How in the Hell did I get back here

I find myself back in a place I never wanted to be back at. I am feeling out of control, lazy and not really good about myself. All these feelings make me start thinking about what others think of me and worse than that actually caring. When I am exercising, running and eating right I worry more about what I think about me than others. 

When my girls were young I would era them the book ' You are special' by Max Luccado to help them learn that what God thinks of you is more important than what others think. In this book the little wooden people wemmicks go around giving each other grey dots and gold stars. If you are a pretty wemmicks or can do things you get stars. If you are plain or clumsy you get grey dots. These grey dots and gold stars represent people and their comments and thoughts about others. These have been weighing in me lately.

In the book there is a wemmick called Punchenello we only gets grey dots. Lately I have felt like I have only been getting grey dots. I feel like I have been giving myself some grey dots. These grey dots or comments and thoughts are really weighing me down and I let them they will drag me back to a place I never want to be again.

so what do I do about the dots. In the book Punchenello meets a sticker less Wemmick. He goes to see Eli his maker as the sticker less Wemmick tells him. Eli tells him he is special and he needs to worry more about what  he thinks then the Wemmicks who are just like him. He tells him to visit often until he is stronger. For me it is much the same. I got rid of my stickers for a while but then I let them come back stickers being insecurity and self doubt.

I am the one who can change the way I feel and look. Even though I didn't want to revisit these feelings and attitude I know I can pull out of it I have done it before. I only fail if I give up. Time for me to get rid of my stickers. 

Th 4Cs Challenge

A kid at work was telling me that he was going to do this 4C challenge. This would be 30 days with no chocolate, cake, cookies or candy. I knew there would be no way I could do this on  Valentines and Super Bowl so I took these days as out days. I also started a week earlier.

My assessment is that I did ok but there is room for improvement. I started out really strong. I thought it  would be cake work so to speak. Then came valentines day. I love to make valentines cookies and made a batch. This makes tons and so I took some to work. Then I took them around to neighbors and friends. The only problem was there was still many more. I ended up giving my sister and her cute kids two plates and I dumped a couple.

The easiest thing for me to resist was Candy. The worst is Chocolate. I am a chocoholic and I have known it for years. I usually have a bag of Dove chocolates in my desk. I think they subliminally called my name so that part was kind of a fail. 

The days I had fail, I tried to make my fail not so bad and then I went right back to it. I have a Facebook group I belong to called " leap into fitness" and I told them about it and my challenges. One lady told me something that made complete sense. She said basically that just because my challenge last a certain amount of time that doesn't mean I have to end it. This is so true, and I do need the work in some areas.

As I continue to challenge myself I will also add another C. Coffee, but not what you think. I will continue to drink coffee but I want to cut down the amount of blended coffees I have. I also want to cut down the amount of sugar in my coffee. I enjoy them and go to coffee with my girlfriends on Friday. I love more than the coffee, the friendship. I will work on making these types of coffees not a daily occurrence. This will save me lots of calories.

New year new goals- one bite at a time

 
I am a little late in posting a new years post but I was trying to decide what I wanted to say. Last year was a big year for me and my family. I graduated from college finally. My youngest daughter graduated from high school. My oldest daughter got engaged. My husband also reached a milestone with his company.

With all this I still had some goals that I was not able to reach. I wanted to run a half marathon and ended up being unable to complete this goal. I am not very happy with this. Also because of an injury and other issues I did not run any races this last year. I am not really happy with this either.

When I thought about what I wanted to accomplish, I needed to look back on what I did and didn't do last year. I also needed to look at the goals I didn't reach and see if they still make sense for me.

This year I want to concentrait on my health with my running and weight being front and center. This means that running a half marathon still makes sense. With my daughter getting married I would like to get off between 30 or 40 pounds before her wedding.

I think sometimes I let the enormity of my goals get to me. I need to make sure I don't get freaked out. To do this I will take on the big goal in little pieces. One of my friends Debra Higginbothom reminded new that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

So how do I best do little pieces. First with my running. Becoming more consistent, set a schedule in ink, sweat and blood. My long runs of the week need to stretch each time, even if it is just a half a mile. I need to comitt the time for the long run. Celebrate each race, each new longer run. My first race is in February and it would be nice to PR it. It is a blessing to run and I need to celebrate that fact.

With the weight I need to do the same. I recently went to my endocrinologist Donna. My blood work was great. My A1C was great down from 7.2 to 7.1. My weight was unchanged for the last 6 months. This is both good and bad. Good because I am not up and went through the holidays without weight gain. Bad because in six months no loss. 

To turn that around I will need to committ. This means something different to each person but to me accountability. I started using a food / exercise tracker but I need to be more consistent. I have a week ness when it comes to sweets and know I will never be able to cut them completely. So for me cutting portions of this and saying no a lot less then yes will be big. I am going to try to cut some carbs where I can, this may be having more salads, using pita or lower carb options and skipping the potatoes or rice. I will weigh each week and celebrate every 5 miles with something like a massage or peticure or new clothes just something non food. 

Like my friend Debra said, I am going to eat my elephant (tackle my goals) one bite at a time.

10 year Aniversary /reflection and renewal

October 13, 2003 is one of the worst days I have ever encountered. I had not been feeling well and was pushed by a friend to go to the doctor and found out that I had Diabetes type 2. This completely changed my life in more ways than I could have ever imagined.

Fast forward ten years, I still don't have all the answers figured out. I still struggle at times with eating right and exercising like I should. I have done well but feel I have been in a slump the last few months. I know I can get out I just need to work my mind through it.

