Small victories

Sometimes celebrating the small victories is enough to keep me on track. Example of two of today's small victories:

1) Not letting snomaggedeon keep me from exercising. Although CrossFit was closed for my 6:30 am workout, I woke up and worked out on my own. Tabata Push ups, sit ups, squats. So I didn't even wuss out on my own workout! That might count as two small victories, come to think of it. I have been known to not push myself, when left to my own devices.

2) I was just really craving sugar. Hard core craving sugar. I want to go ravage through a forest of milk chocolate, gummy worms, and maybe some peanut butter cups while I'm at it kind of craving sugar. (You know, the kind of craving that has very little to do with the sugar and much to do with the bandaid the sugar coma would provide.)

The choices I made instead: some nuts (almonds, hazel nuts, and cashews), and some unsweetened dried apple.

Now, is this the awesomest paleo snack in the history of paleo snacks? No. Nuts have anti-nutrients (I'm too lazy to link to it, google it), and dried apples are sugary. But is it better than the peanut M&Ms I ate last week after keeping paleo at a delicious and posh restaurant where the serving was one sausage link, leaving me still voracious? Yes. Small victory achieved. Small pat on the back.

Opening the hips.

So it took a few weeks, but the goal posting was totally worth it. I'm back on the workout bandwagon with a vengeance. 6 days a week, and going to each day happily. Last night, I went to the conditioning skate and learned 1) I am totally capable of doing 1 legged squats now, but 2) I cannot do them for a half an hour.

I also took a stab at sideways skating.



Having done some training in jiu jitsu, I thought keeping my hips open would be way easier than it is.  I can definitely go sideways, but it takes some thought to open up all the way. Any advice on how to train for that off skates?

Goals for the week 12/6-12/12

So, yet again, I'm a little late - but let's take a look at how I did. 
Last week's goals

1. Make it to the gym 5 times. A-. I didn't make it to the gym per se, but I went to Yoga, Monkey Bar x2, Skating and did a P90X workout from home (derby had been canceled, and the weather was too poor to get out to the gym.)
2. Continue to be gluten- and sugar-free.  C+.  Gluten free? Yes. Sugar-free? Eh,  not so much. Bit of a sugar binge for 2 days, but I'm back on track, and already starting to avoid all the sweet things, including the GF cookie my coworker left on my desk.  Sugar cravings are gone, weight is dropping, so I feel like the plus is warranted. 
3. Be social at least 1 time this week. A-.  Much to my friend's chagrin, I begged off several events to finish some briefs, but there was no way I was going to  miss my roommate's fundraiser on Saturday night.  3 hours of entertainment and dancing with friends made for some quality social time, but I need to be better about not flaking on those who can commit to me. 
4. Send out Holiday cards to friends and clients.  F. Um, they're sitting on my desk, does that count?

So what are the plans going forward?
Goals for this week

1. Continue to go to the gym 5x a week.  After a terrible, terrible day yesterday, I was proud of myself for forcing myself to make it to the gym.  Hopefully, this will remind me how important the gym is to my daily well-being and get my butt in there more often. 
2. Pack my lunch at least 3x a week.  One can only eat at Chipotle or its University equivalent so many times a week. Eating Paleo while out is expensive, and typically, underwhelming. 
3. Continue the social trend.  When I lived in AL, I never went out, but I never really felt like I was missing much. (Sorry Montgomery, you're no Madison.) Now that there is so much to offer and so many great people to do them with, I should really take advantage of it.  
4. Send holiday cards.  This time for sure, Bullwinkle. 

What are your goals for the week?

On Anonymity and Community

So a long time ago, I had a personal blog.  I talked about everything - my friends, my family, my job, my dating life - though I did so with complete anonymity.  This blog is not anonymous.  Folks who come here can figure out who I am in real life (though if you know me in real life, you probably won't find the blog until I tell you about it.)

At first, I was a little scared by this. I wondered what repercussions it would have for me, my friends, my job. But now I like the comfort this provides. I can share things that are important to me with a growing network of folks who support me, both in real life and the virtual world. That said, there are some things about me that I don't really tell anyone.* While there are good reasons for that, I sometimes think that some of that information should be shared because it helps me, and because hopefully it will help someone else.

Recently, I've found myself struggling. I'm trying to do all the things I know to feel better - to relax, be happier, take it one step at a time -but it's been hard.  I've found myself thinking back to the places I've been before, and remembering how terrible it was to be there. In times like this, I know it's easier for me when I know I'm not alone, and it occurred to me, that maybe someone out there reading this feels that same way too. So I went to the old blog and dug up some of the old me. The me I try not to think about anymore. But a me that still deserves a lot of attention, because she's still a part of the person I am today. And for once, I decided that I'm going to give her voice.

The following is a post from a long-ago deleted blog. 

On Eating.

I love food. I love gourmet food. I love comfort food. I love junk food. I love the way simple ingredients can be combined to make the most scrumptious meals. I love thinking about food, planning a meal, stopping at the store, cooking up the ingredients and delighting in the fact that I made whatever it is that is making me so happy. And there in lies the rub. Cooking and eating is the only way I ever learned to make myself happy.

Now, I know some of you might be thinking "But I love eating! And it makes me happy! and there is nothing wrong with that!" You're right, there's nothing wrong with loving to eat or delighting in the process. But there is something very very wrong with using eating as your only means to deal with things that make you unhappy.

