Waiting for It vs Working for It

Holy Breakthrough, Batman!

Epiphany time: I'm done with goals I have to wait for, I will only focus & put my energy into goals I can work for.

And here's how I came to this.  It started with a fight with my husband (for clarity, my weight had NOTHING to do with our fight & Dave has seen & approved all of this...lest tongues start wagging about the state of our marriage).  It was a stupid fight about me not starting the dishwasher & neither of us putting the defrosted meat in the fridge & him not putting away the baby's bathtub.  See, stupid.  As all of such stupid fights go, in order to justify how irate we were getting with each other, we escalated dishes & meat & baby tub into a global relationship argument with words like "always" & "never," which prove utterly useless in 95% of fights because always & never are, in reality, mostly impossible.  The crux of Dave's argument was "give us some slack, we just had a baby."  The crux of my argument was "it's time to be done with slack, she's 6 weeks old."  Both (moderately) reasonable in context, but the context is unimportant for what I realized while doing the inevitable argument post-mortem in the the shower.

Like many who are overweight/obese/body conscious, I knew that *gasp* my weight kept me from doing things that I wanted to do out of fear of failure or ridicule.  The kicker for me is that most of those things that I stopped myself from doing were completely unrelated to my weight (like venturing out of my corner to meet other moms at kid activities or growing a garden or re-purposing bedraggled furniture).  And while I was busy longing for all of those things, a voice inside my head would chime, "You'll do that when..."  The "when" was always some nebulous time when I would lose the weight, something that sounded just plausible, but gave me enough wiggle room to back out & not have any skin in the game.  You'll do that when, you'll do that when, you'll do that when.  But at some point during my prior process of shedding pounds, the voice just started saying, "You'll do that."  Period.  So I did.

It wasn't a conscious choice at the time, but this morning as I was lashing out at Dave over the idea of allowing time to readjust & find a new normal, I realized that the idea of "give it time" has become absolutely abhorrent to me.  I spent 30 years giving it time, waiting on the sidelines...I've used up most of my sideline time.  It turns out that in a relationship that's a pretty unacceptable & unrealistic stance to take.  But for the purposes of my process of getting back to fighting weight, it's a really good thing to know about myself & a pretty useful idea to leverage in setting goals & making plans.  Plans that are based on the passage of time are just not useful to me.  I need to have goals that are based on actionable steps with finish lines defined by accomplishments, not deadlines.  I want every reason & motivation to work for my success, not wait for it.

In the past I've set a couple of mini-goals based on time, most recently my vow to be out of maternity undies in two weeks (which I did), but most of them left me frustrated, whether I succeeded or not.  Now I know why.  Simply letting time go by isn't something to be proud of.  Time passes regardless of what I'm doing.  I want my time to pass intentionally & purposefully because I previously let time & my life pass me by out of fear.

So, I'm glad that I started my morning sitting on the floor by the refrigerator boo-hoo-ing over dishes & meat & the baby's tub because it got me here.  And here is good.  I'm just thankful I was crying over spoiled meat--not spilled milk--because then I would look ridiculous.

There & Back Again: An Obese Girl's Tale

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then two pictures must be worth 2000....in this case, almost all 2000 of mine are unsuitable for civilized company.

Today was my last first day of Couch to 5K.  If it's possible, I think I was more proud of myself today than on my FIRST first day of Couch to 5K (I certainly had to work harder!).  I'm 50 lbs heavier than I was then.  I'm an obese woman.  And I huffed & I puffed & I blew that run down.  It was urgli.  It was painful.  And I did it.
Rather than dwell on how the disparity of these pictures (taken almost exactly a year apart) makes me feel like a disgusting failure, I'm choosing to embrace these images.  I'm choosing to use the picture on the left to remind me of what is possible--no, what is probable!  I'm choosing to use the picture on the right to remind me that a life's work is never done--thank goodness, I'll never be bored!  I waffled as to whether to post righty, but this is the process--warts & all.  I'm lumpy & bottom heavy but I did it--I went for my first post-baby run.

There was a moment during my last walk interval when my favorite running song ("Let it Rock" by Kevin Rudolf) came on & I nearly lost it.  I could barely keep up to the beat while walking; last year I could run it double time.  It was yet another concrete reminder of how far I've slipped in one year.  But just as the pictures above, it can be a negative or a positive.  Positive:  I have another great non-scale benchmark to gauge my progress as I head back again.  To thin, to healthy, to myself, to running the snot out of "Let it Rock."

Speaking of snot, check out my new gloves.  They have fleecy index fingers so you can wipe your nose when you're running in the cold.  Bizarre?  Yes.  Disgusting?  Absolutely.  Did I use them for their intended purpose on this chilly morning?  You bet your sweet bippy, I did.  Hawt.

  

A Plate Full of Progress

Like many husbands/boyfriends/partners before him, Dave  claims finishing rights to my plate when we go out to eat.  On my ornery days this prompts me to order things laden with tomatoes, mushrooms & seafood in an effort to protect my lunch leftovers.

Through most of our relationship I would insist that if Dave was going to finish my food he HAD to take the plate & set it in front of him, as a signal to the server that I hadn't eaten all of the food...because the judgement of a server that I would likely never see again was too much for this obese girl to bear.

This evening, while Dave was scavenging off of the plate while it was still in front of me, I realized that sometime in the not to distant past I've grown beyond that.  It's not a big deal, but it's a deal & I'll take it--evidence of mental progress.  I won't say that the server isn't judging me (I was a server for FAR to long to delude myself of that), but I will say that I don't give a flying fig.  Proof that my head has in fact changed though my tush is back to a size that I find regrettable.  Or maybe it's proof that I'm a mom of three littles & I don't have the energy to waste on judgmental strangers.  Either way, I'm not stressing about the unimportant opinions that others hold of me.  So I've got that goin' for me--which is nice.