Finding Balance

How do you find balance between being size positive and being a glutton?  Being a curvy girl that works out and doesn't diet and being a person who mindlessly eats way more calories than is healthy are not the same thing.  I find my middle and my thighs getting fatter over the years despite my weekly calorie burn increasing with more mileage and more classes.  

I follow a lot of amazing people on social media.  Plus size athletes that are killing it.  But as I listen to their podcasts and read their blogs I recognize that I'm not where they are.  I want to be.  I am sometimes perceived to be.  I want to be the best version of me.  And I know that I'm not right now.  

Counting calories and not eating whatever you want sucks.  But eating the amount of sugar and sodium that I do in a day is only going to lead to health problems down the road.  I have been blessed with health problems from my genes that are beyond my control.  I don't want to make things worse.

So what's the solution?  I like the idea of days where I can splurge and days when I have more control.  Dr. Ian from the Biggest Loser had a book a few years back called the 3-1-2-1 diet.  This program told you to be good for 3 days and then have a cheat day and then 2 more good days followed by a cheat day.  This is a realistic goal that I can achieve.  

At the end of a lot of days I find myself sluggish and falling asleep on the couch because I have gorged myself.  Making healthy food choices will make me feel better.  Replacing some of those fatty and salty staples with fruits and veggies and healthy proteins will give me more energy.  

So with two more days of vacation before I go back to reality this probably isn't the best time to start something new.  But really there is never going to be a good time.  I find that I have the most clarity first thing in the morning.  I will try to go back to journaling when I first wake up.  Before I start taking care of everyone else, I need to take better care of myself.  

Here we go again.  

No Will Power aka Mindless Eating

Yesterday I went to Dunkin to pick up a breakfast sandwich for dinner.  Not the healthiest post-workout meal but I had 30 minutes after teaching my class to get changed and get to an event.  Eating in my car and frequent visits to drive thru lanes are bad habits I know.

Well Dunkin had a deal where you could get 2 breakfast sandwiches for $5.  So almost 1/2 price.  When the cashier asked me if I wanted to get 2, of course I said yes.  Thinking about the money that I was saving and that I already had my post-workout meal ready for the next day when I would have a similar time crunch. 

So now I’ve doubled down on my bad decision.  I have followed up 2 calorie-scorching sessions with meals that most likely undo all my hard work.  When people say they can’t believe I’m not thin even though I work out so much I spout bullshit about metabolism and bad genes but the reality is I have terrible eating habits and no will power.

So fast forward to today.  I teach class and then eat my 2nd breakfast sandwich as I run into a meeting.  There are donut holes and fruit on the table.  I gorge myself on fruit and only eat 3 donut holes.  I eat a sensible salad for lunch. 

When I get home at the end of a long day I watch Netflix as I fold laundry.  I snack on some iced animal cookies mindlessly while I do this.  My husband makes dinner and sets a full plate in front of me that matches his.  I think for a moment that this is way too much food for me and that I should put some of it away for later.  Of course this is not what I do.  I clean my plate.  Even though halfway through I am satisfied and by the end I am struggling to finish the last couple bites. 

My husband is significantly taller than me.  There is no reason we should ever be eating the same portion sizes.  I workout a lot and he doesn’t. I often justify our twin eating because I burn more calories than him and need the extra fuel.  This is such bs.  We are both eating way too much food.  We are mindlessly eating and it is preventing both of us from losing weight. 

I don't really believe in New Year's Resolutions.  Every year I find myself trying to reinvent myself and every year I seem to manage to fail in this area.  

The Race Card.....Again

I keep finding myself in situations where I feel disrespected.  Taken for granted.  Dictated to.  Talked down to.  The only constant in these situation is that I am black and everyone else is white.  I'd like to think that this is just a coincidence but it happens too often for it to be.

Then I think that maybe it's me.  Maybe I'm on edge; waiting for someone to do or say something.  Maybe I am hypersensitive to it.  Maybe it keeps happening because I'm the problem.

I feel like I am distrusted to handle certain tasks.  Like my opinions aren't valued.  Like I'm talked down to like a child.  But I'm more educated than all of them.  That's the kicker.  They think less of me and treat me like a subordinate because I'm "new".  But I'm not really new.  I have just as much experience (often more) than they do but I'm new to them in this role. 

