nutrition plan. I've been running, I've been trying to eat well, but I haven't been committed. My efforts have been very half-hearted. Enough to keep me going, but not enough to help me progress in my goals. This has to change.


The biggest problem is that I haven't really been planning. I might make a loose plan ("I think I'm going to try..."), but nothing I've fully thought out, and therefore, nothing I've stuck to. I've let myself derail on my diet a number of times more than I can readily recall. It's been frustrating and discouraging, and I've wanted to throw in the towel so many times. The only reason I haven't is because I know what the outcome will be: 224 pounds.


I'm going into the upcoming week with a plan. 1) I will get up early each morning. I will run the neighborhood route on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I will walk a shorter route on Tuesday and Thursday. 2) I will go to the bike trail Saturday and get a long-ish run in. 3) I will not use social occasions as permission to indulge in foods that will not help me meet my goals. I'm going to dinner and frozen yogurt with some friends this weekend. I have already let one of them know what I am eating for dinner and that I will be passing on the frozen yogurt. It sucks that I have to rely on telling someone else to keep me accountability, but that's my reality right now, so there you have it. 4) I will NOT continue to give in to unplanned indulgences. I don't have any specific mechanism in place to accomplish this, but I am bound and determined to beat this behavior.


The good news is that I have fully committed to a half marathon in September and a full marathon in October. I know I'm capable of taking better care of myself than I have been, I just need to tap back into that will-power to move forward.

Sugar-free, that's me!

It's no secret to anyone that knows me that I LOVE things that are sweet. Cookies, cake, ice cream, chocolate, hard candy, pie, brownies... I love it all! I love it a little too much. My consumption of these delicious, sugary goodies has been causing me a lot of problems in my efforts to re-lose the 12 lbs that I gained while unable to work out. So I decided to do something about it. I decided to commit to going a full week without any sugar from these types of sources.

I've tried to do this before, and I failed. I couldn't commit. My heart wasn't in it. But last week, I just decided enough was enough. There was sugar all around me for Valentine's Day and I lost control. I didn't like it.

In a moment of frustration, I emailed my dear friend Rachel from Minnesota who is my fitness accountability buddy (and also has a very good blog at becausethefloundersaysso.blogspot.com) and told her that I'd had enough and I was going to fast from sugary, desserty-type food for a week.

To be clear, I didn't commit to going completely sugar-free for a week. I still ate fruit. There was sugar in my yogurt that I wasn't too concerned about. There was probably sugar in my tomato sauce, bread, ketchup, beans, whatever else I might have eaten that I didn't prepare 100% from scratch. And I still put honey on my peanut butter and banana breakfast sandwiches. But I laid off the things that I would consider to fall into the dessert category.

I thought it was going to be very, very difficult. I wasn't sure if I could do it or not. But I guess my mind and body had finally had enough and I actually made it an entire week without these delicious items. Do you what else is amazing? It honestly wasn't that difficult. Yes, there were times when I craved something sweet, but I felt so good without having all that extra crap in my body that I think it more than compensated for not having that sweet taste in my mouth.

I also realized that sweets are a much bigger trigger food for me than I ever thought. I think what would happen is I would lose control around sweets, feel like I went way off track, and then just throw my whole eating plan for the day out the window. Without losing control of the sweets situation, I was able to stay much more focused on making good eating decisions with all the other food groups available to me. A bag of Dorito's lasted AN ENTIRE WEEK in my house. AMAZING!

I successfully completed the fast. I'm allowed to eat dessert today. I'm just just not sure if I want to!

Nine a day?!?!

Typically, I use this blog to talk about my physical activity. That's definitely an important part of my recovery. However, as I have been unable to do any real rigorous physical activity the last several months, I've also noticed that I have not been very careful regarding my nutrition. As I'm able to start using my body more and more, I'm also trying to focus on improving the quality of the foods I eat. This has proved to be very, very challenging for me!

While on Weight Watchers, I did a pretty good job planning my meals, sticking to my daily points, and writing down everything I ate. Then I started slacking about writing everything down. And then I started slacking about sticking to my daily points. And then I stopped planning out what I was going to eat ahead of time. And then I gained back 15 pounds.

I really wanted to lose that 15 pounds again before I started attempting to run again, but it's been an incredibly difficult challenge. A lot of what motivated me to eat well is knowing that I need certain nutrients to fuel my body for long runs. When I had to stop running, I lost a lot of my motivation. Now I'm trying to get back to practicing good eating habits. It honestly SHOULD be motivated by my desire to be healthy - I should just WANT to do things to take care of my body, especially when I know that I feel better, stronger, happier when I make good choices. But at the same time, our bodies learn to crave certain foods.

For me, making good choices involves two types of thinking. 1) Mind over matter. Yes, I want sugar and fat, but I just need to decide to stop eating those things for a while and eventually it will become easier to resist those types of foods. 2) I feel good about myself when I make good choices. I can do more things, I have more energy, and I'm more pleasant to be around. I have to endure the first type of thinking for a while, and then hopefully I'll get into a rhythm and the second type of thinking kicks in. I have a secret, though - I'm not there yet!