And that's what I've done. Sporadically, over the course of my life, but substantially in the past year or so. In fact, I ate so much, so often, that I started gaining weight exponentially. I gained almost 20 lbs in 2 months. And, coupled with my history of being fat and fear of being so again, I became desperate to slow the process down. So I became bulimic. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's right. This seemingly well-rounded law school grad, with the good job, and the great friends, couldn't figure out how to make herself happy and so turned to consuming ridiculous amounts of food and puking it all up. And somehow, that made me feel better.

The saddest part of the whole bulimia battle is that I knew how horrible everything I was doing to my body was, but I couldn't stop. Every time I threw up, I would freak out that my teeth were going to fall out from the acid, but that didn't keep me from puking up the 10,000 calories I had just ingested. And yes. It is quite possible for me to eat that much.

In fact, I probably ate that much today. You see, even though I'm in recovery, and even though I'm doing all the right things, I'm never not going to be a bulimic, just like an alcoholic will never not be an alcoholic. Unfortunately, unlike an alcoholic who can avoid booze and bars, I cannot just choose to never eat again. It's not just a matter of putting down the ding dongs.

So sometimes, I fall off the wagon. And this makes sense. My whole life, everyone has told me that food is the way to be happy. And when you look at the obesity in my family, you'll see I'm not the only one with an eating disorder, though maybe I was the only one that purged. So this weekend, when I was surrounded by friends who love to eat and who want to do it a lot, I lost my footing. I started eating a lot and I told myself it was ok because I wasn't binging, I was just overeating, and that if others were overeating too, it must not be so bad. But what isn't so bad for them is horrible for me. After I got home from my mini-binge vacation, I couldn't figure out what to do to make me ok with being home alone and doing work that I hate. 

So I ate. And I ate A LOT. I even went to the store to buy horrible things to eat so I could eat more. And today, when I told myself I would do better, I just went and ate more at lunch than I could ever need even though I wasn't hungry. 

So how do I stop?

I keep telling myself it'll be better when I work out again. And this is true. Working out means I'll actually feel hungry at some point and that will help me self regulate. But that's another issue non-bulimics maybe don't understand - for those of us living with ED, we actually don't know what it's like to feel hungry. That feeling of actually needing food, and the corresponding feeling of NOT needing it anymore was completely foreign to me. I didn't know what hungry felt like until I was in my 20s. And everytime I experience it now, I'm surprised. 

So yeah. I'm not doing so hot right now. I'm on a binge (minus purging) and I need to fix it. So if you see me with that cookie, or that cake, or lord knows what else I bought last night because shopping for bad foods creates a high for me, talk to me about something else, do something with me, invite me somewhere. Because I'm not hungry. I'm just stuck. And I don't know what to do.

*This is how you can tell I adore Meagan. There is very little that she doesn't know.

Blast it.

So, I'm doing really well with the whole gym business this week, but eating is a DISASTER. I've been doing work I don't want to do, and so eating to avoid it.  On top of that, I end up having to work late, so keep eating to stay awake. TOO MUCH FOOD.

Notably, it's about 800x harder to give oneself a pass after reading this.

Goals review and update for Dec. 1

So, I take Karen's point about goal-setting, but in actuality, last week's post wasn't about setting the goals as much as it was giving me a vehicle for this post -- the one where I hold myself accountable.  So lets' see how I did.

Here were the goals for Thanksgiving week:


1) Stay gluten-free.  A+.  I  give myself an A+ for this.  Even at Thanksgiving, everything but 1 stuffing, 1 gravy, and 1 pie was gluten-free, and in the end, the folks that could eat those were still stealing all the awesome gluten-free stuff.  You haven't lived until you've had cornbread stuffing with bacon and sausage topped with turkey drippings thickened with tapioca starch. ((dies))

2) Begin the sugar detox, with the exception of dessert on Thanksgiving. B.  I actually think I did pretty well with this, all things considered. I went out with the derby girls 3 nights that week and at not a drop of sugar.  I did eat lots of GF desserts on Thanksgiving. The reason I give myself a B though, is that I extended Thanksgiving an additional 12 hours and had GF dark chocolate tart for breakfast on Friday.  I regret nothing.   

3) Work out 5 times during the week. C. This was an epic fail. Sunday night, I pulled an all-nighter, so skipped Monday from exhaustion. Tuesday, I went to conditioning class only to find out it was cancelled, so played trivia at the bar with my derby girls instead.  Wednesday, I went to open skate (yay!), Thursday was Thanksgiving, Friday, I missed gym class by 10 minutes because of unforeseen circumstances, and Saturday and Sunday, I skated. So, overall - 3 of 5 days.  Not the best. Not the worst.  But still disappointing.  This one should be pretty easy to fix though. 

4) Figure out my Christmas gifts. A.  Done and done!


So, what's in store for this week?  Let's give it a go:
1) Make it to the gym 5 times. Seriously. No excuses this week. 
2) Continue to be gluten- and sugar-free.  'Nuff said. 
3) Be social at least 1 time this week.  I love my derby girls. I love my coworkers.  I love my gym buddies.  With that many people, there is no reason to not hang out with folks, and as I've noted before. . . .mental health is important to physical health. 
4) Send out Holiday cards to friends and clients.  Ugh.  I procrastinate on this every year. BUT, I already purchased my cards, so now I just need to get them out! 


What are your goals for the week?