If I confront them I am always the angry black woman because I can't control my emotions.  But on a daily basis I feel mistreated.  I stew over these incidents obsessively.  I have heart palpitations.  I can't sleep.  When I'm in meetings I try so hard to act like everything is okay that I often stumble over my words and become the bumbling idiot they all seem to think I am.

By the end of the day my jaw hurts from clenching.  I don't even realize I'm doing it until the headache and neck pain sets in.  I have to sleep with a night guard or I have crippling migraines and stabbing pains in my jaw throughout the day. 

If I go somewhere else it won't be different.  At this point I know that.  That this misjudgment and bias will follow me everywhere.  I think that I'll just do a kick ass job and they'll have to notice and change their tune but they never do.  It never happens.  I feel proud of myself and then they kick me down. 

I think back to years ago when I was depressed and spent most of my time in the house alone.  When I wallowed in my solitude and didn't participate in life.  When I took working from to home to extremes and rarely went further than the end of my driveway.  Than I remember how I found myself again.  How I found myself through fitness and volunteering and then moved to positions of authority in both fields and started to feel fulfilled. 

But now I'm back in the same old rut I always find myself in.  I am filled with anxiety.  I am ready to quit everything and just go back to being a hermit.  But I know this isn't the right answer.  I just wish I knew what was. 

Holding On to Anger

I find myself having imaginary conversations with people whenever I am by myself.  Driving to a meeting, reading a book, etc.  Any quiet time becomes a time for me to replay an incident where I didn't react the way I wanted to or to predict an incident that I've made up so I can respond accordingly.  I don’t even realize that I’m doing it until I’m halfway through an episode.

There are so many incidents where I haven’t expressed myself or stood up for myself.  When I look back at them I think about what I should have said.  What I wanted to say.  I invent a situation in my head where I have a chance to put someone in their place.  Where I will have redemption for a wrong that must be righted. 

How did I end up here.  So knotted up with anger and regret that I can’t think.  I am conscious of it now and stop myself but before I know it I am back in that same place.  At the end of a drive I find my jaw hurts.  My shoulders are sore.  I often have a headache.  When I’m driving I am so tense because I’m going through all this shit in my head.  I can’t keep going like this. 

I have to break myself of this habit.  It is toxic.  Holding in all this anger and getting so worked up about things that have already happened or that I’m imagining happening in some fictional situation is not good for me.  I don’t want to be angry.  I don’t want to hold things in.  My blood pressure is high.  I am overweight.  I’m begging for a heart attack or stroke one day if I don’t fix this.

Rinse and Repeat

You have a terrible day.  Everything that can go wrong does.  And all of it could have been avoided if you prepared better.  If you balanced your time.  If after 40 years on earth you had gained time management skills.  So you tell yourself, this is my rock bottom.  I will never let this happen again.  I will get my sh%t together and not ever have another day like this again.  

And you will be better….for a little while.  Maybe a day, hell maybe a whole month.  But in the end, if you don’t make any big changes you will fall into the same old patterns.  Sure you’ll dodge a couple bullets.  You’ll pull an all-nighter to prepare for your presentation. Your class will get cancelled because of bad weather, giving you another week to prepare.  But it will catch up to you eventually.  It always does.  

At that point you’ll have that same conversation with yourself.  You’ll say never again but you’ll remember that you’ve said this before.  You are angry at yourself. You can’t believe that it’s gotten this bad again.  So you feel sorry for yourself for a day and you start again tomorrow.  Hoping that this time is the last time and you’ve truly learned your lesson.    

Moderation is a Dirty Word

I’m not sure why it is so difficult for me to do anything in moderation.  I complain that people say I have a bottomless pit for a stomach.  That I always clean my plate and everyone else’s plate.  This has basically been my claim to fame amongst family and friends since I was a little kid.  I get offended by this and then proceed to do exactly what they said I would do.  Sometimes the food doesn’t even taste good and I’m thinking that I only have a few bites to go through to get to the end.  Maybe I don’t want to offend someone if they’ve prepared a meal, or I don’t want to waste food that I’ve paid for.  Or I like the attention, even though it’s negative.  I don’t know.  Either way, my waistline isn’t getting any smaller and no matter how many miles I run in a week, the 1000 extra calories that go to 2^nd helpings and dessert aren’t helping. 

Women

I've had a lifelong battle with other women.  I don't feel like I fit in with large groups of women.  It always feels like they are obsessed with trivial things that I don't care about.  In my experience, women seem focused on making other women look/feel bad and not on supporting each other.  When I'm traveling, I've learned that I will enjoy my night much better if I spend it alone at a restaurant or in my hotel room.  The alternative of going out to dinner with a bunch of women who I can't trust and don't have anything in common with.   
 
