Failure, Defeat and Other Forbidden Terms

Last week (and peppered across several other weeks) I brought up the concept of the habit. I was challenged to talk today about what happens when those habits don't stick. To talk about defeat. It's something I've felt plenty of, but to be honest this is difficult because of where I'm standing. Defeat, obesity, poor health (even when you can't tell) are this mountain I can barely see in the foggy distance when I look over my shoulder. I shift my weight this morning; I'm walking backwards on my path, squinting, trying to remember what it's like to fail.

And eventually, you'll have to do the same thing. Because if I can do this, anyone can do it. Determination and patience are what wakes up failure in the middle of the night, screaming of nightmares.

Growing up, I didn't eat the healthiest but it wasn't terrible. I weighed about 180 pounds from 8^th grade into high school, lost 10 pounds or so getting into the groove of high school (plus I took PE for the first time since elementary school my freshman year). We'd have your typical Southern cuisine. Things were deep fried. Things were fried in bacon grease. You put a scoop of bacon grease into your green beans because you can. An aside, my grandpa used to be on several heart medications, even had a heart attack, but sadly now that my grandma is gone and doesn't cook for him anymore, he's off of them and has lost weight. I love(d) my grandma dearly... but she had 7 inches of height on me, so 180 looked a little better on her.

I think of growing up in Kentucky and I don't want to make excuses, but it made it hard. These were habits too. Saving bacon grease after frying up a pound of bacon for 3 people. Home fried chicken tenders. Margarine. These are habits just like getting in 6 days of exercise a week. They're just bad habits.

There were some things growing up that were positive. We rarely had soda. If we got a case of soda it usually stayed in the fridge in the basement, therefore out of sight and it really was a treat. We also didn't eat out very much.

Those two things lead to damaging habit creation when you become an adult. When you have your own fridge and you make sure it is stocked with Coke. When you eat out at least once a day in the land of 1000 restaurants. So then the weekend before my Freshman Orientation at college, I met the boy I'd later marry. And when you really have nothing in common... when you have to change yourself because you want to be compatible with the only guy that has ever shown any interest in you... you find the thing you have in common and you overindulge. And that was food. Eating out. Trying new restaurants. Trying recipes. He was 190 lbs when I met him and he was a biker. By the time our lifestyle got the best of our waistlines, I was 217 pounds and he was upwards of 240, if I'm remembering right. I might be giving him the benefit of the doubt with my memory.

So here I am, 217 pounds, and here are my habits: I go to work. I work in an office and getting to go out to lunch is the only way you can keep sanity. There were snacks everywhere. Volunteers would bring in candies and cookies and things like that to say thank you to us. Coworkers would bring in cupcakes or donuts. And when your habit is to not show any self control, and when others aren't eating it, you are compulsively eating three donuts. Three cupcakes. I go home. At home we had every electronic device under the sun. Pick your video game. Watch it. Watch television. Anything that involves a comfortable corner of the couch. Don't feel like cooking, so let's order takeout. As the days before I walked out on my marriage came upon me, I was asking him to bring me home McDonald's every night. When your mouth is full, you don't have to speak. When something tastes good, it brings a certain level of joy in places you don't normally feel it.

These things are failure at living a healthy lifestyle. 

I saw one of those “inspirational” photos on Pinterest recently that describes exactly what I try to preach: “One bad meal does not make you fat, just like one good meal will not make you thin.” Yesterday was the perfect example. I got to spend the day with my handsome gentleman and his kiddos. I took my “rest” day from exercise, mainly for convenience and because I had not had a rest day in 8 days (sorry, exercise addiction forming here) but I'm usually pretty active when I see the kiddos. There's always a large quantity of crab walking. Don't ask.

Anyhow, I weighed myself on his scale which isn't as fancy as mine, just does half pounds... so I was 130.5 yesterday morning. Don't get so excited, I can usually add 2 pounds to that, so for the sake of using this data, we'll say I weighed 132.5 yesterday morning. Eating is always tough because those skinny kids like chips and such. I pass for the most part. HG made me eggs, those were tasty. But by 3:00 we were starving so we got some pizza. I ate half of a medium pepperoni pizza. I hadn't had pepperoni in AGES. I tracked it on MFP like a good girl. 875 calories. That's less calories than a burger at Applebee's, so I'd say I did pretty good for a bad meal.

This morning, I woke up and weighed on my scale. 133.4. I was THRILLED! I ate half a freaking pizza!!! Loved every minute of it.

The difference is I am not making it a habit of eating 875 calorie meals every day. Giving yourself a “splurge” meal every once and a while can actually give you a weird boost. Even Bob Harper's “Skinny Rules” say to have a splurge meal every week (I don't do it every week unless you count a salad from a restaurant).

Here's failure... I'll diagram it.