My roommate recently informed me that the food pyramid requirements have changed and that we're now supposed to eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day (a serving is 1/2 cup for everything but leafy greens; a serving size of leafy greens is 1 cup). As a disclaimer, I have not verified this information. To be honest, I think that's a little bit unrealistic to tell the general public they need nine servings of fruits and vegetables when most of us probably aren't even getting the five they previously required in on a consistent basis. But I've been eating a lot of junk food and I want to focus on "detoxing" my body from all the sodium and sugar I've been feeding it, so I'm game to give it a try for a week.


What this means is that for the next week, I'm going to focus on more vegetable- and bean-based meals. I made eggplant parmesan and roasted brussel sprouts last night, which should last for a few days. (I honestly have never really eaten eggplant or brussel sprouts before; I'm not really sure why I decided to focus on two new foods at the same time, but hopefully it'll work out okay.) That should give me about four servings. I have applesauce every day with my lunch, which brings me up to five servings. I was going to get bananas to put in my oatmeal, but the grocery store was out of them for some reason last night. But that will give me at least two more servings. So now I just need to fit in two more servings somehow. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm also going to try really, really hard not to have desserts or pre-processed foods for the next week. In general, I don't believe in depriving yourself of things you really enjoy. However, I have a hard time satiating my sweet tooth, so I think it's better for me to stay clear of it for a while before I can trust myself to enjoy a reasonable portion at a time and not go overboard.

Besides, I don't think I'm going to have many free calories left over after eating all those veggies!

Do you want to be a toughie or a tubby?

I recently started going back to the gym. Because the activities I used to do at the gym are off limits for the time-being, I thought this would be a good opportunity to work on some of the activities I generally avoid. Namely, weight- and strength-training. Specifically for my upper body. As someone who largely avoided gyms except to use the pool and the treadmill, this was a completely new universe for me, and I needed some help.

I started going to a new church in the fall of last year and got involved in a small group. I found out a couple of the guys went to my gym, and they kindly agreed to help me get started. I am very grateful to Mark, who willingly met me at 6:30 am on a morning when he didn't have to be at work until 10, and for Rick, who provided a great deal of instruction and comic-relief. Apparently, weight-lifting is more effective when you make faces in the mirror. Who knew?!

In addition to providing me with a greater sense of purpose in the YMCA weight room, Mark and Rick also shared their personal work-out motto with me: Do you want to be a toughie or a tubby? When they first told me their motto, it made me laugh... a lot. But it's grown on me a lot these last few days.

They use it in terms of motivating each other to finish their work-outs, especially if they run into circumstances where one or the other doesn't want to do a certain activity. It definitely makes sense in that capacity. But I've been finding myself saying it more to myself outside the gym - specifically when I have to make decisions about what I eat.

I have to remember that the effectiveness of my work-out isn't over just because I've left the locker room. For some reason, it's really easy for me to leave the gym and then act like I never did anything good for my body. I'll crave sugar-laden mochas and chocolate chip cookies instead of fruit and yogurt and lean proteins. But by making those poor nutritional choices, I'm working against accomplishing my fitness goals. I say I want to be a "toughie" in the gym, but then I leave and I make "tubby" decisions. That's got to change - pronto.

I'm gonna be a toughie... all the way!

Under the Knife

I scheduled my surgery for December 16, 2010. It was about a month from my last doctor's appointment. As I left, Dr. Gondi assured me that they'd get me fixed up. I believed he was going to do everything he could, I just wasn't sure that it would work. The doctor had told me that he was usually able to resolve IT band problems with more conservative treatments, so I was already the exception. What if I was the exception after the surgery, too? I wanted to be optimistic, but I also wanted to be prepared for the worst.

That month was rough. I had gained about 12-15 pounds back over the last few months, and I was terrified that with the waiting period for my surgery and the recovery period afterwards, that would just continue to increase. I was mentally struggling to make good eating choices, and as half-hearted as my efforts were, I was at least trying to be reasonable. The other challenge was that this was all happening in the midst of the holiday eating season. Amazingly enough, though, I held steady at my 12 - 15 pound gain. I am very thankful it wasn't worse, but I also felt like I was at the brink of falling out of control and it was all I could do to hang on.

Surgery day arrived and it was cold and snowy, which isn't completely normal for my part of the country. But everything still ran on schedule. The highlight of the experience for me was the anesthesiologist. My mother had worn a Georgia Tech sweatshirt and it turned out that he was a University of Georgia grad. After some good-natured banter, I was wheeled into the operating room. He told me that since I went to GT, I should start counting down from 100 in prime numbers. I remember thinking that I couldn't count down from 100 in prime numbers because 100 wasn't a prime number itself, but I think all I articulated was that I couldn't count down from 100 in prime numbers. I'm sure that destroyed his opinion of GT grads!

I woke up feeling groggy and tired, but otherwise not too bad. I made it out to the car and into my parents' house without incident, despite the snow and ice. My knee ached, and I was very sleepy, but I was able to walk without crutches and my little dog, Abigail, stayed by my side the entire first day, so overall I was in pretty good shape.

Everything was looking good, but it was still just a matter of waiting to determine if the surgery would effectively resolve the problems I was having.