morning everyone,
back from a crazy couple of days roadtripping with the regular and extended family. lots and lots of driving, which was tough on el nino and consequently tough on myself and DH. too much time in the car. i managed to talk DH into talking me into running another half marathon, this one at the end of september. training starts immediately and i look forward to faster and more enjoyable runs, since i get to keep the fitness improvements i made while training for the last one.
lots to reflect on in everyone's posts.
onebyone, i've had EXACTLY the same sabotaging thought - "i don't need to lose any more weight! i'm fine the way i am." well, we're both wonderful exactly the way we are - but why stop there when we could be happier and healthier? i'm so much more consistent with exercise, i think, gee, why worry about what i eat? why do i need to lose weight? BECAUSE I'M OBESE, that's why! clothes don't fit the way i want them too! i can't run as fast as i'd like! i hate looking at myself in pictures! why do i think these things will somehow magically go away?
heidi and
wendy, so wonderful to hear from you!
mary, your observations are particularly helpful - i like "hang onto a day." they go so fast, and i don't know if awareness makes things slow down - but it does help you remember them later. the strongest memory i have of the blur of my wedding day was our first dance, because it was the most focus i had the whole day.
barb, amazing job. really fabulous! go ON, girl!
bill, your continued awareness of yourself and behavior is inspiring. i toast you with my (bought and paid for) coke zero!
ko, bill isn't female, but i also believe (correct me if i'm wrong,
bill) that "babe" can be applied to anyone.
hope your headache improves!
spryng, if you're allowed to splurge, i DEFINITELY believe wedding cake is the way to go.
i also have been less than disciplined in my approach, and it shows. daily planning is the first thing to go, because somehow in my head it's the thing that really means that i'm on a diet and i can't eat the foods i want/like/deserve/etc. i'm going to try an experiment: i'm going to plan a week's worth of off-plan food. when i write my meal plan, it's historically been all super-healthy, low calorie, diet-perfect, and not at all what i actually want to eat. since i've been successful at maintaining with no plan, i'm going to plan to eat the food i really want - in the amounts i've been eating them, as a way to try and get over my visceral reaction to returning to a meal plan. hopefully i can get comfortable with that, get my brain wrapped around the fact that following a plan doesn't mean eating food i don't like. i got religion about exercise and tracking what i eat, so i'm going to ease my way in by journaling what i'm really going to eat before i eat it, instead of afterwards. if i can get used to doing it this way, then after a few weeks i'll make one improvement in my diet each week (or maybe even every other week.) i'm still too black/white in my thinking about how this "should" work, what i "should" eat, how quickly the weight "should" come off. kaplods posted on another board about how she was instructed to do a sort of "reverse" atkins - instead of taking carbs down to almost nothing and then adding them back to figure out what a good individual amount is, she started exactly where she was and then gradually removed. i think i'm going to try that with beck - plan to eat exactly the way i do now, and then gradually improve. it's not that my eating is terrible now. not at all! i'm generally pretty healthy. i just have this rock-solid resistance to meal planning that i need to soften and get my head around.
what do you think, coaches?