I met a woman through mutual work friend.  She worked for a local engineering firm and was the only women of color in her office, much like me.  During a conference we ended up spending a couple hours getting to know each other.  We found out that we both loved running, dogs and Asian food. We agreed to meet together once a week to walk our dogs.  We ended up running or having lunch together once a week as well.  She had some annoying habits but overall she was someone that I enjoyed hanging out with. 

One morning I got to the park at our designated time and she wasn't there.  I texted her and she responded: "It's raining.  I don't walk in the rain".   Were her dogs aware of this?  Apparently they no longer need to go to the bathroom or get exercise when it's raining.  Let me be clear, this was not a monsoon.  Here in Syracuse, we are known for some really terrible weather.  This was a light rain on a beautiful spring day.  A lot of other people were at the park working out.  No one else seemed to think this was stay at home weather.

The fact that she didn't have the courtesy to call me to let me know she wasn't coming and that she would just let the time pass and assume that I would be okay with it because it was raining is ridiculous.  I hung out with her a handful of times after this.  Each time I saw her after that was less enjoyable than the last.  Suddenly her flaws become hard to ignore.  She was a bad dog parent.  She was materialistic and obsessed with impressing the other wives of her husband's co-workers.  She was trying to use my connections to gain traction at work.  I'm sure these problems existed before but I let them go because there were positive things to balance them out.  Eventually I stopped hanging out with her completely.  She ended up moving across the state when her husband got a better job.  I haven't spoken to her in years but she does occasionally pop up in my Facebook feed.  Every post reminds me of why she and I could never be friends.  

I have met several women through online running groups.  I love these groups because we are all going for the same goals and everyone is extremely positive and supportive.  As a person who typically runs alone, these groups give me a sense of community.  Every once in a while I meet these women in person by running in a relay together or having dinner before/after a race.  And every time, I feel left out, annoyed, bored, etc. 

From women "forgetting" to pay their race/hotel/rental car fees to women being selfish and not considering the needs/wants of other people in the group, they are consistently unbearable.  This has been easier to avoid since most of the groups also have male members.  I find that I am often the only woman in a group of men or that I am waiting/commiserating with the men in the group while the women are being annoying.  I am generally the wife who is hanging out with the husbands at weddings, Christmas parties, etc. 

I'm sure there are great women out there but my life has been full of unreliable women.  Even in cases when I have women that I would consider to be my friends, I can never completely let my guard down with them.  I cannot cry on their shoulders and count on them to support me the way that I support them or the way that my male friends support me.  I'd like to think that there are other women out there like me but really, at this point, I don't care.  I'm too old for this shit.   

Learning to Let it Go

My brother and I were rarely spanked when we were kids.  We were frequently beaten.  My mother didn't know how to cope with having 2 young children with minimal support so she took it out on us.  Sometimes it would be an overreaction to something that one of us had done wrong.  Usually, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Sometimes being in the room, minding your own business was enough to warrant a beating. 

It took me a long time to forgive my mother for this abuse.  For years I would inappropriately hit my friends and boyfriends and overreact violently to situations that other people would just brush off.  I still struggle with controlling my temper and letting things go.  I know that I get this from my mother.

The most difficult thing to deal with is my mother's complete change of opinion on corporal punishment.  At least a couple times a year there is a video of a parent beating their child in a grocery store parking lot or a famous person putting their child in the hospital after a routine spanking.  My mother is the first one to express her outrage at these parents.  She is careful to say that yes, that sort of thing was okay when she was a kid but it's not okay now.  But she never admits that it is the sort of thing that she did as a parent.  That she was wrong.  It is always them.  It is never her.

I don't expect her to have this epiphany.  I know she won't ever apologize or admit that she was wrong.  But it still bothers me.  I don't know if I will ever be able to let things go but at least I'm only screaming at her inside my head.   

My Love Hate Relationship with Road Races

When I first started running in road races, I was quite the loner.  I was often the only black person there and I was in the back of the pack.  Every once in a while I would make friends during the race.  People who ran around my pace and struck up a conversation during the race or in the recovery tent.  But generally I kept to myself.  I drove to races by myself.  I ran by myself.  After the race I ate my snacks alone, stretched alone and then drove home.