Monday you eat well. You exercise... hell, you run for 30 minutes and are a general badass. Tuesday your legs are sore so instead of getting in some fitness, you decide to take a rest day. Your friends invite you out for dinner and you eat way too much. You eat way too much and you have leftovers, so you take those leftovers home. Wednesday you take those leftovers for lunch. A meeting comes up and it's really stressful, so you go home and you drink and entire bottle of wine by yourself and munch on chips in front of the television. Thursday you feel like you have zero energy, which you do, because you've been filling your body with junk for 3 days. You do nothing. You go back to the couch. Friday you go out to lunch at work. You've lost your endurance. You've lost your healthy eating habits. You have to start over. You need to “detox” your habits. This requires work. You decide it's not worth the work.

In this example, bad habits killed your good ones. Overindulging and not finding “the time” to exercise can take your momentum down. You need to ride the ride. If you slow down at a turn, know that when the sun comes up the next morning, you will increase speed on the straight away. Don't let an unexpected thing stop you dead.

I've heard it said by so many... how it's so easy to put on weight but it takes so long and it's so hard to get weight off. It really is all about habit. Think about how you get ready for work in the morning. I can use my shower routine in the morning as an example. If I don't use shampoo first... absolutely number one first, I will forget to wash my hair. And I've been doing that since I was old enough to take a shower. You need to make eating healthy and treating your body with respect so routine that doing anything else seems foreign. If I forget to use shampoo first and I start washing my face... and then I wash the rest of me... and I turn off the shower. I start toweling off my hair and notice it feels a little heavy and greasy... just because I forgot to wash my hair first doesn't mean that I'm DOOMED to have dirty hair for the rest of my life. I hang the towel back up, probably say a few choice words, fire the shower back up, and I wash my hair.

I don't leave my hair dirty and say to myself, “Well, I blew it for today” and then every time I walk past a trash can, I reach it and rub a big handful of trash in my hair just for good measure. I mean, my hair's already dirty, so what damage is that going to do?

I ate a huge, fatty breakfast... so I might as well stuff myself at lunch. I've already RUINED the day, right?

No.

It has taken me 5 years to get certain foods out of my system and to get to a point where exercise is a priority. FIVE YEARS. You can not and should not be discouraged if you can't do it in three weeks. It's a gradual journey. I used to save up my Weight Watchers points so that I'd have 18 at the end of the day to eat an entire box of macaroni and cheese. Now, right now, I've got 1/3 of a box of Annie's organic mac and cheese in the fridge. That's after eating 1/3 of it for leftovers and 1/3 of it when I first made it. Remember how I had said I always cook a double serving of pasta because I just love it that much. This week, I kid you not, I cooked ½ serving of pasta. Because I didn't feel like eating so much of it.

Sometimes, I get SO SICK of food because of how often I have to eat it now. But that's my life now. And you will get there too.

I have given lists of things to do before, but I think this topic needs its own list of things to do. Things to remember:

1. It's a lifestyle, not a diet. The moment you stop saying, “I'm on a diet” is the moment you have finally accepted that. That's the first step.

2. Learn to feed yourself before you learn to exercise. It's so much easier to exercise when you've lost 20 pounds. You don't need to bombard yourself with changes. Once you have learned how to eat and how to not go overboard, that's when I would start picking up the exercise. I say this because before you learn how to eat, you're not only going to be tempted to eat your exercise, but it's going to be a feeling of difficult that you're not going to stick with. Sweating when I was really big was the most horrible feeling in the world to me.

3. Learning to eat is a journey. If you eat a whole pizza every Friday, don't stop eating pizza. Cut it down to ¾ of a pizza. Then ½. It's a lifestyle, not a diet, and you need to take yourself off of drugs gradually. Just like my macaroni and cheese example. You will wake up one day and not want it at all.

4. Don't exercise a million miles past your potential. If you've never run before, don't start a half-marathon program. But that doesn't mean don't push yourself. Change occurs when it starts to feel like too much. But don't exercise on Day 1 in such a way that you won't do it on Day 2. Know what you can handle and start there. You will get better.

5. You are allowed to deprive yourself!!!! If your snacks are recreational, meaning have zero nutritional value and it's just something to eat, it's OKAY not to eat that! Don't feel like you have to have candy, cookies, cake, just because you always have. I haven't had a soda for 5 months. I don't look at my food log during the day and say, “Well, I have enough calories to have a soda, so why not?”

6. Patience. You won't be able to eat exactly the way you want to or should overnight. Take it slow. Let your body become used to not eating the things you've been eating for so long. Give your body time to adapt. Your body is working even when you aren't. It's your job to move it and fuel it. Eventually, what you fuel it with and what you do with it will click and you'll find what you need to do for your unique self. Don't let failure creep in because you're worth the fight.