I think I have gotten lost in worrying about lots of other things and I forgot the main reason why I started this quest to become more healthy. It is easy to get side tracked in lots of different thoughts about what others think is right for you but what really counts is what you thing is right for you.

I started eating less and more healthy and lost weight. Then I started running to help with my weight loss and found I loved running.  A year ago I ran several races and loved each and every one. I set my sights on a longer running goal. In my quest to run further and do more I injured myself. In working to get better there was lots of helpful ideas that people gave me. The problem for me came when I though about those more and what my real goal was less. I found  I was kind of depressed and I didn't love running because I felt I wasn't progressing like I wanted to.

I am at a point in my life where I need to work on getting back to the basics. Eating more healthy and running for me. Does this mean I give up my half marathon goal? No way, It just means that I want to get back to running for the love of it. Once I am back at that place I can move forward getting more miles in and feeling more confident about finishing a half marathon.

I need to be more consistent about taking my blood sugars, this will help me know where my diabetes control is at. I need to track my eating with a calorie counting app, which will help keep me accountable for what I eat. I also need to commit to exercise and specially running on a more consistent basis four to five days a week would be a very good goal for me. These are all things I know and it is up to the inside to push the outside in me so they can both rebuild stronger.

"If there really are two paths, I want to be on the the one that leads to awesome."  kid President

Out of Sorts

 

Since I graduated I have felt out of sorts a bit. I can't seem to shake free of this funk. I am still running but with less urge or desire to run. I love it when I am out there and feel that I could run better and longer if I could get out more often. I have just been feeling defeated.

My eating hasn't been super good either. I find that I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by life even though nothing huge is going on. I am not sure what the route of this depression is.  I only know that I hate it and in turn feel that I am not a fan of myself.

I decided to analyze my funk since that is what I do in the work world. I looked at what I was doing and compared it to my norm. Then I realized this isn't my norm anymore. My norm is more active and less weight. My eating is better and so I realized that I have let myself slip from the norm for me. This slip has happened over time and that is how I am going to have to turn it back. It is up to me to do it no one else can do it for me.

I have goals that I still want to accomplish this year and my slacking in eating and exercise are getting in the way of what I want to do. This new trend is not one I like and I am the only one who can change it.

___________________________________Update_________________________________

So when I started writing this I felt really out of sorts. I knew I needed to do something but was so out of sorts that I was almost in a depression. I have been working on it and found that I am getting a little better at my eating and I love my running I just need to make more time to get more running days in. I will be the only one to know when I am feeling like I am back to normal but as long as I was just sitting there feeling out of sorts and doing nothing I couldn't feel any better. I can't be on the side lines of my own life I have to get in the game and go for it.

When is an epic fail and epic fail

I recently had an epic fail or what I call and epic fail. The thing is I am OK with it. For me it is an epic fail but no epic fail. I was supposed to run the Ogden half marathon May 18th. Supposed to being the key word, it never ended up happening. May was a busy month for me. I graduated  and was concentrating on my classes previous to graduating. I was trying to recover from an pulled Achilles tendon.

There were other things at play. I had not trained like I should and so the self-doubt was huge. Anytime I race I feel nervous but this time was different. This time I was doing a race that I knew I was not ready for.  Nerves and stress can play a huge role in diabetes. For me this was a recipe for fail. The night before we were running around doing things and I didn't eat like I should. I went to bed early knowing I had to get up at 3AM. I woke up at 11:30 with a blood sugar of 28. This might not mean much to some people but a normal blood sugar is between 80 and 120. At 30 and below you can pass out and much worse. That is exactly how I felt.

Diabetes is a weird and awful thing. When your blood sugar goes low you need to take in calories with sugar and protein to get your blood sugar up and keep it level which is what the protein does. At 28 I was in a panic with sweat dripping and started eating anything I could get my hands on. Instead of being calm about taking things in you end up being in a frenzy. Which meant by the time I went back to bed and the alarm came at 3AM I felt absolutely awful. The combination of feeling horrible and it pouring rain out was terminal for my running that day.

This post is about when epic fail is fail. That day was an epic fail because I felt crappy all day.  This story only becomes a fail if I give up on the goal of trying to complete a half-marathon. I have started picking up my training in anticipation of completing my first half still. I am cross training and stretching. I am also working on testing my blood sugar more often so that I know where my body is.

In life there is always set back and fails. This is how we learn. Someone once said that it is not how many times you fall it is how many times you get back up that counts. I have a hard time with this as many people do but we need to look as failure as a learning and part of the whole process of life. But like the song says I am not giving up the fight.

Take time to celebrate

I received my college diploma today. I have been going to school for the last year and a half basically full time. One class every 6 weeks. I decided after several years of off and then some years of off and on that I needed to finish what I started. I finished my classes on April 1 and decided to participate in the whole graduation ceremony and have a celebration. I felt a little weird about doing it but then I decided that I worked really hard to finish my degree and I deserved to celebrate.

 One friend said it would be good to show my kids that it is important. I found that I was pretty emotional that day actually thinking about what I had finally accomplished. It is a big deal for me. I started right after high school trying to work on my college. I got overwhelmed, burnt out and quit. Then life happened and it took me a bit to get back to school.

I find that as I finished my school I wasn't concentrating on other goals and so there was another goal I ended up having to move back. I didn't drop this goal but I had to move it and I will go into those details in another post.

My whole thought in this is that when you reach such a monumental goal you need to take time to celebrate and enjoy the goal you reached. I am so glad I went back and finished my degree and I am even more glad that I did the graduation ceremony and party. I achieved a major goal and should take time to celebrate it.