As my confidence increased and I noticed a lot more runners who looked like me and/or ran my pace or slower I loosened up.  I hung out longer after races.  I initiated conversations with people.   I even ran with other people every once in a while.  Occasionally,  I would choose the wrong person to talk to.   Some pseudo-elite runner would bristle at the nerve of someone like me to make a comment about the race or a suggestion about something he was complaining about.  But more often than not my experiences were positive.

For me running is meditation.   It is my time to clear my head, to fantasize, to work through my problems.   I have been told by people that they waved to me or yelled my name during a race but I ignored them.  I am so much in my head during a race that I often don't notice other people, landmarks and course markers.  Luckily I have only gotten lost twice!

Lately running has been less therapeutic and more stressful.  The local 5ks have become a place for families to gather.  For people to sight see and take pictures.  For large herds of inexperienced and rude people to block the paths of runners and turn a leisurely run into an obstacle race.

I find myself running off road to avoid people that are running 5-people across or swerving to avoid people who come to a dead stop in the middle of the road.  I waste energy passing these people or being angry at them.  I find myself tense and relieved when the race is over.

One solution is to line up closer to the front.  But then I risk making myself an obstacle for the faster runners.  I don't want to ruin anyone else's race.  A better solution is to take the local 5ks out of my rotation.  To only participate in longer or more difficult races that will not attract those people. 

This will take  me back to my loner days.  There will be more elite runners.  There will be less people that look like me.  I will be in the back if not last.  But I will have peace again.   I will be able to run my race with my shoulders relaxed and my head cleared.  It will be worth it.  I just hope my self esteem is strong enough to take it in stride.

Holding Strong at 3 weeks!

So I have managed to maintain my 3 lb weight loss for 2 straight weeks at home.  I'm still riding the high of spending a week with a bunch of fit and positive people.  I feel like I've been a better fitness instructor since I came home.  Like my passion has been reignited.  So how can I make this part-time fitness and wellness thing a full-time gig?  Or, more realistically, how can I carry the positive energy that I get out of fitness into the other aspects of my life?  

My goal for this week is to lose 2 lbs.  I'm psyched that I maintained weight loss but I'm no where near my goal weight.  I know what I need to do to maintain my weight.  What I need to figure out is what I need to do to lose weight at home.  Maybe it won't work but for now I'm going to try to maintain this 3 week trend that I've kicked off (1 strict week followed by 2 maintenance weeks).  

Let's not call this a diet, but a new way of life.  

My Own Biggest Loser Week

I just got back from a week long fitness convention in Florida.  This is the third one that I have attended but definitely the most positive experience that I have ever had.  There is nothing more motivating than a few thousand fitness professionals and the best instructors in the world at a beautiful destination resort.  

I lost 3 pounds during the past week.  To those of you who are dedicated to your diet and exercise and lose 3-5 lbs every week this might not seem like a lot.  But to someone like me whose weight plateaued a long time ago, this is amazing.  

I know that working out several hours a day and eating lots of small meals between my workouts was key.  This along with the variety of workouts that I was doing and the fact that I was getting a good night of sleep every night.  These are all things that seem like they could be modified to fit into my real life. Because I had a large dinner out with dessert and a glass of wine every night.  I didn't feel deprived.  My digestive issues were better.  My energy still had dips in the afternoon but it was definitely more stable.  

I am terrified that those 3 pounds will be right back next Sunday when I weigh myself.  But there is a little voice in my head that tells me that this could be my jump start.  This could be my biggest loser week.  I spent a week at the ranch and learned what works for me.  Now I just have to figure out how to make things work now that I'm back home with all the responsibility and stress that come with work and family.  

I think its also important to point out that my attitude was much better than it normally is.  I was surrounded by people of all races, ages and sizes.  Sure, there were plenty of size 2 "fitness models" walking around but there were just as many curvy (or dare I say fat) fit folks walking around.  And no one said anything bad to them.  Everyone accepted that they were instructors and had just as much right to be there as everyone else.  

I found myself walking around in my swimsuit top and shorts or in my swimsuit and a t-shirt.   I would never do that at home.  The moment I am out of the pool, I am wrapped from head to toe in a beach towel and hustling my way into the locker room.  Maybe I need to stop doing that.  Maybe if I pretend to be confident and comfortable in my own skin, I'll start to feel like it. Maybe this is the beginning of me loving me just a little more than I care about what other people think about me.