I could make infinite lists. The first challenge is believing that you're worth it. You might think you're confident. I always thought I had a certain amount of pride and strength. I couldn't have been more wrong. I didn't even know my own potential until I got to where I never thought I'd be.

Well...

That was longer than I thought it would be. Obviously I'm a little passionate about failure nowadays. Let me share with you my week. I didn't share my food log last week, and there really wasn't anything interesting in my food log this week, so I think I'll go with that again. I'm having a little bit of trouble with my eating recently because I don't think I've been eating enough. I had a couple days that I felt unfed when I started in on my exercise. Now that I'm almost up to 6 miles when running, going to need to focus on altering my nutrition to make it that far. I bought myself a book to start reading so that I'll be prepared for May when I start training for my half marathon.

Speaking of training, I've signed up for a few races and I wanted to share that. I feel that even though I'm nowhere near being competitive with other people, signing up for events gives me something to work for. It's hard to run with nothing to run to... I say.

So March 16^th I've got a 5k sponsored by a local restaurant. Haven't done a race in Epping, NH yet. I've had races in Concord, Nashua, Derry and Portsmouth... maybe I'll just run around New Hampshire.

Then May 4^th I've got an obstacle race. 3.5 miles with 14-15 obstacles. Pretty excited because my handsome gentleman is going to be racing too. He's doing the competitive wave, I'm not... so it'll be nice to get to cheer him on.

May 18^th I've got a 12k. I had been looking for 10k races but couldn't find any during the time frame that I wanted it and a coworker brought me info on this race as well as a $5 off coupon for the registration, so why not!

I need to find something to run in July or August. Last year I didn't run in July because it was hot (well, hot to New Hampshire...) but this year I want to try harder. September 8^th is my half-marathon.

I mentioned my yoga injury last week, right?  I did a massive face plant doing crane pose.  Here's what my knees look like this morning.  They're getting better but they're darker.  Then I have the bruises lower on my knee/shin area where my bone protrudes out if I do any of my push ups on my knees.  In 30 Day Shred, I can do the first set of push ups all on my toes, but then after doing two sets of presses and a set of push ups, I do 3/4 of the second set on my knees.  I try to stay off my knees for a lot of these things just to keep from bruising...

My fitness log this week looked like this:

Monday: 30 Day Shred, Level 1, Day 3 and Bowling

Tuesday: Ran 5k during my lunch hour. More on this later.

Wednesday: 30 Day Shred, Level 1, Day 4 and Tap Class

Thursday: 30 Day Shred, Level 1, Day 5

Friday: B210K, Week 3, Day 1. More on this later.

Saturday: REST

Sunday: 30 Day Shred, Level 1, Day 6

My runs this week made me happy. Reason one is that I was actually able to go out and do them with the weather being so incredibly crazy here recently, and reason two because I busted ass and it felt great!

My run during my lunch on Tuesday was the first time I'd ever ran a whole 3.1 miles during lunch. I still got back in plenty of time to change back into my work clothes and freshen up. It was the first 5k that I logged on my app where my first mile took more time than my second, my second took more time than my third. My first mile was 10:13, my second mile was 9:38 and my third mile was 9:35. Average pace was less than 10 minutes. I felt great for the rest of the day after. So proud of myself.

My second run was my longest ever. I was so nervous. I mapped it out on Google maps knowing that with the step up to 63 minutes on the program, I'd probably go 5.6 miles. I went 5.78 instead. It felt so good when I got to 4.5 miles and I knew that the route I had picked out was going to work perfectly and that I was able to do it.

The only issue I'm having while running is the “ring” toe (the one next to the little toe) on my left foot. By mile 5, every time, it starts burning because of the blister that's forming on it. Not sure what to do about that other than wrap a preventative band aid on it. If you know what I could do, comment here please! I'd really like some tips. I'm sure it just has to do with my leading with my left and how much toe room I have in my shoes.

It's snowing right now, so that's going to put a damper on the running for the next few days at least. I'm doing good that I haven't fallen down yet. I've slipped, but stayed on my feet. Exciting also is that this time last year was the first time I'd ever gone out for a run. The last weekend in February last year I did Day 1 of Couch to 5k. I've improved so much and I've lost 20 pounds since then!! Crazy.

So above I shared a bunch of before pictures... it's so weird to me that I look like that, but when I'm shopping online and my measurements tell me I could wear a XS/S bikini bottom, I forget that I'm as small as I am. So here's some pics from this morning. Post workout and shower, but comfy clothes today. I'm wearing my new “Starfish Pants” from Lands End that I got on clearance... I ordered Small but they're a little too big. At least they're comfortable. They're baggy in the front. First world problems.

Time to strap on the boots and go out in the snow for some tasty groceries. I went vegetarian most of this week (because I couldn't buy meat last week as I made it to the store earlier than the counters opened up) so I'm looking for some salmon today.

I have a whole new idea of time now. Every moment is useful. Every day is a joy.